NYT 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
The New York Times's July 2024 list of the 100 best books of the 21st century, voted on by 503 authors, critics and book-lovers. Tracking my way through it.
10 of 100 tracked here · Source
The full list of 100 titles voted on by 503 authors, critics and book-lovers. Books I’ve reviewed are linked through. Want to track your own progress? Download the print checklist below.
↓ Download printable checklist (PDF)
The list
| # | Title | Author | Read | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Brilliant Friend | Elena Ferrante | ✓ | Buy → |
| 2 | The Warmth of Other Suns | Isabel Wilkerson | — | Buy → |
| 3 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | — | Buy → |
| 4 | The Known World | Edward P. Jones | — | Buy → |
| 5 | The Corrections | Jonathan Franzen | — | Buy → |
| 6 | 2666 | Roberto Bolaño | — | Buy → |
| 7 | The Underground Railroad | Colson Whitehead | — | Buy → |
| 8 | Austerlitz | W. G. Sebald | — | Buy → |
| 9 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | ✓ | Buy → |
| 10 | Gilead | Marilynne Robinson | — | Buy → |
| 11 | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Junot Díaz | — | Buy → |
| 12 | The Year of Magical Thinking | Joan Didion | — | Buy → |
| 13 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | — | Buy → |
| 14 | Outline | Rachel Cusk | — | Buy → |
| 15 | Pachinko | Min Jin Lee | — | Buy → |
| 16 | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Michael Chabon | — | Buy → |
| 17 | The Sellout | Paul Beatty | — | Buy → |
| 18 | Lincoln in the Bardo | George Saunders | — | Buy → |
| 19 | Say Nothing | Patrick Radden Keefe | — | Buy → |
| 20 | Erasure | Percival Everett | — | Buy → |
| 21 | Evicted | Matthew Desmond | — | Buy → |
| 22 | Behind the Beautiful Forevers | Katherine Boo | — | Buy → |
| 23 | Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage | Alice Munro | — | Buy → |
| 24 | The Overstory | Richard Powers | — | Buy → |
| 25 | Random Family | Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | — | Buy → |
| 26 | Atonement | Ian McEwan | — | Buy → |
| 27 | Americanah | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | ✓ | Buy → |
| 28 | Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell | — | Buy → |
| 29 | The Last Samurai | Helen DeWitt | — | Buy → |
| 30 | Sing, Unburied, Sing | Jesmyn Ward | — | Buy → |
| 31 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | — | Buy → |
| 32 | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | — | Buy → |
| 33 | Salvage the Bones | Jesmyn Ward | — | Buy → |
| 34 | Citizen | Claudia Rankine | — | Buy → |
| 35 | Fun Home | Alison Bechdel | — | Buy → |
| 36 | Between the World and Me | Ta-Nehisi Coates | — | Buy → |
| 37 | The Years | Annie Ernaux | — | Buy → |
| 38 | The Savage Detectives | Roberto Bolaño | — | Buy → |
| 39 | A Visit From the Goon Squad | Jennifer Egan | — | Buy → |
| 40 | H Is for Hawk | Helen Macdonald | — | Buy → |
| 41 | Small Things Like These | Claire Keegan | ✓ | Buy → |
| 42 | A Brief History of Seven Killings | Marlon James | — | Buy → |
| 43 | Postwar | Tony Judt | — | Buy → |
| 44 | The Fifth Season | N. K. Jemisin | — | Buy → |
| 45 | The Argonauts | Maggie Nelson | — | Buy → |
| 46 | The Goldfinch | Donna Tartt | ✓ | Buy → |
| 47 | A Mercy | Toni Morrison | — | Buy → |
| 48 | Persepolis | Marjane Satrapi | — | Buy → |
| 49 | The Vegetarian | Han Kang | — | Buy → |
| 50 | Trust | Hernan Diaz | — | Buy → |
| 51 | Life After Life | Kate Atkinson | — | Buy → |
| 52 | Train Dreams | Denis Johnson | — | Buy → |
| 53 | Runaway | Alice Munro | — | Buy → |
| 54 | Tenth of December | George Saunders | — | |
| 55 | The Looming Tower | Lawrence Wright | — | |
| 56 | The Flamethrowers | Rachel Kushner | — | |
| 57 | Nickel and Dimed | Barbara Ehrenreich | — | |
| 58 | Stay True | Hua Hsu | — | |
| 59 | Middlesex | Jeffrey Eugenides | — | |
| 60 | Heavy | Kiese Laymon | — | |
| 61 | Demon Copperhead | Barbara Kingsolver | ✓ | Buy → |
| 62 | 10:04 | Ben Lerner | — | |
| 63 | Veronica | Mary Gaitskill | — | |
| 64 | The Great Believers | Rebecca Makkai | — | |
| 65 | The Plot Against America | Philip Roth | — | |
| 66 | We the Animals | Justin Torres | — | |
| 67 | Far From the Tree | Andrew Solomon | — | |
| 68 | The Friend | Sigrid Nunez | — | |
| 69 | The New Jim Crow | Michelle Alexander | — | |
| 70 | All Aunt Hagar's Children | Edward P. Jones | — | |
| 71 | The Copenhagen Trilogy | Tove Ditlevsen | — | |
| 72 | Secondhand Time | Svetlana Alexievich | — | |
| 73 | The Passage of Power | Robert A. Caro | — | |
| 74 | Olive Kitteridge | Elizabeth Strout | — | |
| 75 | Exit West | Mohsin Hamid | — | |
| 76 | Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Gabrielle Zevin | ✓ | Buy → |
| 77 | An American Marriage | Tayari Jones | ✓ | Buy → |
| 78 | Septology | Jon Fosse | — | |
| 79 | A Manual for Cleaning Women | Lucia Berlin | — | |
| 80 | The Story of the Lost Child | Elena Ferrante | — | |
| 81 | Pulphead | John Jeremiah Sullivan | — | |
| 82 | Hurricane Season | Fernanda Melchor | — | |
| 83 | When We Cease to Understand the World | Benjamín Labatut | — | |
| 84 | The Emperor of All Maladies | Siddhartha Mukherjee | — | |
| 85 | Pastoralia | George Saunders | — | |
| 86 | Frederick Douglass | David W. Blight | — | |
| 87 | Detransition, Baby | Torrey Peters | — | |
| 88 | The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis | Lydia Davis | — | |
| 89 | The Return | Hisham Matar | — | |
| 90 | The Sympathizer | Viet Thanh Nguyen | — | |
| 91 | The Human Stain | Philip Roth | — | |
| 92 | The Days of Abandonment | Elena Ferrante | — | |
| 93 | Station Eleven | Emily St. John Mandel | — | |
| 94 | On Beauty | Zadie Smith | — | |
| 95 | Bring Up the Bodies | Hilary Mantel | — | |
| 96 | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments | Saidiya Hartman | — | |
| 97 | Men We Reaped | Jesmyn Ward | — | |
| 98 | Bel Canto | Ann Patchett | ✓ | Buy → |
| 99 | How to Be Both | Ali Smith | ✓ | Buy → |
| 100 | Tree of Smoke | Denis Johnson | — |