7ToF: ok, maybe I have "a few" more thoughts about that list

I spent too much time thinking about the Best Books of the 21st Century list, far more time than it deserved--hence, this post. Feel free to skip, this whole damn thing is about that list. 

1. It's, obviously, heavy on intellectual books, books that you could include in a grad school syllabus with no embarrassment. It is not a list meant to include all readers, a list to pull you in and get you excited about reading-- or at least, it wasn't for me. It seemed to me that it was a list about proving who is reading capital-W Worthy Books. I don't know why I expected anything different. Intellectualism is not about including everybody, it's about making distinctions--well, yes, that book is fine, but it's not one of the best books. The real problem with my beef with the list is not the list itself, it's that I was excitedly expecting--as they released another twenty books each day-- something different.

(for the record, throughout this post I've limited myself to the books and/or authors I've actually read, which is 26 books--I've finished Detransition, Baby since that last post--and another handful of authors I've read but not the book that was picked (Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead, and how did he only have one on the list, if they were going to do multiples?))

2. By the night before the top twenty came out, I was disappointed enough that I was sure they were going to pick The Corrections as the #1 book, but thank God at least they didn't do that. It's a great book--I've read it twice due to book clubs-- but I would have put it in my top 20, not my top 10. (And I just deleted a mean, snarky comment about Franzen, just google why people don't like him if you don't already know.)

Anyway. There were some way down the list that I thought should have been a lot higher (The Fifth Season, The Friend, The Tenth of December, Exit West), some that should have been at least a bit higher (Bel Canto, Station Eleven). There were a few at the top of the list that I would have put further down (Wolf Hall, The Year of Magical Thinking, The Overstory, and Gilead, the only book I'll mention that I haven't read, because I did try it), and a handful that I would have left out entirely (Lincoln in the Bardo, H is for Hawk, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (which I enjoyed, but it's not that great, certainly not better than many that were left out)).   

3. I heard that their argument for why they included so many multiple books (by the same author) was that they were choosing the best books, not the best writers, and first of all I want to say, do you think that's helping your case here? but also, they undermined that by choosing at least a couple of books that were not the author's best work, but were published after 2000--for example, Didion. She is an icon, a brilliant writer, a true literary treasure, but is Year of Magical Thinking really in the top twelve best books of the past 25 years? It seems to me her best work was in the twentieth century, and that her book was picked because she is a great writer. I liked Year, and her writing is always good, but I had forgotten about it before I saw it on the list.

4. And what about George Saunders? I've heard he is a writer's writer, and although I didn't put it in my own top ten, I thought Tenth of December was brilliant. But Lincoln in the Bardo just seemed like an oddity (I haven't read Pastoralia). The fact that he had three books on the list made me wonder about the geographical distribution of the people who voted-- were they mostly east coast? Saunders teaches at Syracuse, he seems like a writer who is irrelevant to me here in the mountain west.

If there were a preponderance of east coast voters, that might explain why, of the books by US authors, so many midwest writers (Louise Erdrich, J. Ryan Stradal, Jane Hamilton) and western writers (Jess Walter, Peter Heller, Annie Proulx, Ivan Doig, Tommy Orange, ...believe me, I could go on) were left out. It might also explain how in the world Lauren Groff (who lives in Florida) was omitted. 

5. Besides the ones I'd read, there were about a dozen books that I'd been meaning to read for years (Kavalier and Clay, Pachinko, Never Let Me Go, for starters), and Trust and Stay True were already in my library queue, but other than those, there were very few books out of the remaining 60-ish that I thought with excitement, ooooh, I want to read that!

I wanted it to be a list that got me excited about reading, but instead it was a list that made me think, why do I care what they think? They obviously have an entirely different set of criteria for picking best books. I wanted a list I could read with delighted surprise; my snarky, cynical self says they wanted a list that makes them look smart. Honestly, sometimes I get exactly why conservatives are always rolling their eyes at the so-called coastal elites, because that seems like exactly where this list comes from. omg, my inner mom is telling me if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything. So why do I keep going?

But also-- I did read a handful of reactions on Threads from people who were surprised and delighted by the list, so what do I know? (clearly, not much)

Yeah, that's my sour grapes about the Best Books list. Why do I care so much? And that is an excellent question.  

6. You know, this is too grumpy. I should probably edit it to make it less critical (believe it or not, I did tone it down a bit). They admitted that they tweaked the list, so I assumed that meant they basically massaged it to showcase the books they picked, but maybe it really is just the way the votes fell. I'm enough of a snob that it's hard for me to believe that a book I've never heard of (like Austerlitz, or Outline) got that many votes, but on the other hand, I'm clearly not an east coast intellectual. Wait, that's still snarky. I'm probably just out of it.

7. OK, what they got right, in my obviously-not-so-humble opinion: The ones that seemed to me to be in about exactly the right place, give or take a few: The Road, Americanah, The Cloud Atlas, Detransition, Baby (again, I'm limiting that to the ones I've read). And their top two choices were, tbh, a pleasant surprise. I haven't read the Ferrante books because the only person I know who has read and loved them is someone whose taste is very different than mine. So now I will probably give them a try. And I super-admired Isabel Wilkerson's more recent book Caste (it was in my top 10!), so now I'm looking forward to trying Warmth. And getting #1 and #2 right is no small thing.  

Yeah, I can't believe I wasted this much time on it, either. In case you didn't see the list, here is a gift link. I've heard that those expire after 7 days, so get to it. I'm back-dating this because I feel inexplicably bad about how negative it is. If I had a wider audience, I would never publish it.