The Latest Major Book List

  • First, about this week’s New York Times list of the best books of the 21st century;
  • Second for today: Paul Krugman on how Republicans think that America is a dystopian nightmare.
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For no particular reason that I can detect, the New York Times this past month has been compiling lists of the best books of the 21st century, i.e. from 2000 to 2023. They began by compiling the annual “Editors’ Choice” or “Best Books” lists, chosen by the book review editors, that were published in each of those years (typically in the first Sunday of each December’s Book Review). That list is here. Since I read the NYT and its Sunday Book Review, I’ve seen these lists before; indeed, have seen them since the 1970s.

Then this past week they rolled out, 20 titles at a time, their compilation of The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, “As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.” The photo above, presumably, shows all 100.

They asked all sorts of writers and celebrities, even a couple three science fiction writers, even a couple three scientists. The final top 20 were revealed today.

My quick reactions on the entire list of 100.

  • The vast majority of the titles are fiction.
  • Even though I’ve followed the annual editorial lists all these years, there are many books on the top 100 poll that I’m unfamiliar with. (Maybe a third.)
  • There are a couple three science fiction or fantasy titles, including Mandel’s Station Eleven (at #93) and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (at #44), plus a few crossover titles, i.e. books by ‘literary’ writers that have some SF themes. Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
  • There is only *one* unambiguous book about science or technology: Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies, at #84, which is about cancer. There are a couple borderline titles: Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, a sort of nonfiction novel about Bohr, Heisenberg, and others; and Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, about varieties of children, which might be read as about sociology, or human nature. I reviewed a portion of the that book here.

It’s this last point that’s curious, even alarming. Most of the books I’ve read in the past 10 or 20 years that I consider important are science nonfiction, such as, oh Harari’s Sapiens. I could put together my own list.

Still, the reason I pay attention to such lists is to see what I’ve missed. I’ve found 6 or 8 titles on the list that I *have copies of* but have not read yet. So perhaps I shall. After that? Well, maybe some of the highest ranking titles. There is always more to read.

  • Oh, and how many of the books on the list have I read?

In ascending order of rank:

  • Solomon, Far From the Tree
  • Roth, The Plot Against America
  • Bechdel, Fun Home
  • Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
  • Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
  • McEwan, Atonement
  • McCarthy, The Road
  • Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  • Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

And I have copies on hand of these others:

  • Mandel, Station Eleven
  • Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World
  • Hamid, Exit West
  • Saunders, Tenth of December
  • Atkinson, Life After Life
  • Jemisin, The Fifth Season
  • Macdonald, H Is for Hawk
  • Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
  • Coates, Between the World and Me
  • Powers, The Overstory
  • Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
  • Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
  • Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

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This is, yet again, consistent with my conclusions about conservatives and their morality.

NY Times, Paul Krugman, 11 Jul 2024: What Does the G.O.P. Have Against America?

Keying off the Republican platform.

I want to focus not on what the platform proposes but what it says about the G.O.P. image of America today — a dystopian vision that bears hardly any resemblance to the vibrant country I know, a nation that has coped remarkably well with the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. Republicans may try to brand themselves as patriots, but they truly appear to despise the nation they live in.


Why does the Republican vision of America, as revealed in the party’s platform, bear so little resemblance to reality? A large part of it, I believe, is that the party instinctively favors harsh, punitive policies — which obliges it to believe that failure to pursue such policies must lead to disaster, even when it doesn’t. Democrats haven’t been deporting millions or toying with the idea of shooting protesters, therefore, the logic seems to go, we must be experiencing a crime epidemic. Democrats care about the environment, therefore they must be hampering energy production. Democrats want to expand health care coverage and alleviate poverty, therefore they must be feeding runaway inflation.

This is remarkably plausible, and of course speaks to black and white thinking. If not this, it must be that. There’s a term for it: Law of excluded middle. The morality: “harsh, punitive policies.”

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