Over the last couple of weeks, book club and paid subscribers over here (end matterers?) have been voting for our top books of the century so far. Everything that needs to be written about the list that inspired this has been written… but let’s just say it was hardly welcomed with open hearts and minds. And certainly not by our community of book lovers, a rather discerning bunch of readers happy to venture beyond just those books that have won literary prizes (though there are some of those in here, too).
I am, of course, completely biased but I think this list is pretty great. No list will satisfy everyone, and certainly when you get into the nitty gritty of the rankings there will be some upset. How can you rank books that are so different from one another? Are you rating based on what’s actually ‘best’ in literary terms, or for wider influence and popularity, a historical record? It’s a futile gesture. But the overall sweep of the list chimes with how I feel about many of the books of these first twenty-four years, and I hope it won’t ruffle too many feathers. You’ll notice one of my attempts to slightly shift the language around the whole thing is to call these the ‘top’ books, rather than the ‘best’ (the subtitle to this post is a little tongue in cheek). There are some on the list which are undoubtedly here for their cultural impact, rather than their literary merit (which I usually reserve ‘best’ for along with my own personal favourites). And that is a-okay.
It’s also a quite lovely record of where the wider sunbeamsjess (to use my ancient internet handle for just a moment) community sits in terms of our favourite books, collectively. We felt a bit limited by the 21st century designation, and many of our group favourites couldn’t be included. I sense this is not the end of us putting together lists a bit like this one. But what a joy it was to watch the results come in, and see the patterns aligning along our community’s taste. It’s been such a pleasure to find readers who like similar books to me all around the world, and this list acts as a snapshot of where we’re at now. I hope we’ll be able to keep building on it as the years go on.
Like true scientists, we need to talk about method. I asked people to submit their top books into a master list and then asked everyone to pick which ten from the master list were their personal best of the century. This isn’t dissimilar to the NYT’s approach, and that’s how I compiled most of it, with the books that appeared in more people’s top ten ranking higher. But I also asked everyone to pair rank a selection of books from the master list. As there were so many, we couldn’t do absolutely every combination, so it yielded pretty weird results on its own. But this was helpful for me when differentiating between six books that appeared on six people’s lists, for instance. The higher the points in the second round, the higher up it went. As we got to the bottom of the list where the books were appearing in fewer people’s top tens, I started to rely on the points system a bit more. Everything that got over 60 points got a place on the list, regardless of if it was anyone’s personal favourite or not. Far from a perfect method, but as we didn’t have time to pair rank 33,000 different combinations, I think it turned out pretty solid.
I’ll save analysis of the list itself and its differences from the original for the final post. For now, I’ll be releasing twenty-five of these each day until Saturday! You may notice that these first (or last) twenty-five are quite bottom heavy (not least because I’ve added an extra ranking in…) As we got further away from the top spots, the differentiation between the books’ rankings got less defined, and I figured the more the merrier. Sure, you could argue I’m cheating a bit in that this is well over a hundred books, but there are no rules here! We are not a legacy media publication! Instead, we just like great books!
I’ll add little comments as we go along. In fact, I can’t resist.
The List
The Return by Hisham Matar
I’d like to get to Matar’s latest novel, My Friends, in the next couple of months after attending a very moving discussion between him and Adania Shibli at Hay Festival this year. But this Pulitzer Prize winning memoir of his, exploring the disappearance of his father, is now mostly definitely on my list, too. (After writing this it was announced My Friends is a Booker longlister this year - exciting!)
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
A graphic memoir that charts the author’s fraught relationship with her late father. Adding to my list! I’d love to read more graphic novels, feel free to leave me recommendations.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
A novel that has garnered a lot of attention, though perhaps surprisingly far down the list. A son writes a letter to his mother who can’t read, exploring their family history with its roots in Vietnam.
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
There’s no denying this series was an event, and a huge influence on the bevy of dystopian novels that came after, both in and out of young adult fiction.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
I’ve read a couple of Patchett novels and neither have been standouts though she’s undoubtedly been a key author of the last quarter century. Seeing as this is the only Patchett to make our list I think I might just give it a go. A research scientist goes in search of her missing mentor in the Amazon rainforest.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño
Planning to read this before the end of the year (we’ll be buddy reading it if you’d like to join us!) and I am both excited and nervous. I’ve heard it is both a challenging and brutal book. In a town on the US-Mexico border, women begin to go missing.