My Struggle (to Choose 10 Favorite Books since 2000)

No, I did not vote for "My Struggle," but I can't resist a corny headline. Here instead are the books I did vote for in the New York Times Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.

Lots of people pooh-pooh best-of lists for lots of reasons: works of art shouldn’t be in competition with each other; no list can truly express something as abstract and subjective as “best,” all lists are simply “to-do lists written by other people.”

However, I am not lots of people and I agree with none of those reasons.

I love lists. I love lists of best novels, funniest novels, weirdest novels, best of the year, best of the century, best of the millennium. Because: Why not? Lists remind me of books I love and introduce me to books I might love; they’re fun to ponder, argue about or, if you’re so inclined, ignore.

So I was all-in for the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I was also delighted to be asked (along with 500 or so other book-lover-types) to submit my own top 10 favorite books since 2000 to be tabulated. My wife, Julia May Jonas, was also asked, which was the very best part of all, because it meant we could spend several weeks talking about and debating books and, most of all, what constitutes “best” in this context.

The designation of “best” was left purposefully vague by the Times in its entreaty; best could mean, they explained, anything you like. So: Most accomplished? Most monumental? Most influential? Most enduring? Most personally affecting? Personal favorites? All of the above? Some of the above?

You can see why this was a fun thought exercise. I will mention that there was no overlap between my list and Julia’s, which: That tracks. You should see our bookshelves.

I have been really interested to see other people’s lists, so I’ll play along and share mine, too.

I could have accurately predicted many of the books, both that I’d read and had not read, that would place well on the list. I also presumed that one reason to ask a wide range of readers is not to achieve some sort of hive mind consensus but to incorporate the idiosyncrasies of each individual juror. So ultimately, for my ballot, I went primarily with books I personally love and that have been hugely influential on me, either directly or indirectly as exemplars of the potential possibilities of fiction.

While winnowing, I gave some weight to the book’s broader influence and importance: I love “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” roughly equally — the critic in me would likely give the former the slight edge as an overall piece of cohesive art, while the reader in me finds the alternate-history pulp-fiction hi-jinks of the latter more alluring. But only one book per author allowed (another arbitrary rule for me only, which I wish the Times list had adhered to) so “Kavalier,” the Pulitzer winner, made the cut — it wound up at #16 in the final 100.

I had three of my picks show up in the top 100 — “Kavalier,” “The Looming Tower,” and “Pastoralia” — which is mostly a testament to how few of these books overall I personally have read. (No, I did not tally them, to preserve myself from humiliation. But for literally any novel you might mention that I haven’t included in my own top 10, the answer why not is: “Have not read it.” Nope, not even that one. Nor that one.)

There’s personal reasons for this — I’m a slow reader; I’m borderline narcoleptic; and I’ve had, for most of the last decade, young kids — but also I’ll say that my list, and my reading habits, skew more toward genre fiction than the overall voting pool for this exercise. I won’t grouse (at least not here, not yet) about the lack of genre titles in the Top 100 — though I could read this list a hundred times and still not believe that “Gone Girl” is not on it — because the lack of genre titles is both a) very predictable and b) somewhat defensible.

I personally read a lot of crime fiction, and crime-adjacent fiction, and so would love to have seen more crime fiction on the list. But then some voters no doubt read a lot more romance and would no doubt have loved to see more outstanding novels in that genre represented. The truth is that, in a poll of 500 literary-oriented people, tastes will always revert to the mean — which in this case is widely embraced and celebrated literary fiction.

But for posterity and service purposes, here’s some of the books I would absolutely have loved to see on that list because they will always be at or near the top of my personal favorites.

“The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy (2021)

“The Road” made the list at #13, which is entirely understandable, given its influence, prize-winning status and Oprah-anointment. Yet McCarthy has written several novels that are better than “The Road,” and personally I think one of them is “The Passenger.” However, it only came out three years ago and has neither the popular momentum nor the critical consensus to make an appearance here. But it’s better. Maybe his best.

“Leave the World Behind” by Rumaan Alam (2020)

No novel better captures the strange ambient unease of this modern moment, plus it’s very funny — funny enough to be considered a satire if not for the fact that its primary affect is not to leave you sitting in smug judgment of someone else but rather feeling shattered and catastrophically unsettled.

“Interior Chinatown” by Charles Yu (2020)

The novel that beat out “Leave the World Behind” (and many others) for the National Book Award in 2020, “Interior Chinatown” absolutely should have been in the Top 100. I have to think it simply hasn’t been read widely enough — it’s a fantastically effective meta-examination of our current struggles with, and battles over, identity, that’s also profoundly moving? Literally no other writer than Charles Yu, a national treasure, could pull this off.

“Trust Exercise” by Susan Choi (2019)

A thorny, virtuosic, tricky, masterful novel about sexual interplay and power dynamics — very topical, very intelligent, also intermittently laugh-out-loud funny. Maybe the definitive #MeToo novel and definitely the definitive theater-kids novel.

“Dare Me” by Megan Abbott (2012)

My favorite crime novel of the last 20 years so naturally it has to be on my list. Should have won the Pulitzer in 2012, when no prize was awarded, a signal of all sorts of cultural myopias that we won’t get into here.

“The Fortress of Solitude” by Jonathan Lethem (2003)

This one kind of fascinates me. Lethem is one of many highly successful and influential novelists not to make the top 100 — Sally Rooney and Karl Ove Knausgard are also omitted, among many others — and “Fortress” is widely considered his masterpiece and the high-water mark of the early aughts Brooklyn-era in literature. It’s the kind of big, messy, stupidly ambitious, brilliant, frustrating, leave it all on the dance floor kind of novel that was very much in vogue in, say, 2003 but very much isn’t in vogue right now. But likely will be again! I’d be curious to know how many votes this book had and how widely (or narrowly) it missed the top 100. If a similar list been compiled in, say, 2008, I think this novel would have made it. But as they say: Things change. People change. Hairstyles change. Interest rates fluctuate.

“The City & the City” by China Mieville (2009)

Is there any chance a book like this would make a list like this? It did win the Hugo Award and has been adapted for (a pretty terrible) TV show but honestly there’s no world in which it could achieve the kind of critical consensus needed to crack a top 100. And yet — it’s the most brilliant premise for a novel I think I’ve ever encountered, and it’s seamlessly pulled off; and in a year in which I was reading a different novel about the Berlin Wall while watching global horrors unfold, this novel refuses to not be relevant. If you haven’t read it, read it.

Please tell me your thoughts! And your lists! As mentioned, a list is only as good as the arguments it provokes. The novels cited above will give you a pretty good sense of my readerly tastes (and my writerly proclivities), so please be my human algorithms and give me 100 more books to read and love.

Cheers,

Adam