The Daily - Sunday Special: The 100 Best Books of the Century (So Far)

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

Earlier this month, the New York Times Book Review rolled out the results of an ambitious survey it conducted to determine the best books of the 21st century so far. On this special episode of the Book Review Podcast, host Gilbert Cruz chats with some fellow Book Review editors about the results of that survey and about the project itself.To read the full list, please visit: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.htmlFor more episodes, search “Book Review podcast” wherever you get your podcasts, and follow the show.

Hi everyone, it's Sabrina. We're taking a break from our usual weekend routine to bring you something special today. It's summer. It's beach reading time. Maybe you need a book to take a break from the news. Anyway, our wonderful colleagues at the New York Times Book Review recently compiled a list of the 100 best books of the 21st century so far. To be clear, this is not a list of bestsellers or just literary award winners. I mean, there's some of those, but to make their list, they surveyed more than 500 novelists, poets, critics, editors, and readers. It's a very cool project, and it's a super interesting list. It's gotten a huge response. And so today, we're sending you the episode of their podcast.

It's an episode about this list and what's on it. You should also know that beyond this episode, the New York Times Book Review's podcast comes out regularly. They have fascinating conversations all the time, including with some of the phenomenal writers on this recent list. So sign up for their show wherever you listen to us. Okay, here they are. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. On this week's episode, I'm very excited

to finally talk about a project that we've been working on for much of 2024, and which is finally out there in the world. 100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far. If you're listening to this show, if you're listening to a podcast about books, I have to think you've already seen part or all of it. Joining me this week are three editors who have been deep in the weeds with me on this since January. Tina Jordan, hello. Hi. Ju Monica Teague, welcome back. Hi, Gilbert.

And Scott Heller, this is your first time on the show. It is. I'm a listener now. I'm excited to be here. Thanks. I'm excited to have all of you on. So I'm hoping we can have a free-flowing discussion about this effort, about some of the books on the list, books that didn't make the list. There's a lot to dig into here. And I want to start by asking someone else who's not me, Tina, why did we do this? Why did we do this? Because we looked around and we, it was almost the quarter century mark. We're book nerds who like to categorize and make lists. And we thought, what are the best books of the 21st century so far? And we started to argue about it. We started to talk ourselves about the things we'd

read since January 1st, 2000 that we loved. And then we thought, hey, maybe there's something here, but let's put this out to a lot of people. Because normally we would have just done this in-house. We would have polled the editors, we'd have polled the critics, our wonderful critics, and that would have been it. But this seemed like an opportunity to do something bigger, given that we ask all these writers all the time to write for us, to review books, to appear in our pages, we figured we could actually use their voices towards something massive. And this thing is massive. Scott, as someone who's still relatively new to the desk, as new as I am, we've only been here about two years, what was the most surprising thing to you

about this effort, this project? What ended up being most surprising, actually, was how many people were willing to share their ballots. We bent over backwards to let people know this was anonymous. And don't worry, we're not going to reveal who you pick, who you left off. And yet so many people were willing to come forward with what they selected. And I think that's one of the best things about it. In fact, the aggregated list is wonderful and there's plenty to argue about. But when you go get in and dig into what Stephen King put on his list, in fact, he put himself on his list, which I think people have gotten a kick out of. But many others came forward. And I think that

makes for sort of wonderful reading in and of itself. And also you get to see a lot of quirky choices that maybe many people didn't vote for, but that individuals are passionate about. And I really enjoyed that. Scott, I think you're right. I think seeing some of the ballots possibly is more entertaining to some of our readers than seeing the list itself.

I have to say in our earliest discussions about this project, one of the things that was an inspiration, certainly for me, was the Sight & Sound list. For those of you who don't know, Sight & Sound is a British film journal. And ever since 1952 or 1962, every 10 years, they've taken a poll of critics, and then it turned into a poll of critics and film directors. And they asked them to put their top films of all time. And every 10 years, it's a big deal when this list runs,

particularly over the past couple decades, because not only do they run the list, but they run the ballots of the most famous critics and the most famous directors. You can see what Guillermo del Toro and Barry Jenkins, and I don't know if Steven Spielberg participated, but you can imagine all the people whose lists are on there and just get a real sense of their taste. And then the other thing that's interesting about this list is that it changes over time. So Citizen Kane was the top movie for many decades and then Vertigo was the top movie. And now there's a French movie, Jean Dielman,

other French words I cannot pronounce. That is the top movie. I'm not saying we're going to do this every 10 years, but it certainly is an inspiration to try to capture a moment in time. And whatever else you want to say about this list, it is a snapshot of this moment in time. There are probably books on here. If you took this poll at the end of this year, it would not be on here. If you had taken it earlier, they would not be on here. This is what people in the spring of 2024 that we polled thought were the 100 best books. So let's talk

about some of these books. I'd love to start with our number one book, which I don't know, were people surprised? Was anyone in this room at least surprised that My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante was, according to our 503 respondents, the number one book of the 21st century. I was surprised. Okay. But maybe I shouldn't have been because, as a reminder to our listeners, we asked our respondents to choose what they thought were the 10 best books of the century so far, but we didn't define best for them. And people clearly defined it in different ways. They defined it as the book they loved that they pass along to people. They defined it as the books they thought would still be around generations from now. But it really

seems to me that a lot of the people who took our poll were just like voting for the books that had struck them. Right. The books they could not get out of their heads. Absolutely. And I think we're all going to touch on what books fell into our own personal categories of books we couldn't get out of our head. But talk a little bit more about Ferrante. Thankfully, luckily, we have a Ferrante expert on here. Talk a little bit more about Ferrante. Thankfully, luckily, we have a Ferrante expert on here. Apparently, there are several Ferrante experts on the desk, but we have one who is in studio,

who wrote a wonderful article that published in conjunction with this project, looking at all the theories about who Elena Ferrante is. Elena Ferrante is an author who uses an alias. We don't really know who the author is. There are theories and suspicions. But first, Shumana, I'd love for you to talk about just the book and maybe the Neapolitan Quartet as a whole. Two of them appeared on this list. There is, of course, some irony of being an expert on somebody that we don't even know who it is, but I will lean into that with pride. So, Tina, I actually agree with you that I was surprised to see My Brilliant Friend first.

I do think it's a nice representation of a couple of things. Obviously, this whole quartet touched people really deeply. But also, I think we're all still coming out of Ferrante fever. Do you remember those years where it was everybody was reading these books? Like it was an actual event when she had a new book coming out when the HBO adaptations were on. So I liked that this top pick represents a couple different ways of looking at what best really means. In case you are one of the people who has not been infected with Ferrante fever. My Brilliant Friend is the first in a series of four

books that is now known as the Neapolitan Quartet. It follows a lifelong friendship between two girls who are growing up in Naples. They're poor. They're both fiercely intelligent. They're both preternaturally smart and preternaturally attached to each other from the time that they're young girls. They are doubles of one another. And it's a very charged relationship. There's jealousy. There's rivalry. But it's also built on a type of love that you only, I think, can really foster when you're at that age and you attach on a friend like that.

I think I read this pretty much the first when it came out in English. So I followed the course of all these novels as they were arriving. And something that a lot of people were responding to, myself included, was that it was one of the first times we had seen the complexities of a female friendship so substantively discussed. There was so much recognition in it and it was a pleasure. And I think too, so the series, if you stick with it, and I think you should, because personally, my favorite is not the first one and I'm not going to tell you what my favorite is, but that's an incentive to continue with the series.

We're going to get this out of you. Maybe. I'm a locked box, man. Anyway, so you see the women grow up. You see them throughout their entire lives and you see how their lives intersect with the history of Italy, with Naples, with all sexism and communism and labor movements. And she does it very delicately. And I guess as a last Easter egg, since I am the in-studio Ferrante expert, I would not say I am an expert outside of this studio, is that a couple of years ago, I wanted to write a piece about Ferrante's English translator, Anne Goldstein,

who really helped elevate Ferrante's profile outside of Italy. And I talked to a bunch of people who knew Ferrante because of course she was really well loved in Italy before the Neapolitan Quartet. So I talked with a bunch of people who knew Ferrante because, of course, she was really well loved in Italy before the Neapolitan Quartet. So I talked with a lot of other translators, people who know a lot about Italian literature, people who had actually auditioned to translate Ferrante into English and lost out to Anne. And they said, as much as I love Ferrante in Italian, I think Anne makes them even better in English. Scott, have you read any of the Ferrante books? I've read the first one, and now I'm going to have to admit that I haven't continued with it.

We're in the same boat. You too, yeah. I have to say I was completely charmed. I loved the two of them. I loved the fierceness of their friendship. And I don't read series typically, so that may be why I didn't continue. But that's my football. I'm struck by something you said, which is these books were a cultural moment and Ferrante fever was a thing. And it was and I was completely consumed by it. But a lot of other books that we saw as cultural moments since 2000 aren't on this list. So what sets it apart? What made this one pop? Like there's a lot of good

books that people were seeing carrying everywhere, whether it's Seabiscuit or Gone Girl, and I will fight you about Gone Girl. It is a really good book that are not on this list. I love Gone Girl, and I will fight you about Gone Girl. It is a really good book that are not on this list. I love Gone Girl, to be clear. I don't love it. I don't love it enough to maybe vote for it, but I love it. So that's a great question. And I have some hypotheses. I don't have a definitive answer. One thing I will say is that I think people over the course of a series, and I understand that there are people like you, Scott, who just don't, you know, life is short. Why are you going to stick with four books?

For what it's worth, Ferrante herself considers all four of these books one long novel that are basically serialized like Dickens. I don't know, if you've invested a thousand pages with these two people, they're going to stick with you maybe more than a woman who the title will tell you is gone. It's harder to be closer with that kind of person if she's absent. That's my theory.

Is that how like TV creators like, no, this is actually an 11-hour movie? Which is not at all annoying when they say that. I mean, also everybody who doesn't want to visit Italy in one way or another, right? Although post-war navels. That is true. I don't want to go in the meat factory. So what were you surprised at, Tina, that was not on this list since you brought it up? What cultural moments?

No Gone Girl, No Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, No Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. I didn't really expect to see Kevin Kwan on there, but that book was huge. I just, I feel like the books that were, when we were seeing people carry around books, not that we do anymore, like so few of those ended up on the list. Let me ask this question then, not to mess with the conceit of our own list, but we talked about how everyone defined best in a different way. Did people overemphasize the over literary, the ones that they think are fancy, are the ones they should pick as opposed to Gone Girl, which I put on my list. All of us in this room took the poll. We're not going to share our results with you.

We're not going to share our ballots, but I put Gone Girl on my list. I think Gone Girl is a great book that is extremely well written that most people loved at the time. And I think will continue to be read. I agree with you. I do think people erred towards what they considered to be great. I think there's less fun reading on this list than I thought there would be but what is a fun book on this list who wants to pick a fun book on this list Pastoralia by George Saunders okay this is coming in at a cool 85 but I was delighted we want to have story collections on here Pastoralia is hysterical if you only read one thing in it read Sea Oak, which is one

of my favorite short stories of all time. So George Saunders had three books on here. There are only three authors that had three books on here. George Saunders with two story collections and his novel Lincoln and the Bardo. Ferrante had two of her Neapolitan quartets and then the Days of Abandonment. And Jesmyn Ward had her memoir and two novels. Just to hang one more beat on George Saunders, why is he good? I'm not saying he's not. Are we doing 11-hour series on George Saunders? Because I can follow. Sure, if you host. Okay. In Pastorella, you see his really bizarre, bonkers, laugh- loud, funny. He's a very emotional writer. He doesn't stray away from things that seem difficult. He takes on some big stuff. I mean, Lincoln and the Bardo

is one of the better books about grief that I've read in a long time. And longtime listeners of this podcast know I love grief books, although not the Joan Didion that's on here, but we can get to that later. And I think he's able to render these what can often feel like oppressive, overwhelming human experiences into things that are very manageable, like deceptively simple. So I'm delighted he's on here. Scott? I think one thing we should remember is that we went to and got answers from a lot of writers who teach in

universities and probably many, many, many fiction writers are graduates of MFA programs. And George Saunders is an incredibly influential figure in that world. And I bet a lot of, I don't think this shaped the answers, but plenty of his students are among the most important writers of this generation and are on this list, in fact. So I think he's at the center of tastemaking in some ways. And I think, you know, I know what Tina and I and all of us had discussed as we were trying to put together a wish list of who would actually vote is going beyond only sort of experts in literary fiction. And that I think is, I think ultimately, I think it's literary fiction writers who ended up answering the survey probably more than any others. And that's why the list reflected their taste, I would say.

I don't know about that. You don't think so? Well, to be clear, I think we asked more literary fiction writers than genre writers. Yes. For sure. There are quite a few genre writers. And they still went fancy to use Gilbert's term. Yeah. You can see on the ballot that Scott referred to, the page where you can see a bunch of writers' ballots, you have Rebecca Roanhorse, you have Sarah McLean, some of these writers who really, you know, write within a genre and focus their picks probably very deliberately on genre books because they had a sense perhaps that those types of books would be underrepresented on the list. And they were. We have one sci-fi fantasy, one prominent sci-fi fantasy book on here, which is The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin.

It certainly would have been great to have seen more. I agree. And that's what makes looking at their ballots so fabulous. We'll be right back. This is the Book Review Podcast, and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by three of my fellow editors at the Book Review, Tina Jordan, Jumana Khatib, and Scott Heller, to talk about our 100 books of the 21st century project. Scott Heller, to talk about our 100 books of the 21st century project. Jumana just mentioned how much she loves George Saunders, the short stories of George Saunders. Are there any other books on this list that, Scott or Tina,

you found particularly pleasurable? If by pleasurable, you mean laugh out loud funny, I'm going to nominate Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Is that a laugh out loud? Okay, maybe I have a morbid sense of humor. This is a graphic memoir. Yes, her family lived in a funeral home. She's just funny. You know how some writers, you just, whatever it is, they strike that chord in you?

I've never laughed so hard. Okay. Scott? All right. I would say going to the list, number 16, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon's book about the history of the comic book industry is a complete delight.

It captures the making of culture. It captures the immigrant experience. And it's just rich and vivid. It's a long book. It's one of those big fat books that you'd lose yourself into. And I felt like it could have gone on. I completely loved it.

And then actually the one right after that on the list is The Sellout by Paul Beatty, which is a pretty impressive, pretty bold satire about race and racism. And there's no question, you'll smile and you'll laugh at both. And the sellout appeared on our critics list from earlier this year of the funniest book since Catch 22. Is that correct? Yes, it did. Yeah. The only crossover, in fact, I think that might be.

Well, listeners, if you haven't checked out that list, please do find it. We do more than lists here, but that is a great one as well. One question that I've gotten a couple texts about, shout out my friend Lenore, is the break between fiction and nonfiction. We decided to do both categories in one list as opposed to doing two lists. I think it was our estimation that maybe we had one shot at this and we could not, we would collapse if we actually had to do this effort twice. There are, I believe, 26 nonfiction books on here. So just over a quarter of the books are nonfiction. What stood out to any of you in terms of the types of nonfiction books that our poll respondents picked?

What stood out to me actually was the wide range. We don't have that many of them. Like you said, it's a quarter. I think in real life that probably, it may not exactly mirror book sales, but fiction does greatly outsell nonfiction. But of the nonfiction that appears, we have massive biographies like Caro's last volume of LBJ. We've got histories. We've got memoirs. We've got investigative reporting. We even have true crime. Like it's really a broad range. Yes, we have the Frederick

Douglass biography. We have the Robert Caro fourth volume in his LBJ series, Say Nothing, We have the Robert Caro fourth volume in his LBJ series, Say Nothing Investigative. Is that investigative? True crime? It is. Yeah. A beloved book that placed very high on the list. We have several memoirs.

Also H is for Hawk. H is for Hawk, Annie Erno. The ones that are on here, I feel like, I feel like the right ones. Random Family, the Adrienne Nicola Blanc book that came out in 2001? 2003. 2003. It was on my list. I was very happy to see it here.

Yeah. I sort of feared that some of those early century books, to be honest, would get lost. And they didn't. That book clearly has resonated with anyone who's read it. I thought no one is still going to be thinking about this book but me. And so then when I saw it on the list, I was happy. What else is from 2003 is a fiction that's in the top 10, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, also 2003. As is The Corrections from 2001, which is a book that, look, I know Jonathan Friends is not, probably has never heard of a podcast and he's certainly not listening to this one. I was so curious as to where this book would play sudden list because as the whole

controversy of when it came out and this feeling that it started the century it came out a year after Cavalier in Play I believe and would people remember it and I will tell you they did because number five is as they say nothing to at. And we had gone into this whole process a little bit worried that people would only be thinking about more recent books. But in fact, for the most part, the last few years aren't really well represented here at all. No, although I think the ones, and I'd love to hear other people's opinions on this, because there is a slight recency bias. You'll see, I wonder if Demon Copperhead, Trust, Tomorrow and Tomorrow,

there might be one or two others from the past two years. If we took this in a year, if those would still be on. All great books, to be clear. I'm not suggesting that any of them are not. I'm just curious as to what are the books from the past few years that have stuck in people's minds? And clearly two of those books are Pulitzer Prize winners. One of them is one of the biggest bestsellers of the past couple of years and they have lasted.

True. My point was, you're talking about five books here and we went into this thinking, oh no, what if most of the books on the list are from the last seven or eight years? And that just did not happen. Shumana, you were going to talk about the Nobel winner? Yeah, I was going to talk about Septology because that to me, and I say that as a fan of the half of one of the seven books that this book encompasses, I wonder if he hadn't received the Nobel last year, if it would be as high on the list as it would be, although I'm delighted to see it. One thing I was worried about, because these are the things that keep me up at night,

is what kind of international representation we would see, what kind of translated literature we would see. You mentioned The Years by Agnès Arnaud. I'm going to quibble with you about whether that's nonfiction, but that's a whole other podcast. What's what? Just give me a little taste of the quibble. I say this as somebody who is so deep in the Arnaud weeds that fine, but she coined her own sociological term for her literary project. It's not quite autobiography and it's not quite fiction, but out in the middle somewhere they meet. I'm dealing in blunt categories here. And we have nonfiction.

You're right, I'm sorry. Nuance is not so good for a podcast. We do not deal in nuance on this podcast. This is the guy who sits around the horn, like we're on ESPN. You're right, I forgot. I forgot about the horn. Okay, forget it. It is nonfiction. Okay. So in addition to the French writers, and of course, Bolaño's on here, which was exciting to me. We even had Tova Ditlefsen, who wrote the Copenhagen Trilogy,

which is a book that has stuck with me and a lot of my friends, kind of came as a total shock out of left field. We named it as one of our 10 best a couple of years ago. So it's just, it's nice to see a really good representation from across the world. Persepolis, the vegetarian, it's good. I'm sleeping better. So one thing that I was maybe not surprised to see, given what some interpret as the state of the world over the past couple decades, was several dystopian novels on here. There are ones that are incredibly dark, like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which is about a father and a son on the road. They're in a burned out post-nuclear war America and they're trying to survive and they're cannibals and it's just grim, even though he tries to leave you with a flicker

of hope at the end. So you have something like that. There was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. This is a book that became very popular during the early days of the pandemic because it was about a super flu that took out most of the world, had an amazing HBO adaptation. But this, unlike The Road, is a book that leaves you feeling a little bit hopeful. A big part of the book is about a troop of actors sort of walking around one of the Great Lakes, bringing the last flickers of civilization, Shakespeare, to all the groups of people that they run into. And while, again, most people in the world died and they're very sad parts of the book, it's also about the persistence of art, how we use art to remind ourselves that we're human, how we use art to remind ourselves that in the darkest of times, there is beauty in the world.

Station Eleven is just a great book. And then there is Never Let Me Go, which I think I characterized it recently as the quietest dystopian novel that might ever exist. Most of it is about a bunch of kids at an English boarding school. I'm not going to ruin what the book is actually about, but once you discover what is actually happening to the kids in this boarding school, where they're living their little quotidian lives and just running, having little arguments and sniping at each other, it becomes crushingly sad. I don't know. The 20th century, 21st century, has it been so sad that we care about dystopian novels more than ever? Dystopia for summer.

No, this is part of the firmament of most good literature it's never that far out of reach for the good writers am i do i think i don't know do we need some benzos collectively maybe i'm not a doctor i don't know scott what do you think i i actually would have thought that there would be more bleak stuff on the list. In fact, sorry to say. I really did. I did. I thought the road would be higher. In fact, I don't know how you judge whether a book, how high it's ranked is how miserable people feel about the world.

It's a direct connection. Yeah, there is. Okay. And I had a conversation with the critics and we talked about whether this list and how this list speaks to the shadow of 9-11 and what the 21st century has been about. And I think the agreement was that it felt like people were picking books that took them away from the state of the world more than took them closer to. And I kind of agree with that, actually, in terms of directly stuff that's directly connected to the political situation. we have The Looming Tower. The Lawrence Wright book was very specifically about 9-11 and its aftermath.

But it's really only around the edges and in many ways not even around the edges. There's quite a number of historical novels on this list, which, of course, are still maybe about contemporary America in all sorts of ways, especially the novels that are about race and slavery inevitably are still about now. They're not just about then. But there's something about this facet of the 21st century that I found there to be not as much as I expected. I do agree with that, especially because for the first half of the time period we're talking about, it was also what consumed the young adult literary landscape, right? Like Hunger Games, all those books. That's all there was. The other thing I was really interested going in and I'm still trying to figure out is this is a list of books that were all produced in the digital

first era, for the most part. And do we feel like these are books that live in the shadow of the internet, that are made by and for people who don't have the attention spans to read and are actually, as we all are, listening to books and not just reading books, which is increasingly part of the way people are consuming. I was interested in getting into that with the critics, and I think the critics had some interesting answers, but I'm curious what people here think. First of all, Scott, I think listening to a book is reading a book. Thank you. Okay. I hear you. One thing you mentioned does remind me just how popular historical fiction and historical fiction,

I feel like is possibly on the edge of being too broad a category at this point, if the 80s are starting to be historical fiction, but how popular historical fiction is as a category, as a genre, and how well represented it is on our list. From Wolf Hall to The Known World to The Underground Railroad to to Pachinko to Lincoln and the Bardo. I mean, those arguably are all pieces of historical fiction. And I think if you go down the list of 100 here, you probably have a 40 percent or something like that. I agree with you.

So, you know, actually, Scott, your point about to what extent the Internet has influenced this list, maybe it's that it drove people in the other direction. Like at the same time when we're talking about the tech boom and barreling towards relentless progress at what cost, people are being driven to historical fiction as a means of escape. That I could think that I'm willing to stand behind that. We have a theory. That, I'm willing to stand behind that. We have a theory. Look, it also makes big fat novels more pleasurable to be sinking into an old fashioned narrative.

And there's many of them on this list, I think is a pleasure of this moment because we're receiving information in bits and fragments so much. And to sustain a real story is a pleasure. So as we draw to a close here, I'm curious, I'd love to go around again and just ask each of you to stump for a book that did not appear on the list, but you are particularly passionate about. Scott? We were talking about Funny before, and one of the funniest books that was on the other list and I wish was on

this one is Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, which I think is one of the absolute funniest workplace comedies ever. And wherever you work, you're going to laugh. And then you may cry a little bit too. But I think that's one that I really do think was on my ballot and I wish was on made it into the full list. And the other one that was on my ballot, and that's just singular, and there's not that many of us who would have gone for it, but I had been the theater editor for a long time. And the best theater books that have come out during this period are these two books of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics called Finishing the Hat. And look, I made a hat. And the more people are embracing Sondheim, the more people are going to start looking back at these books and realize that he's an amazing writer, lyricist, and an amazing critic of his own work. And you're introduced to his thought processes as he wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history. And they're incredible books.

He wrote some of the greatest songs in theater history, and they're incredible books. Scott, I love those books. There's the one's sort of a bright pink cover. One's a bright blue cover. That's right. He annotates his lyrics. There's photos from the original productions. Those are absolutely wonderful. A good gift for anyone or for yourself.

Thank you. Jumana. So I love Dana Spiada, colleague of George Saunders. I voted for one of her books. I think she's just incredible book to book to book. I would have liked to see Eat the Document on here. This is from 2006. It is about sort of 1970s activists there's a Bob Dylan reference I love her I wish I'd seen her but Dana you're on my list Tina what would you have liked to have seen on here I would have loved to have seen a novel called The Paying Guest by Sarah Waters which I think is probably my favorite book of the century so far. Good kick, Tina. Oh, yeah.

Good kick. It's set in Britain in the 1920s when things were grim, post-war years when things were especially grim. That's a Tina special. Yeah, right? A young woman and her mother are taking in a lodger to help them make ends meet. And the lodger they take in, her name is Lillian, she and the daughter, Frances, fall in love. But it's set against the backdrop of a murder,

which I can't get into. But there are individual scenes of such power in this book that I'll never get out of my head. There's one scene where someone is being given a shave with a straight razor and you're certain it's going to end in that person's death. And you're reading and you're just sweating because the tension is dialed so high. I don't know if you experienced it like that, Jumana, but just highs and lows, but just an incredible story. Makes me happy I don't shave my face. It's making me think of Sweeney Todd. It should, right?

Gilbert, did you have one? No, every book I put on my list ended up on here. Really? Yeah. No, I'm just kidding. I mentioned Gone Girl. I think Gone Girl is one that should be on there. I put On Writing by Stephen King, which actually I thought would have appeared on this list.

But see, I think that the reason Stephen King isn't on this list is that he has so many great books. I think he got a lot of votes. But when you write a book a year, the votes are going to get split. Yeah, we actually should end by talking about a series that none of the books appeared on this list. People are a little bit surprised. And I think it's because there are so many of them.

Ferrante has four books. That's a lot of books. But there's someone else that has seven? Six. Six, I think you're thinking. What am I talking about? You're talking about

our great disgorger, Karl Ove Knellskard. Six My Struggle books. Six My Struggle books. Six My Struggles. Not a one appeared on our list. And I think it's not because people don't like them, but because people just voted for different ones. But then again, look at how many series books

we do have on the list. I would just like to point out that Ferranti has two. Hilary Mantel has two from her series. So you're saying if he had bundled all of them together, you and Foss... I don't know. That would have been... Listeners, you can't see what I'm doing, but the book would have been this big. I don't think binding exists.

I just don't think it... I think it definitely affected him. I think it definitely affected Stephen King. But I think in other cases, people who loved all the books, look, two of four for Ante, two of three for Hilary Mantel. Shout out to Scott Turow, who put all four of the Neapolitan Quartet on his ballot. It was amazing to see. I never would have guessed that of all the people on there, he would have been the one. But you like what you like. He loves all the legal drama in the Neapolitan Quartet. There's no rule of law in Naples.

Maybe that's what he likes. It has been a pleasure to talk about this project with all three of you. It's been a pleasure to work on it over the past many months with all of you. And I genuinely look forward to never speaking about it again. So thank you for joining me this week on the Book Review Podcast, Jumana. Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you. Scottumana. Thanks for having me. I had fun. I don't know about you.

Scott, you did it. First time. I did it. I'll be funnier next time. You'll definitely be back. Tina, thank you again. Thanks for having me. Please don't start another big project anytime soon.

Okay. Okay. I guess I will promise on air. Listeners, please do, if for some reason you haven't, check out our list of the 100 books of the 21st century so far is voted on by 503 writers and other literary luminaries you can find that on ny times.com please do let us know what you think the list happy reading that was my conversation with scott heller jumaana Khatib, and Tina Jordan, my fellow editors at The Book Review, about our 100 Books of the 21st Century project.

As I said, I hope you've had an opportunity to read it, to experience it, to check which books you've read, which books you want to read. You've taken our opportunity to share your 10. There's a lot to do there. As always, it's still true. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.