The NYT Just Listed the 100 Best Books of the Century
I crunched 100 numbers and I have 10 complaints
The New York Times chimed in last week with their picks for best books of the 21st Century (so far). In a fashion designed to piss readers off, they turned to judges like Jenna Bush, Sarah Jessica Parker and James Patterson to show us what we should have been reading all along.
Do I sound irritated? I am, a little. And even more, I’ve been curious. So in the days since the list dropped, I’ve been breaking down the 100 “best” books in an Excel sheet (as one does).* I’ve looked at data points such as genre (fiction vs. nonfiction). Authors’ nationality. Ethnicity and gender. How many times an author appears on the list. I’ve looked for trends and reasons why these “503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers” picked the books that they did.
I have some observations, and some complaints. Ten of them, as it happens…
10. Is this a grand but unconvincing gesture of internationalism?
Unsurprisingly, the NYT list skews towards writers who write in English: 84 of the 100 books are from citizens of the U.S. (66), Great Britain (14), Ireland (2) and Canada (2). The closest we get to a writer from the African…
