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Notes -
The NYT has dropped a list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. According to them.
I find the list to be vapid beyond words. The inclusion of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow alone, even in the upper 70s, disqualifies it from being anything except for a circlejerk of the rag. Trash like The Fifth Season cements it.
You can walk through the list and see the same themes being hammered over, and over, and over, and over. It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.
A couple years ago I collected what I think are the best hundred songs of all time. A friend's python visualization of my Spotify playlist illuminated that, despite all the deep cuts, I didn't have a single entry from before I was born. My musical blind spots are enormous, and I think most old music just fucking sucks. At least I can admit it's because I'm susceptible to the level of manufacturing that modern music goes through, along with a huge obsession with sick beats. My list is "wrong" for most people.
I can't imagine having this level of navel-gazing weakness in self-reflection. Did nobody look at this list and realize how stupid the title is? Did anyone over 25 contribute to it?
In any case as the number got higher there were at least some decent books listed that you could read without hating yourself. They're all still liberal, by default, but at least have significant redeeming qualities.
It seems awfully presumptuous to write a list for the 21st century given that we're not even a quarter of the way through with it.
Guess it has a better ring to it that '100 best books from the first quarter of the 21st century'.
Looks like they asked writers to name their favourite books, which was always doomed to failure. It's like asking architects to name their favourite buildings. They've been too exposed to the art form to have normal, human tastes, so they end up chasing weirdness and pretence. Only art forms that are subject to public opinion can produce good work. Fortunately, normal people still read books, so we can get a much better list from them.
Even "100 best books since the turn of the millennium" would sound better.
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