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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.
I almost certainly can't find it now, but I remember stumbling upon a list of movies or albums like this that was published decades back, probably in an old magazine, and realizing that it had a similar bias that had aged terribly: half of the then-contemporary ones didn't seem to have been mentioned again, but had heard of all the classics.
At least it's not a new bias, I suppose.
It is profoundly frustrating. I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons, but my every attempt at finding "Top X Book" lists is cluttered with current year thinly veiled, Gen Z, political slop. Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages? I recall 4chan put together a list of anon's most recommended reading and it was shockingly more representative than you average list from a "Paper of record".
In the November 1996 issues of Computer Gaming World, they put together an article for the 150 best games of all time. And unlike modern IGN or PCGamer lists, CGWs was 1996 probably was truly representative of the entire breadth and depth of the computer gaming history at the time. Maybe it was easier, spanning 15 years tops. The PCGamer list only shares Doom with CGW's, and the IGN list only shares Doom and Tetris.
In some ways I get it. I will plant my flag on this hill and die on it, 1997 was an apex year for computer games. Games that came out before 1997 tend to struggle greatly with graphics, sound and usability. Games that came out after are the complete package, and many from 1997-2000 remain the definitive example of their genre. And that is more or less where history largely stops in the IGN list. Why include Simcity from the CGW list when you can include Simcity 2000 from a year later? Why include WarCraft II when you can include StarCraft from 2 years later? Still, some omissions are shocking, like Day of the Tentacle, probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever, possibly only eclipsed by The Secret of Monkey Island. System Shock, #98 just keeps getting remakes, remasters, source ports, etc.
But I've digressed too far...
In my view, the 1998 Modern Library list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century has mostly held up. As of now I have read 50-60% of the books on the list and was generally glad to have read each one.
https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100#top-100-novels
Something else that you may find interesting to do, is to examine some of the books that were bestsellers in different time periods. In the '50s you had writers like Nevil Shute and A.J. Cronin; later you had authors such as Arthur Hailey and Mary Stewart. However, rather than being slop, I've generally found these writers' works to have held up quite well; to my mind this reflects that at one time, the reading public was much more male, had longer attention spans uncorrupted by digital technology, and had better liberal educations than what prevail now.
It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.
Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.
Note that Moby Dick came out in 1851.
I thought that, but the header text says
Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.
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