A very interesting list appeared last week from New York Magazine and Vulture (and I just love the supercool graphic for the article). An attempt at establishing a 21st century cannon. An ambitious pursuit. This is not the first time I've seen a list trying to do this, but is the biggest list thus far. The list encompasses fiction, memoir, poetry and essays.
Book of the Century (for Now)
The Last Samurai - Helen De Witt 2000
12 New Classics
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen 2001
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro 2005
How Should a Person Be? - Sheila Heti 2010
The Neapolitan Novels - Elena Ferante 2011-2015
The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson 2015
2666 - Roberto Bolaño 2008
The Sellout - Paul Beatty 2015
The Outline Trilogy - Rachel Cusk 2014-2018
Atonement - Ian McEwan 2001
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion 2005
Leaving the Atocha Station - Ben Lerner 2011
The Flame Throwers - Rachal Kushner 2013
The High Canon
Books endorsed by two panelists
Erasure - Percival Everett 2001
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides 2002
Platform - Michel Houellebecq 2002
Do Everything in the Dark - Gary Indiana 2003
The Known World - Edward P. Jones 2003
The Plot Against America - Philip Roth 2004
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst 2004
Veronica - Mary Gaitskill 2005
The Road - Cormac McCarthy 2006 (see my review)
Ooga-Booga - Frederick Seidel 2006
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Who - Junot Díaz 2007
Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel 2009
The Possessed - Elif Batuman
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake - Aimee Bender 2010
Mr Fox - Helen Oyeyemi 2011
Lives Other Than My Own - Emmanuel Carrère 2011
Zone One - Colson Whitehead 2011
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn 2012
NW - Zadie Smith 2012
White Girls - Hilton Als 2013
My Struggle: A Man in Love - Karl Ove Knausgaard 2013
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt 2013
Dept. of Speculation - Jenny Offill 2014
All My Puny Sorrows - Miriam Toews 2014
Citizen: An American Lyric - Claudia Rankine 2014
Consent Not to Be a Single Being - Fred Moten 2017-2018
The Rest of the (Premature, Debatable, Arbitrary But Still Illuminating) Canon
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon 2000
The Amber Spyglass - Philip Pullman 2000
True History of the Kelly Gang - Peter Carey 2001
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos - Anne Carson 2001
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich 2001
Austerlitz - W.G. Sebald 2001
Fingersmith - Sarah Waters 2002
The Time of Our Singing - Richard Powers 2002
The Book of Salt - Monique Truong 2003
Mortals - Norman Rush 2003
Home Land - Sam Lipsyte 2004
Oblivion - David Foster Wallace 2004
Honored Guest - Joy Williams 2004
Suite Française - Irène Némirovsky 2004
The Sluts - Dennis Cooper 2005
Voices From Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievich 2005
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link 2005
The Afterlife - Donald Antrim 2006
Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell 2006
Wizard of the Crow - Ngūgī wa Thiong'o 2006
American Genius, A Comedy - Lynne Tillman 2006
Eat the Document - Dana Spiotta 2006
The Harry Potter novels - J.K. Rowling 1997-2007 (read 1/7)
Sleeping It Off in Rapid City - August Kleinzahler 2008
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga 2008
The Lazarus Project - Aleksandar Hemon 2008
Home - Marilynne Robinson 2008
Fine Just the Way It Is - Annie Proulx 2008
Scenes From a Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth and Summertime - J.M. Coetzee 1997-2009
Notes From No Man's Land - Eula Biss 2009
Spreadeagle - Kevin Killian 2010
Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart 2010
Seven Years - Peter Stamm 2011
The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes 2011
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami 2011
The Gentrification of the Mind - Sarah Schulman 2012
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain 2012
Capital - John Lanchester 2012
The MaddAddam Trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, MaddAddam) - Margaret Atwood 2003-2013 (read 1/3)
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena - Anthony Marra 2013
Taipei - Tao Lin 2013
Men We Reaped - Jesmyn Ward 2013
Family Life - Akhil Sharma 2014
How to Be Both - Ali Smith 2014
A Brief History of Seven Killings - Marlon James 2014
Preparations for the Next Life - Atticus Lish 2014
The Sympathizer - Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015
The Light of the World - Elizabeth Alexander 2015
The Broken Earth trilogy - N.K. Jemisin 2015-2017
What Belongs to You - Garth Greenwell 2016
Collected Essays & Memoirs - Albert Murray 2016
The Needle's Eye - Fanny Howe 2016
Ghachar Chochar - Vivek Shanbhag 2017
The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas 2017 (see my review)
All Grown Up - Jami Attenberg 2017
The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir - Thi Bui 2017
Tell Me How it Ends - Valeria Luiselli 2017
Priestdaddy - Patricia Lockwood 2017
Red Clocks - Leni Zumas 2018
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden - Denis Johnson 2018
Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday 2018
Read 9/100
DNF 1/100
I think probably the most remarkable thing about this list (apart from how few I've read) is how few of these books are books, and authors, that I've never even heard of. 49/100. Yes, just about half, including I think, the best book of the century so far. I feel like I might have heard of The Last Samurai, but I really think I'm just really remembering the 2003 Tom Cruise movie of the same name - which is not at all related to the book, and one that I've never actually seen, samurai action films not being my thing.
Sadly I do think that I don't actually want to read a fair proportion of the books that I hadn't already heard of. Many of the others are on my TBR. I have a few of them in the house. The list was collated from selections by 31 critics and authors. Only seven of them agreed on The Last Samurai. It is of course a very Amero-centric list. Peter Carey, an Australian who has lived in America for decades, is the only Australian to make the list.
Thanks to Steve Donoghue for alerting me to this list.
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