Who's Counting?

On Reading the New York Times' Best Book List

We all love to count. It starts as little kids and never leaves us. My little granddaughter delighted in playing hide and seek where she got to count to 20 (sometimes she jumped from 14 to 20!) This week, I was going to discuss “You Are Here,“by David Nichols, and I promise I will get to it next week, but I couldn’t resist the New York Times issue today on the 100 best books of the 21st century.

The Times sent out a request to hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians, and other “literary luminaries,” asking them to pick their 100 best books of the 21st century. They received replies from 503. They gave no criteria for the selection and the books did not need to be novels, although fiction dominated the final list in a 3 to 1 ratio. They then took the responses and organized them in order of the most votes into make a list of 100. 

I immediately counted how many of the books I had read and how many I had begun and abandoned. I’ve read 24 of them and started and abandoned another eight. The issue today of the Book  Review contains a short paragraph on each book.  I’d already added many to my TBR list.

This inspired me to make a list of my the ten best books published since 2000  (only one book skirts the timeline criteria because “America’s Favorite Poems,” edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz was published first in 1999.)

I used similar criteria to the Booker Prize panel, which just published its long list for 2024. The chair of the judges, Edmund de Waal said he looks for “

works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments . . . works that have made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others. . .We need fiction to do different things – to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves, and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us.”

I used the same criteria in selecting my list. So here they are, not necessarily in order of importance.

1.        “The Friend,” by Sigrid Núñez. This is a quirky novel with unnamed characters. The narrator is a woman who inherits a Great Dane, which was owned by a writer, her mentor and friend, who committed suicide. Her relationship with the Writer is not completely clear. What is clear is that she’s not allowed to have a Great Dane in her apartment. (The book is being made into a movie. Check out the New Yorker article about selecting a Great Dane for the role and getting him to act against his training.) I chose this book because of a a wide-ranging conversation in her head with other writers which touch upon her grief and sense of being unmoored. This is the one book on my list that is also on the New York Times list. The ending causes us to question what we think we know.

2 . “Horse,”  by Geraldine Brooks. This is historical fiction about an actual racehorse in the mid-1800s, where Jarret, a young male slave,  becomes first a groom and then a trainer to Lexington, a famous racehorse. Jarret loves Lexington and understands him. No one loves or understands Jarret. He is moved around from stable to stable with no more agency than the horse. Then comes the Civil War. The mixture of the racing world with the world of slavery and Jarret’s relationship with a white painter (at that time paintings of horses were used in their purchase and sale) is compelling.  A painting of Lexington with Jarret in the corner shows up in the modern day scenes.

3.“Old God’s Time,” by Sebastian Berry. This was on the book long list for 2023. The New Yorker called Sebastian “a writer of almost Joycean amplitude.” We sink into his language like cosying up to the bar in an Irish pub. On first blush, “Old God’s Time,” (which means “beyond memory”) appears to be about a murder mystery that Tom Kettle, a retired detective in Ireland, has been asked to help solve, but it is really a profound meditation on grief and memory. Kettle spent his childhood in an orphanage, where the boys were serially raped by the Brothers who ran the place—or, in Kettle’s words, “put to the sword of their lust.” This trauma and how it affects his wife, leads to the murder of a cleric the detectives are trying to solve. But as the title hints, the novel is about much more. It moves back-and-forth between reality and an alternate reality living in Kettle’s memory and imagination. I couldn’t put it down.

4            “The Night Watchman,” by Louise Erdrich.  I have read a lot of Erdrich’s work, which often incorporates Native American ritual, wisdom and heritage. This novel is based on her grandfather, who testified in Congress against a bill to dispossess the Chippewa tribe from North Dakota.  Does Tom, the night watchman, see and hear ghosts in the night? In what in lesser hands could be called magic realism, in Erdrich’s writing makes us believers.

5.“Fellowship Point,” by Alice Eliot Dark. Dark stated that she wished to write a saga in the style of Dickens that would weave together many characters and many plot lines. She succeeded in her goal, but I was most captivated by the relationship between two 80-year-old women who have been friends for years and have a falling out over the disposition of land at the tip of Cape Cod called Fellowship Point. A story told unapologetically from the standpoint of an 80-year-old woman, at times cantankerous, blunt spoken and compelling, is a refreshing look at a modern narrator.

6.        “ James,”  by Percival Everett. “James” is on the long list for the Booker this year and with good reason. It tells the story of the slave Jim from Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the slave, who calls himself James. James learned to read and write in secret and code switches, speaking slave pidgin English (which Twain used in Huckleberry Finn) to white people and educated English among blacks. Everett gives James a big heart, a mission to find his wife, and a birds-eye view of the torment and degradation of slavery.

7.        “The Dictionary of Lost  Words,” by Pip Williams. This is historical fiction about a group of editors in England compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, and the words that were cut—those commonly used in the life of women, particularly lower class women. It alternates between the life of the editors and a character who used the language that was excised from the dictionary. Photographs at the end of the book of the actual editors, including women, were a bonus.

8.        “The Boys of My Youth,” a story collection by Jo Ann Beard. I love the genre of the short story and this one includes a masterful short story (actually creative nonfiction, as it is based on fact) called “The Fourth State of Matter,” originally published in the New Yorker, and used frequently in writing courses. The story is about a horrific killing in a university where she worked. But the scenes I found equally compelling involve her dying collie and her playing “gear shift” by pulling on its face.  Beard weaves the end of her marriage, the dying dog, and a squirrel infestation in her attic with a school shooting and somehow, magically, makes us care equally about all the storylines.

9 “The Poetry Home Repair Manual,” by Ted Kooser. Kooser, former poet laureate of the United States, sprinkles his own poems in a lovely introduction to the voice of a midwestern poet.  Plus, I discovered in its pages the word “cattywampus,” which I had thought was a family word. What a delight. I heard Kooser talk about getting the call that he’d been named Poet Laureate. Surprised and stunned, he just lay down on the grass! This is excellent writing advice for anyone —new or established poet. His charm imbues the pages. 

10.  “America’s Favorite Poems,” edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz. This project, begun when Pinsky was US poet laureate, also has an associated website, where ordinary Americans talk about their favorite poem and why they love it. The print version is the same concept. The testament to the power of poetry in the lives of ordinary Americans is palpable. Unlike the criteria used by the judges of the Booker Prize, Pinsky simply asked for Americans’ favorites. I recall Amy Foster, who wrote that after a disastrous love affair, she was comforted by “The Night Dances,” by Sylvia Plath, even though the poem was about Plath’s baby son. This reminds me that what we read often lifts off the page and forms an association or connection that often has nothing to do with the story itself. Writing is a magical process.

I hope you had fun reading this list. I certainly had a terrific time writing it.