50 more books the NYT should have put on their list, proving that I, too, can read

Bait: taken.

I’m a big boy who minored in English.

Every time a major publication finds a reason to assemble a Best Whatever list, people predictably jump out to attack the very idea of list-making, using the same boring arguments. You can’t rank art, man! The canon is an obsolete concept! WE don’t need media gatekeepers to tell US what is worthy of OUR attention! This whole enterprise is invalid because you included [thing] but not [other thing]!

One straw-man argument at a time here: First of all, sure you can rank art. Go right ahead!

Second, yes, the “canon” is historically problematic and structurally outdated and so on. The way to address this is to continue to canonize, which will have one of two effects: 1) the gradual formation of a new canon that includes the tastes and experiences of people whose voices were previously excluded, or 2) the zone floods with so much curation and analysis and backlash and debate that the whole concept of a canon becomes diluted. Either way, great!

Also, you’re right, now that scarcity is no longer an organizing principle for the consumption of culture, we don’t need strangers telling us what works of music and prose and visual storytelling are good. But as an adult with shit to do who can feel his life slipping away, it sure is helpful when strangers do that.

And, as for people who say things like “How could you list ‘Blonde’ as the fifth-best album EVER?” or “Am I really supposed to believe that a French film no ordinary person has ever heard of is the number-one movie of all time?” or “Hold on, you used to think Pavement had the best song from the ‘90s and now you think it’s Mariah Fucking Carey?” … you all realize you’re being trolled, right?

Every debate about the validity of lists affirms the validity of lists. They are win-win-win. If it contains a lot of items you agree with, then your personal tastes are affirmed. Congrats! If it contains very few items you agree with, and thus you feel attacked or marginalized, what a good way to find some new stuff to read/see/hear in the ever-dwindling hours of your time as a conscious being! And if you’re a media outlet producing one of these engagement-optimized lists, then good job, you’ve managed to avoid the tar pit for another quarter.

Recently, the New York Times got a bunch of writers and critics to vote on the best books — novels, nonfiction, story collections, poetry, anthologies — published in the 21st Century. It was presented for maximum discourse/controversy, with a handy feature that lets readers check off the titles they’ve read or want to read, then collects them into a shareable graphic. It is not the first attempt to create a 21st Century canon, but it seems to have attracted the most attention and ire, much of it predictable, some of it justified. (Four Ferrante books but zero by Murakami or Knausgaard?)

Generally, though? Pretty good list! Judging by the version compiled from reader submissions, it seems as if the NYT has done a pretty good job mirroring and reinforcing the tastes of its upper-middlebrow readership.

I’ve read 16 of them, and have *attempted* maybe another half-dozen, and sure, there are some embarrassing omissions on my end. But also maybe on theirs, too. So here, since absolutely nobody asked, are an additional 50 books that I, a random person, think should have been on their list.

My list is alphabetical by title and not ordered by favoritism, reputation or any other subjective quality. While the NYT list does allow multiple books by the same writer, I am not including repeats, nor am I listing entries by authors who already do appear on the NYT list, but rest assured, I like Franzen and Diaz and Saunders as much as the next guy with a bachelor’s degree. With all that disclaimed, here are my additions.

1. “1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina” — Chris Rose (2005)
   This collection of on-the-ground columns from a Times-Pic staffer offers what might be the definitive account of life in NOLA in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — a city on the brink of ruin, a nation indicted for its indifference and a tenacious staff delivering the heroic last hurrah for local American metro newspaper journalism. 

2. “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus” — Charles C. Mann (2005)
   Mann rewrites centuries of assumptions about the Western Hemisphere prior to European “discovery” and concludes with a wild theory about the Amazon rainforest as a vast agricultural project teeming with hidden cities and cultures all but lost to history.

3. “The 9/11 Commission Report” — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks (2004)
   Needlessly literary; turns out burning jet fuel does melt steel.

4. “America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction” — Staff of ‘The Daily Show With Jon Stewart’ (2004)
   You all remember SATIRE, don’t you?

5. “American Gods” — Neil Gaiman (2001)
   An imaginatively bonkers crack at new mythology whose chaos and abundance befits the end of the American century. 

6. “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” — Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin (2005)
   The Christopher Nolan biopic’s source material is a far deeper plunge into the moral impossibilities of nuclear deterrence and the devil’s bargain the whole planet has had signed for us.

7. “Annihilation” — Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
   A compact and upsetting work of ecological “weird fiction” that keeps the reader both spellbound and disoriented until the final word.

8. “The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine” — Michael Lewis (2010)
   These fucking people, not a single one of whom are in jail.

9. “Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life” — Steve Martin (2007)
   Essential reading for those who aspire to mastery in any field, wild/crazy or otherwise.

10. “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” — Robert D. Putnam (2000)
    It’s astounding that this book, still the most comprehensive and urgent popular study of contemporary loneliness, was published before social media, dating apps, Amazon Prime, Zoom meetings, etc., appeared to further erode our souls.

11. “Bullshit Jobs: A Theory” — David Graeber (2018)
    Dares to say out loud what a growing number of Americans realize, which is that much of the work we do to survive is not fundamentally meaningful, a timely argument with heretofore unexamined byproducts.

12. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” — Thomas Piketty (2014)
    The central argument takes all of one sentence — accrued wealth grows faster than income and thus perpetuates inequality — but the sexy French economist’s many hundreds of pages of data-based analysis are nonetheless gripping and sobering.

13. “Children of Time” — Adrian Tchaikovsky (2015)
    Come for the disturbing far-future sci-fi, stay for the intricate development of a new arachnid group consciousness.

14. “Chronicles, Vol. 1” — Bob Dylan (2004)
    Discursively focused on the creation of marginal albums and full of more obfuscation than insight, it’s as Dylanesque as a Dylan memoir could possibly have been, which is to say 100 percent. Never releasing a Volume 2 would be gangsta.

15. “Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science that Will Transform Your Sex Life” — Emily Nagoski (2015)
    Just read it, dudes.

16. “Cosmopolis” — Don DeLillo (2003)
    Almost universally panned on its release, DeLillo’s proper follow-up to “Underworld” is slight compared to his ‘80s/’90s output (how could it not be?). But “Cosmopolis” is fully on-brand in that the subsequent decades have revealed its prescience about the people and forces behind social upheavals, in this case the finance dickheads who later in the decade tore the economy to shreds. A deep appreciation of 21st Century DeLillo probably won’t happen till he dies, but this will be the first work that’s historically reclaimed. 

17. “Decoded” — Jay-Z (2011)
    Jay’s memoir not only welcomes hip-hop into its dad-rock phase but also anticipates pop music’s Genius era, where every syllable uttered by a major artist must be annotated and parsed for Easter eggs and exclusionary signifiers. 

18. “Detroit: An American Autopsy” — Charlie LeDuff (2013)
    Everyone who’s lived in or around Detroit has a LeDuff story and mine’s not unusual: I once saw him at a bar nearly come to blows with some guy while arguing about the legacy of Jimmy Carter. Why not, I guess. Plenty of good Detroit books have appeared in the last decade since the bankruptcy/receivership, but the gonzo take on Detroit-as-American-microcosm by the endearing, combative drunk is the most essential.

19. “The Devil in the White City” — Erik Larson (2003)
    This high point in Larson’s nonfiction bibliography explores the incalculable evil available to a cunning monster who preys on the vulnerable, which in the underbelly of an expanding and rapidly industrializing city at America’s crossroads, was damn near everybody. 

20. “The Doppelganger” — Naomi Klein (2023)
    Prompted by an odd personal coincidence — people constantly confusing her with the right-wing pundit Naomi Wolf — the pathbreaking journalist unpacks the uncanny intersections of identity and the fragmentation of truth in a digitally mediated world.

21. “Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” — Eric Schlosser (2001)
    Capitalism won in the end, but for a minute there, it looked like our culture was prepared to rethink its relationship with the mass-produced foodlike garbage that is slowly poisoning it. Schlosser’s vivid reporting also presents the fast-food industry as the prism through which to view class inequality, interstate commerce, environmental degradation, immigration and countless other marquee issues.

22. “Fleishman Is In Trouble” — Taffy Brodesser-Ackner (2019)
    A Franzen-esque sad-aging-hipster tapestry rendered unforgettable by the author’s harrowing depiction of a birth trauma and the postpartum hell that followed.

23. “Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything” —  Steven Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner (2005)
    It’s the rare work of popular scholarship whose name becomes synonymous with an entire brand of thought. The “hidden side of everything” part has long been co-opted for “optimization” and whatnot but it’s hard now to recall how blazingly original the concept felt at the time.

24. “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists” — Neil Strauss (2005)
    OK, hear me out. This is such a socially pernicious book that its author wrote a whole different book basically apologizing for it. Taken at face value, a lot of its content is gross. But by embedding with a group of lonely men eager to scheme their way into sex and (less often) real relationships, Strauss was early to identify and empathetically engage with a subculture on the cusp of becoming malignantly, vengefully powerful, before it took on any of its many subsequent iterations: Gamergaters, incels, 4chan trolls, Bernie bros, Jordan Peterson groupies and mens’ rights activists. You couldn’t publish this today, especially not designed to resemble the Bible, but its value as a work of contemporary sociology is uncontestable.  

25. “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” — Dave Eggers (2000)
    Forced to raise his younger brother after both of their parents died, Eggers reinvented the memoir right on time for a renaissance in millennial meta-narrative self-awareness, but never lets its cleverness subsume its heart.

26. “The Historian” — Elizabeth Kostovoa (2005)
    “The DaVinci Code,” only written by a real prose stylist and, instead of Jesus, about the historical Dracula? Hell yes, sister. 

27. “House of Leaves” — Mark Z. Danielewski (2000)
    An ambitious, unsettling, heavily postmodern novel that examines a common dreamlike sensation: the idea that a house could be bigger inside than out. Primal childhood fears, along with the imaginary undiscovered rooms in your home and the monsters that may or may not dwell there: unlocked.

28. “How Music Works” — David Byrne (2012)
    At least once a year, I try to reread the opening chapter to the Talking Heads leader’s half-memoir/half-manifesto, which argues that music is created to fill pre-existing spaces for pre-existing audiences, that the form and the context create the art, not the other way around. It’s a simple idea that sounds radical — or is it a radical idea that sounds simple?

29. “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell” — Susanna Clarke (2004)
    Calling it “Harry Potter for adults” was insultingly reductive but probably moved a ton of units. An engrossing and deeply rewarding work of speculative, Dickensian world-building where what happens on the margins hints at realms even larger and stranger than what she’s conjured in the foreground.

30. “Kafka on the shore” — Haruki Murakami (2002)
    It makes sense that the NYT list did not include major authors whose totemic work appeared in the ‘90s (DeLillo, DFW). “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” might be my favorite of the big phallic novels of that decade, but Murakami was just getting warmed up, and “Kafka” finds him at his surreal, dazzling, discomforting best.

31. “Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly” — Anthony Bourdain (2000)
    Funny, muscular and still shocking, Bourdain’s debut memoir basically birthed the modern genre of food writing and popularized the outlaw-pirate chef stereotype he’d spent the rest of his unfortunately brief public life trying to escape. 

32. “Legacy of Ashes” — Tim Weiner (2006)
    A damning history of the CIA from its postwar origins through the Iraq/Afghanistan blunders. Who needs conspiracies when you’ve got staggering incompetence?

33. “Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste” — Carl Wilson (2007)
    Right as the rockism/poptimism divide spilled out of online forums into general discourse, a music critic delivers what still might as well be the final word as he unpacks his snobbish (and now unfashionable) resistance to Celine Dion.

34. “Life Itself: A Memoir” — Roger Ebert (2011)
    Full-stop, Ebert might be my favorite writer. Even a review of some negligible film can paralyze me with thunderbolts of insight and empathy. This is a whole book of that, written from the death bed of a man who refused to be silenced by the literal inability to speak.

35. “Lord of Misrule” — Jaimy Gordon (2010)
    When I was in college I once interviewed Gordon, and she said something I haven’t forgotten in the 20-plus years since. Asked for advice for aspiring writers, she told me: “Spend your 20s unwisely.” At the time I had no idea the person I was talking to was a figure of significant underground literary renown, but when her name surfaced years later — after her surprise National Book Award triumph for her fourth novel — it all connected. Her “unwise” 20s apparently included enough time at a destitute racetrack to inspire this beautiful, beguiling, unforgettable book. Mine, in various offices, were unwisely spent but thus far have failed to yield comparable fruit.

36. “Meet Me In the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001–2011” — Lizzy Goodman (2019)
    An un-put-down-able oral history of what might be the last great American music scene — early-’00s NYC — that evokes a quickly bygone era in which geography mattered, music still seemed like a conceivable career choice and the archetype of the debauched rock star was still somewhat endearing.

37. “The Ministry for the Future” — Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
    The century’s best cli-fi novel starts with one of the most upsetting setpieces I’ve ever read, as a heat wave in India slowly kills an entire city, with a tangibility that I wish seemed preposterous. 

38. “Morningstar” — Karl Ove Knausgaard (2020)
    The “autofiction” of his much-adored “My Struggle” cycle as applied to an ominous natural (or is that supernatural?) celestial mystery? Yes, thank you. 

39. “The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” — Michael Pollan (2006)
    A landmark both in consumer-advocacy journalism but also of transferring guilt for normal purchasing decisions from the top of the marketplace pyramid onto the buyers themselves. Profoundly influential nonetheless.

40. “On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” — Stephen King (2000)
    Crackling with insight and encouragement for the demoralized. Thankfully written years after his only practical advice would have been: “Do cocaine.”

41. “Open” — Andre Agassi (2009)
    Easily clears the low bar for athlete memoirs (ghostwritten and otherwise) and portrays the tradeoff elite performers make in exchange for greatness as grimly Faustian. Achieves an uncommon depth while also delivering the tea: his hairpiece, his crack use, his needless decision to re-start shit with Pete Sampras long after the fact. Aced it.

42. “The Pale King” — David Foster Wallace (2011)
    DFW’s unfinished “Infinite Jest” follow-up will always remain one of the great what-ifs in contemporary lit, but there is already enough meat within this gathering of scraps to justify its inclusion. One might argue that its diffuse, unrounded, collage-like character makes it a more powerful meditation on the plague of late-capitalist mind fragmentation than the “finished” product could have hoped to be. Also, its opening two paragraphs utterly crush me. “Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

43. “The Paradox of Choice” — Barry Schwartz (2004)
    Finally puts a name to the uniquely modern sadness that is the byproduct of rampant consumerism.

44. “Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” — Radley Balko (2013)
    A chilling and timely (shortly pre-Ferguson) account of how everything turned into Robocop thanks to a drug war that was already catastrophic for a million other reasons. Yeah, why not give them all riot gear and humvees? 

45. “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” — Jon Ronson (2015)
    A handful of case studies — none more gut-wrenching than the tragic Justine Sacco story — explains how basically all of our lives are moments away from being ruined by forces outside our control. Great job, everybody.

46. “The Three-Body Problem” — Liu Cixin (2014 translation)
    The first novel in the Chinese sci-fi author’s sprawling “The Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy is a table-setter for a much grander and more cosmically upsetting narrative. (It later posits a nightmarish solution to the Fermi Paradox.) But it functions well as a stand-alone science mystery in which the payoff actually justifies the misdirection and measured pacing. The Judgment Day attack is an inventively demented action set-piece to which the Netflix adaptation actually did justice.

47. “Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality” — Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá (2010)
    You’ll never think of bonobo penises the same way again.

48. “The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From the Forgotten America” — Sarah Kendzior (2018)
    “We are living in the tunnel at the end of the light,” explains Kendzior, a prolific St. Louis-based journalist whose collected Guardian essays elucidate a Midwest hollowed out by de-industrialization and race-to-the-bottom capitalism in the years preceding Trump with sharpness and experience untouched by the countless parachute journalists trying to make sense of the 2016 election.

49. “What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” — Thomas Frank (2004)
    What indeed. In the 20 years since this essential poly-sci text, the right’s grip on the heartland has only tightened, intensifying the urgency of that rhetorical query.

50. “Who Owns the Future?” — Jaron Lanier (2013)
    The founder of virtual reality (turned post-digital shaman/pan-flautist) makes a powerful spiritual case against the dehumanization and exploitation that are the foundations of the digital economy. Its title might have been more precise without the question mark, since the answer is pretty clear.