Move over New York Times. These are the 44 Best Books of the 21st Century.
A completely objective list based on only the finest criteria
Click here to skip to a list of just titles or click here for a long list with commentary on each entry. This whole post doesn’t even come close to fitting in one email—it’s better in a browser or in the Substack app.
Make your own canon.
Last week, multiple people sent me the New York Times list of the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.
Frankly, I love shit like this. I know that gatekeeping and credentialing taste are both seen as passe but I have always loved this kind of thing: best-of lists, bucket lists, halls of fame, etc. While lists like these often get it wrong, they are at least helpful, giving data points to compare something to. Somebody might just say, “read what you like! Ignore what ‘tastemakers’ say is good.” To that person, I say, 11,000 books are published a day–not to mention hundred-plus million books that already exist. It’s not that simple. Lists like these are both discovery engines and tiebreakers.
Beyond that, every list is not just a collection of cool stuff but a value statement. Art is how we make sense of the world, and every time someone puts together a canon like this, they are making explicit and implicit statements about how the world is and should be.
I feel so strongly about the value of best-of lists that I frequently urge people to make their own. “Make your own canon!” Curation and creation aren't as distinct as people think. Simply asking yourself, "What do I think is the best and why?" – even if you're just going off vibes and don't have any quantifiable justification – is a fantastic way to get to know yourself better. Making your own canon helps you figure out which part of the artistic and intellectual world you want to inhabit and which values you'd like to see more of in the world. As Visakan Veerasamy says, “focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of.”
So I was excited to get those messages from several people after the New York Times list was published because diving into it would be interesting and may even be a good way to learn more about myself. The NYT list had this cool feature where you click a box next to each and it generates a custom graphic displaying how many you’ve read. (Mine is above.)
I had read 10/100. As the son of a bookseller who grew up in a bookstore and plans to take over the family business, I felt a twinge of shame I hadn’t read more, but as Substack luminaries as Ted Gioia, Lincoln Michel, and Erik Hoel have among others have pointed out, the scope of the NYT list is a bit narrow. I began to make a list of all the books on their list I wanted to read (and probably will still in a future post), but I decided instead to follow my own advice and make my own list! I hope that you’ll follow suit and make your own canon (and tag me in it).
Here are the 44 Best Books of the 21st Century.
Is this exhaustive? No. Is the criteria consistent? Also no. But I don’t pretend this is an exhaustive list with consistent criteria. Most best-of lists are about ✨vibes✨ and mine is no different. This is part of my personal canon determined only by my own idiosyncratic tastes.
The list is separated into two tiers. Every book on this list is Really Good, which means it answered yes to the following three questions:
Did I enjoy reading it?
Was I upset when I finished it that there wasn’t more to read?
Has something about the book stuck with me through time?
Every book on the list meets those three criteria. The New York Times built their list by asking a bunch of literary luminaries to submit their top 10 books of the 21st Century, then judging among those. So I also picked 10 books I thought were Truly Exceptional. The was one additional criterion that makes a book truly exceptional was the following question:
As I was making the list, did I have to strongly fight the urge to get up and find the book in my house to read again?
There are two other special designations for which I use asterisks:
*One asterisk means that the book is part of a series and the other members of that series deserve to be on this list but aren’t.
**Two asterisks means I have only listened to the book on audibook. I am a “reading” purist but some of these books are performed so well that the recommendation seems incomplete without mentioning the audiobook.
Within the two tiers, the books are not categorized, just presented in chronological order. Without further ado, here are the books:
10 Truly Exceptional Books
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
*The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (2006)
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
*The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)
The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott (2015)
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (2018)
The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson (2018)
34 Really Good Books
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2000)
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
On Writing by Stephen King (200)
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2001)
The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield (2002)
Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides (2002)
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002)
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (2004)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (2005)
Never Eat Alone (2005) by Keith Ferrazzi
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard (2005)
The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle) by Patrick Rothfuss (2007)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (2010)
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011)
I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (2012)
Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan (2012)
*Red Rising by Pierce Brown (2014)
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (2014)
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016)
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (2016)
*We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor (2016)
Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts by Ryan Holiday (2017)
Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018)
All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything by
(2019)This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar (2019)
Joe vs. Elan School by Joe Nobody (2020)
Wanting by
(2021)Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (2021)
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray (2022)
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life by
(2022)
Commentary on each book
Truly Exceptional Books
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)
From my essay Eight Books That Inspired Me In Under 300 Pages:
My original review on Goodreads was short but got to the point: “I loved this book. It was a really beautiful, intimate meditation on what a life can mean, what trying to always do the right thing can mean, and finding the quiet joy in every day life.”
If you made a bulleted list of what this book is “about,” before you asked me to read it, I almost certainly would have written it off. I’m glad that I bought it and read it because the main character is suffused with so much kindness and homespun wisdom.
(I don’t even like using the term homespun wisdom, because it can often be coded as anti-education or anti-intellectual, but I think it is best when it shows up like it does here through Pastor John Ames, as something you can only gain from deep experience. His deep experience is being a second-generation pastor in rural Iowa.)
If you have ever wondered if it’s too late for you, or if you’re not in the right place, or if you’re prone passing hours contemplating what it all means during mornings in a lawn chair, afternoons on long walks, or evenings around a campfire—then I cannot recommend you this book highly enough.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Also from my essay Eight Books That Inspired Me In Under 300 Pages:
My original review on Goodreads: “Subtle but stunning, heartbreaking, beautiful. I was skeptical after reading the positive reviews, having expected some dramatic tour de force that didn't deliver even three quarters of the way through. At first, I was impatient that there wasn't some big reveal about the sci fi setting and high stakes of this fictitious world, but in the end, Ishiguro masterfully conveys the minutiae of the three main characters' relationships in such a way that the fantastical elements seem almost . . . superfluous by the end. It's a book about hope, death, love, friendship, betrayal, and meaning. It's like Tim O'Brien said, fiction is ‘for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth.’"
I strongly recommend NOT reading up on what Never Let Me Go is about before you read it. Just know that it is a diary format book about a group of friends in an odd living situation. There is an element of science fiction to it, but don’t go looking for it because it’s so subtle that by the time you figure it out, it doesn’t even really matter.
*The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie (2006)
I rarely do this, but I recommend the audiobook of this. The narrator is phenomenal. This book exposed me to “grimdark” fantasy, which is fantasy that is not written like a YA novel. Think Game of Thrones. There’s sex and violence and other types of adult intrigue. This book is excellent and is the start of an amazing trilogy about a ragtag group fighting for some very high stakes.
There are then three standalone books in the universe he creates, followed by a second trilogy which is also great (but as of creating this list I’m only 2.5 books through). Abercrombie’s audiobooks have the distinction of being the only audiobooks that were so good that I didn’t just listen to them while doing other things. I would just get a snack and vibe out to listen to these at night sometimes.
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
There is no fat in this book. It is an atmospheric sci-fi horror book. I haven’t read much of H.P. Lovecraft but I’ve been told if you like him, you’ll love this writing style. Both of the sequels are good although different from this one. There is no resolution per se at the end of the trilogy, so I feel comfortable recommending this as a standalone if you like. It’s about four nameless women on a science expedition. It’s also a great book I recommend to people to break a reading slump because it just sucks you in.
*The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin (2015)
This is the first novel in a three-book series about a world far, far in the future. It is a completely fresh science fiction/fantasy setting, unlike anything I’ve ever read. Give it a little time, as it is written in an odd second-person fashion at first, but it quickly becomes familiar and gets very good. In a show of unprecedented acclaim, all three books in this series won the Hugo Award for Best Novel—a prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy.
The Expectant Father by Armin A. Brott (2015)
As much as I love best-of lists, I think one reason a lot of them retreat the same material and feel bland is because they’re trying to be everything to everyone. I rarely see idiosyncratic, informative how-to books on best-of lists so I wanted to remedy this. I wrote a whole review on this book called “Can you learn parenting from a book?”
But if you don’t want to read that book, this is an excerpt that explains where this book fits into parenting literature, and why I like it. The context is that I had just found out my was pregnant and ordered dozens of books on parenting:
. . . a book can make you a better parent. I am putting my money where my mouth is, and building up my book smarts to make me a better Dad.
When I bought the books, I skimmed them all and found two big surprises. The first surprise was that I found most of the books useless. Almost all of the books for new dads come in one of two flavors. The first type of book is very clinical, and it's essentially, "this is a list of all the things that could go wrong with your wife or your baby at every point in the pregnancy." I found these useful but not super reassuring, and reading them just made me anxious. The canonical example is What to Expect When You're Expecting. It's a useful reference for sure, but not exactly bedtime reading.
The second type of book is aimed specifically at new dads. It essentially says, "listen up idiot--you may have to stop shotgunning beers with your bros for five seconds now that the baby will be here soon." As opposed to the first type of book, which assumes you are a cold, clinical machine just looking for serious errors, this second type of book assumes you are a complete idiot man-child.
The best book I found is the one that doesn't follow either of these formats. It's called The Expectant Father by Armin Brott.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)
This is a book Coates wrote in the form of a letter from a father to his son about what it is like to be black in America. It’s not hyperbole to say Coates’ article in The Atlantic “The Case for Reparations” changed my life. This book is a gorgeous, heartbreaking letter about America, history, race, fatherhood, and so many other things. It is such a foundational book to the way I look at the world, that it is difficult to step back and give it appropriate context for someone unfamiliar, but as a start here’s what I wrote on Goodreads:
A phenomenally beautiful, though provoking book that touches on so much. Everyone should read this book.
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier (2018)
Also from my essay Eight Books That Inspired Me In Under 300 Pages:
A Silicon Valley pioneer, Lanier explains what unites the business models of Facebook, Google, and several other massive Silicon Valley companies, then explains how that business model affects our ability to communicate, build a shared reality, and make independent decisions.
The book is divided into the different effects of these models, and a deep dive on any given one effect could have been a fantastic book all on its own. I frequently refer back to this in writing and even in every day conversation. I’m still shocked that it didn’t take off in a bigger way than it did when it came out.
The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018)
This book is difficult for me to recommend because it is so big, important, and beautiful. It revitalized my love of reading after a period of five or six years of where I was just reading airport pop psychology and business books or the occasional random novel. I hope to reread it soon and distill what I loved about it, but for now, take this blurb of a review I left on Goodreads:
If you like books that are beautiful or thought provoking this is for you. It is a, "novel about trees," that got inside my head and changed the way that I think about a few things, like trees, nature, life, human relationships, big data, and computer programs. Highly recommend if you're looking for something different to read.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson (2018)
Jordan Peterson has always been a polarizing figure, and rather than clarifying himself or leaning away from it, he seems to get a perverse enjoyment from the bloodsport of social media commentary.
But before all of that, he was a kind of weird old professor who I saw on Joe Rogan’s podcast and had lectures online about myth-making and the Bible. I was interested enough to check out his book, and I’m glad I did because I still recommend it to people. I cannot vouch for his day-to-day opinions or stances, but this book is solid, as I explained in my review on Goodreads:
I came into this book really skeptical, but I must say, had I read this 10 years ago it would have done a lot for me, and reading it today still gave me a lot. The advice is generally good, and at first I was very averse to the way Peterson switches between history, psychology, religion, mythology, without noting the switch leading to hundreds of mixed metaphors. As I got into the book, around Rule 6, I realized that this mixing of styles and disciplines is very intentional, and it's a way of imparting gravitas to what is actually very simple, straightforward, good advice. (Obviously, your mileage may vary, but anyone will get *something* out of this, whether that something is enough to justify most people reading the whole book, I'm unsure). I also found his repeated use of his own life anecdotes, inner dialogue, and dreams a little tedious, but then I realized it's in keeping with the theme of the book: confront your own problems now through honesty and hard work.
Overall, I think this is a good book with good advice and I'll probably read it again in a few years to see if I feel differently. What I originally did not like was probably what made the book good: it doesn't say anything the average functioning adult doesn't know, but Peterson says these things in such a way that he effectively pierces through the bubble of everyday lethargy and apathy to make mundane advice meaningful, imbuing all our quotidian responsibilities with a shade of cosmic struggle. This seems a little melodramatic at first, but the more you think about it, the more likely it is that most people aren't beholden to some existential cause that creates meaning for their life, and giving their everyday decisions and actions this kind of importance could do a lot for the average person, and especially the average aimless young man.
Really Good Books
I have a lot to say about some of these books, but for some reviews, I will share short excerpts from others’ reviews or comments.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling (2000)
All of the Harry Potter books belong here. I don’t make the rules: these books got a whole generation of young adults into reading. This was probably my favorite one. If you haven’t read or watched Harry Potter by now it’s probably a more important part of your personality than who you vote for so I’m going to skip the actual review and recommendation and share a story instead.
When this came out, it was a cultural event. My Mom was friends with the store manager at our local grocery store which was part of a chain that was somehow involved in the rollout of this book. Somehow, she convinced him to sell us several boxes of this book at cost so we could do an event at our bookstore.
This was a big deal because we had never before (and never since) sold new books. My Mom just did it because of how much my sister and I loved Harry Potter. We opened the event to the public of course but had people sign up to buy the book if they wanted a copy. We invited all our friends and my Mom hired a magician then made a bunch of vaguely Halloween-themed snacks. I was in seventh grade and it was a blast.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
Do you watch The Bear? Have you noticed chefs are cool now (and have been for a couple of decades)? They have sleeve tattoos and romanticize their hard-partying lifestyle and commitment to excellence. They have big personalities and a commitment to the craft. They are fond of high-quality ingredients but straightforward street food and peasant dishes. I don’t think all of these trends come from Anthony Bourdain, but a lot of them started with or were popularized by him. As ubiquitous as he was, I still believe his impact on American culture at large was larger than most people realize.
I love Bourdain and wrote a whole essay about how much he affected my worldview. While most people are familiar with his TV shows, writing was his first love, and this book is a great place to start.
My recent essay on Bourdain:
On Writing by Stephen King (2000)
This is a great book for a very specific audience. It is half autobiography and half writing advice. This book is great for aspiring and working writers. If nothing else, it did so much for me to read one of the bestselling authors ever explain his own very workman-like process for getting books out.
Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (2001)
This book is about a journalist who tries to make it on a minimum wage salary across multiple states. She gives up everything she has and takes minimum wage jobs and lives in the most affordable places she can find. It has a profound effect on the way I see the world. I read it just a few years after it came out in my AP Government class at the private, all-boys preparatory school I attended.
Twice over the next two years, I would go on to live in low-income Latin American communities as part of an exchange program. I think had I not read this book and had it prime my empathy the way it did, those would have been fundamentally different trips.
Had I not read this book, I still would have been very affected by my time in Honduras and Panama, but it may have just been a very low-resolution idea that, “well they’re poor and we’re not.” By understanding people could be broke and struggle in the USA, those trips to Latin America deepened my understanding of what people face and what they are capable of generally. I saw things as a continuum of possible experiences in our human community.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
When I read The Corrections, it seemed like everyone had read it, but I didn’t actually know anyone who had read it. I had heard Jonathan Franzen described as the last literary rock star and other things like that. I was honestly expecting this to be dry and bad, but as someone who would love to be a literary rock star someday, I felt it was my duty to read it.
While it was a little dry compared to some other books I enjoyed, it was not bad at all. I really loved it. It is kind of Seinfeldian in that even the characters you sympathize with are not sympathetic people. But as I wrote in my review of Ask the Dust by John Fante, sometimes it is people’s flaws that make them relatable. And these people have a lot of flaws.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (2001)
I don’t know what higher praise I can give than this: this is a book for people who love the idea of books. It is a book about books. In the book, one character takes another to “the cemetery of forgotten books.” The cemetery of forgotten books! If you’re a specific type of person, you have already clicked out of this review to buy the book.
The book is set in Barcelona in the 1940s and is about the son of a bookseller, working with his friend Fermin to track down books by a novelist named Julian Carax, who has reputedly written the best books ever but someone is systematically finding and destroying all of them. This book has intrigue, romance, coming of age elements, and the prose is gorgeous. It just barely didn’t make the top 10 cut. (Frankly, if I had read it more recently, it probably would have.)
The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle by Steven Pressfield (2002)
Every creative person should read this book. It is a long series of short meditations on how to do the work of being creative and overcoming your innate resistance to moving forward. I re-read it every few years to up my game and recommend it constantly. You can practically read it in one sitting but you can also come back and open to any page and start reading and it still works.
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
This was the twelfth Pulitzer Prize for fiction winner I’d read and the one that made me realize I wanted to read them all. It reminds me a lot of another book on this list The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in that it is about a protagonist but in order to really understand the protagonist, they give you lore—family lore, country lore, community lore etc. There is some backstory in this book! And mixed in with the backstory and the story are a lot of great one-liners, like:
Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting lineup?
It’s the story of an intersex person, Cal, and their childhood as Calliope. I don’t feel bad telling you this as the first line gives you a lot:
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
I held off reading this for a long time even though I’d seen it recommended but now can’t remember why. For what sounds like a very heady, adult book, much of it almost feels cute. But it keeps you on your toes, like one of the major love stories in the book you’d otherwise be rooting for involves sibling incest.
If nothing else, it’s a singular book, with qualities like others I’ve read but other qualities that set it completely apart. I enjoyed it a lot and if nothing I’ve set here turns you off, I highly recommend it.
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (2002)
I loved this book for a lot of reasons, not least of which was because it made me realize magical realism is my favorite genre. I’m not going to try and summarize the book here as the wild setting and plot are part of what makes it so enjoyable (plus it’s been a really long time since I read this). But I can tell you the language was great and the mood was immaculate. Reading this was my introduction to Murakami and the closest I’ve ever felt a book come to a surrealist painting.
Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford (2004)
For our honeymoon, my wife and I were lucky enought to finagle five weeks off. We flew to Beijing and then traveled to Shanghai, Yangshuo, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Bangkok, and finished up on the beach in Phuket. I burn very easily, sometimes literally getting a sunburn on my drive commuting to work if I’m not careful. Ending our trip with a week on the beach in Phuket was for my wife.
I finished the book I brought in Yangshuo and was lucky to buy this on a whim in the Hanoi airport because it turned out to be fantastic. It made it easy for me to pass the time making myself impossibly small to fit under our rented umbrella on the Phuket beach.
It wasn’t just interesting, it opened my eyes to how many things I thought about Genghis Khan that were incorrect. I was no expert, but for my 8th-grade history project, I did dress as Genghis Khan and did a report on him. However, just like with many other topics, almost everything I knew about Genghis Khan was the fabrication of a marketer or someone who was kind of racist. This is a great book if you have a passing interest in Genghis Khan and you like your history with a little historiography.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins (2005)
I read this in one of my aforementioned summers in Latin America. I’m going to abdicate my journalistic duty and completely skip over talking about whether this autobiography is true or not. In it, Perkins says he was selected by the NSA to be hired by a consulting firm to go into underdeveloped nations and prepare proposals that give the World Bank cover to give them loans at insane, extortionary terms.
The book seems conspiratorial but plausible and is immensely readable. It’s like a spy novel written as an autobiography. I will also say that, when Covid hit, a lot of my friends and family were confused at the slate of different, seemingly unrelated and dissimilar positions people could hold at the same time, like being into shamanistic wisdom but also paranoid about the international banking cartel. But being familiar with John Perkins, I was not surprised.
It’s been about twenty years since I read this, but I would like to again and I recommend it if you have enough geopolitical economic literacy to be able to weigh its assertions accurately and if you want to understand why some people are so skeptical of big international economic coordinating bodies.
Never Eat Alone (2005) by Keith Ferrazzi
I thought about subdividing the books based on which were particularly useful and this one would been at the top of that list. It’s essentially about how to turn networking and community building into a lifestyle rather than a chore that you have to do when you need something. The extra stories and narrative around the tips are OK, but the advice is indispensable. This is a great how-to for anyone who wants to make more connections, build community, or simply be more proactive and generous in their relationships.
The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey by Candice Millard (2005)
This book was about Theodore Roosevelt’s last adventure, a journey by boat through the Amazon jungle. I listened to it on audiobook and found it enjoyable on many different fronts. It was funny and relatable, because even being one of the most famous, popular men in the world, Roosevelt was plagued by incompetent hangers-on and charlatans. It was inspiring because they are trying to do something truly harrowing and dangerous. And it was also thought-provoking, in that every minor character has a story as compelling and interesting as Roosevelt’s himself.
(As a bonus, this was the book where I learned Roosevelt had a high voice. I just always assumed he had a big booming voice, but if you listen to this recording here, you hear that’s not the case.)
The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle) by Patrick Rothfuss (2007)
I had somehow never heard of this book when I first got a copy in 2014. My car had just busted down, so I had to ride a bus for an hour one way to graduate school. My roommate had just finished it and said it was good. One day as I was, quite literally, walking out of the door, I saw it on the couch and asked if I could borrow it on a whim and he said yes.
It took me a few weeks to get my car fixed and over those two hours per day, I read this book and its sequel every day on my commute. For that reason and that reason alone, not only did riding the bus in Houston in August not bother me, but I have very fond memories of it. The plot of this book won’t blow your mind, but it is very strong and the writing is gorgeous.
I recommended this a lot in the years since and was worried that maybe it was just a good escape from the bus, so eight years later I picked it up, on a whim—again, just to see if the writing was as good as I remember. I ended up reading the whole thing in a few days.
Caveat emptor: there are two books in the planned trilogy finished, but Rothfuss subscribes to the George R. R. Martin school of book finishing, meaning many fans are dubious about whether or not the third book will ever come out.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2007)
I really liked this book although it was my second favorite of the two on this list. It is the more famous of Diaz’s books. What’s funny about this book is that even though I don’t remember what it’s about, I very specifically remember certain characters from the book. Like the main character’s mom Beli Cabral. For this review I’m going to cheat and borrow someone else’s words off of Goodreads rather than my own, but they echo my sentiments completely:
“I want to know all about your family, your childhood, your grandparents, their childhood, etc, etc, I want to know where you lived, what food you ate, what games you played or didn't play. I want to know why this is important to you or that is not. Which is why I LOVED this book! Junot Diaz takes 300+ pages to tell a story about a boy that wants to be kissed and the kiss MATTERS because we know his family, we know his friends, we know their superstitions and their pains, and their loses and their survivals and by the time we get to page 339 we know why the kiss is so important.
Oscar goes on the short list of book characters that will stay with me forever.”
This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz (2010)
This was my favorite of Diaz’s two books on the list. It reminded me of Love, Actually the movie or a kind of updated Love in the Time of Cholera, in that somehow, by reading about someone who is a pretty shitty person (serial cheater, womanizer, etc.), you still come around with an appreciation for love and the fact that even the most crooked and malformed among us is on a constant quest for it.
This hasn’t aged well given the allegations against Diaz and his own admitted failure in writing women characters, but I recommend it for the strength of his prose if you can stomach an almost irredeemable protagonist.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011)
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized I like love stories—not romance books or stories that are strictly love stories, but epic, complicated love stories unfolding over some other story. I liked this book for two reasons. First, it was just well-written. It was a great story and added a lot of texture to a Greek myth I was familiar with but hadn’t read anything this fresh about in a while.
Second, it was a gay love story. I had never said, “I’m not ever going to read a gay love story,” but I never planned on it. If I hadn’t read this book, I’m not sure when I ever would have, and I’m glad I did, because it was very compelling and a new angle on a type of story I love a lot. I also liked Miller’s other book Circe (not on this list), but not enough to include here.
I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (2012)
I don’t know what I expected, or even why I bought this book, but it was incredible. Beyond Malala’s inspiring story of being an advocate for women, standing up to the Taliban, and then getting shot, her description of her home in the Swat Valley and life in Pakistan, before the Taliban took over, was really beautiful. I recommend getting the audiobook which she narrates.
Saga, Volume 1 by Brian K. Vaughan (2012)
It took me a long time to come around to the idea of graphic novels, and I still have only dabbled. But one question I ask whenever I try out a new artistic medium for the first time is, “what could be done in this medium that would be harder elsewhere?” And I have to say, after reading Saga, I think that it would be very difficult to render effectively as a novel. This was bizarre, interesting, funny, compelling, and mind-expanding. The illustrations were incredible and the world and story were very fresh, even with its star-crossed lovers motif. I recommend the whole series and hope to read more graphic novels in the future.
*Red Rising by Pierce Brown (2014)
The author of this book lives in Hollywood and you can tell he wrote it with the hopes it would get optioned. I don’t have words to describe this other than it’s a blast. The first book is like a super violent Hunger Games meets Gattaca set in the Roman Senate. They just get better and more space-operatic from there. If this sounds at all interesting, I strongly recommend the Audible version of the book. It is second only to The Blade Itself when it comes to high-octane ear candy.
Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (2014)
I remember sitting down to take notes on this book multiple times because I found it so useful. Brown is a psychological researcher who talks about the many ways people try to avoid shame and discomfort but instead make their lives a lot worse. I found it riveting and incredibly useful. It was also straightforward, but not easy. I enjoyed it and larned a lot, but buyer beware, as I wrote in my Goodreads review:
Don't read this book if you're not ready to have flashbacks to really unpleasant childhood memories.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016)
When I was seventeen I went to live in Panama with a host family for eight weeks in a low-income farming community as part of a volunteering effort. At the end, before we went home, the project directors gathered all of us volunteers in one place and said, “don’t be surprised if people get tired of you talking about this place and don’t really get what you’ve been through. You’ve lived another life in miniature. If it gets too frustrating, reach out to one of your fellow volunteers.”
To be honest, when I first read A Gentleman in moscow, it took me a while to get what was going on. This is the story of the life of a guy who’s trapped in a hotel. On paper, there isn’t a big arc or even little sub arcs. But once I got into it, I didn’t want to leave. I feel like a good book leaves you with a very similar feeling to the one I had when I moved back from Panama. Reading a great book, even one where not a lot happens, feels like living a life in miniature. This was a great book—everyone felt real. Here’s my brief review from Goodreads:
Very charming book with a very good ending. I think that the amount that you care about the minor characters with such minimal description is really a testament to the author. Even the Bishop, as persnickety and unlikable as he is, is a sympathetic character in his own way.
The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier (2016)
Also from my essay Eight Books That Inspired Me In Under 300 Pages:
This might be the best, (and at under 3 hours on Audible) most concise book on how to manage people and give good advice that I have ever read. The secret? Give less advice! It does have structured guidance on how to do less better. I refer back to it often and use it to teach future salespeople, consultants, and entrepreneurs.
*We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor (2016)
Are you a Gen-X or Millennial who likes geek shit and likes audiobooks? Listen, you’ll love this series. The premise is (more or less) that a geek uploads his consciousness into a self-replicating probe and decides to explore the universe. Imagine the IT guy at your work was actually pretty cool and had a knack for writing stories. This is the book he would write. It’s immensely fun as an audiobook and the sequels, while they get a little out there and side-tracked with dumb sideplots, is quite good.
Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts by Ryan Holiday (2017)
Also from my essay Eight Books That Inspired Me In Under 300 Pages:
A digital marketing legend and stoic philosophy popularizer, Holiday wrote a great book about balancing the yearning to make great, lasting work with the need to build an audience and commercialize that work. People who aspire to make great art (writers included) often assume that there’s a tradeoff between doing great art and making sure that art gets bought. Holiday navigates this tradeoff deftly, showing that the things you do to make great art and the things you do to make sure it is eventually bought can be complimentary and reinforce one another. A must-read for any aspiring artist or author.
Atomic Habits by James Clear (2018)
This has been the bestselling book on Earth practically for what, five years? I doubt I can tell you anything you don’t know about it. I have one group of friends who loves literature and is constantly dunking on this book and how terrible it is. However, I will say this—this is The Terminator of non-fiction self-help books. If you want straightforward, useful advice on how to build good habits and break bad ones packaged into easily digestible anecdotes, this is your white whale, the Hope Diamond of airport books. I reread it every couple years because of how useful it is.
All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything by Sasha Chapin (2019)
I loved this book. Sasha and I have exchanged two emails and three DM’s, we are practically best friends by now, but even if that wasn’t the case, there is something so relatable and compelling about this odd book about falling in and out of love with chess. I was skeptical when I could learn anything from this book because it was a memoir from a guy who knew guys I know. But reading it not only proved me wrong, It changed how I think about memoirs. From the review I wrote:
There is so much to take from the book, I couldn’t possibly get it all into one review that wasn’t prohibitively long so I will focus on what I liked and how it changed me. (Also, I am going to talk about the author using his first name instead of what I usually do where I would say “the author” or “Mr. Chapin,” because I DM’d him on Twitter once and he answered, which means we’re basically buds now.)
This was a great memoir because it fundamentally changed how I feel about the nature of art and being an artist. It made real to me not just the value of reading memoirs, but the transformative power of writing them as well. But before I make the case that it was a great memoir, I want to make the case that it was a good memoir, one that was entertaining, insightful, and relatable.
Read my review here:
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar (2019)
This is a stunningly beautiful book I feel more fondly about the more time passes since I read it. There are a few passages I recorded and will often go back to, like:
“I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.”
I don’t like telling people anything about this book when I recommend it except that it’s a sci-fi romance and it’s beautiful. Otherwise, it’s hard to explain without oversimplifying it or giving it away. Here’s the review I wrote for it on Goodreads:
What a wonderful book. I read a few reviews when I started because this book was so different from what I was expecting, and the reviews often said, "not much happens with these characters," which I didn't understand. The prose was gorgeous and the idea is one of the most original I've seen in a while, however in the end those critics were kind of right, and there really wasn't much character development and very little happened. As far as the pure prose and language, this is one of the more beautiful books I've read in a long time.
Joe vs. Elan School by Joe Nobody (2020)
This is only the second graphic novel on the list and the only webcomic. I found it through a Reddit AMA. It’s an incredibly disturbing true story about one student’s life at a high school for troubled teens in May that has since been closed for child abuse. I recommend checking it out at the website its listed, but clear your day because I lost my whole day when I found it and read most of it in one sitting—up until I had to stand up to go somewhere else.
Wanting by Luke Burgis (2021)
In this book, Burgis seeks to make Rene Girard’s theory of Mimetic Desire approachable and understandable, and at that he succeeds. The book is written in the tried-and-true anecdotes plus explanations plus tips format popular of books aiming to condense arcane topics for a lay audience.
However, there is something so earnest about this book. Burgis comes through as the kind of friend or confidante who would take you out for coffee and ask how you’re doing, then when you offer a mealymouthed non-answer, kindly stare at you until your story starts falling out of yourself. Although the book is written to be compartmentalized and used, like something like 48 Laws of Power, the tone seems much more like Man’s Search for Meaning.
By now you may be saying, “man should I bring a book to that book or what?” And yes, even with Burgis’s examples and explanations, Girard is dense, complex stuff, but if you have even a passing interest, I highly recommend this book.
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman (2021)
I loved this book so much but it has given me so many problems since finishing it. It is beautifully written, dense, and powerful, but it is hard to explain what it’s about without oversimplifying and making it sound straightforward.
The basic idea is that: (1) time management is a racket, (2) we’re all going to die, (3) so try to do less, more important stuff. However, Burkeman lays out his case like a true pro. Every paragraph has a gem. And on the way to making his point, Burkeman changed how I feel about a lot of different things.
If you have ever felt overwhelmed or wondered where all the time goes, or tried and failed at time blocking, then this book is definitely for you.
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party by Nick Gray (2022)
At some point in 2022, I asked a question on Twitter and the answer I got was this book. I don’t know what the question was. This book is a very straightforward guide on how to throw a specific type of party and why.
However, I love this book and recommend it often because the underlying ethos is basically like, “you want to make friends? OK. Stop being so self-conscious and do things that work. It feels awkward? Well, everyone else feels awkward, too. Why don’t you just eat the awkward sandwich so everyone else can have a good time and you can get what you want.”
I had four crazy events (weather, illness, weather, surgery) prevent me from throwing the parties I set up using this book, but as of writing this list, I have a plan to throw another one soon.
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life by Paul Millerd (2022)
I often say that you don’t so much read a good book as you “move to it.” Meaning, finishing a great book is like leaving a place you have lived. There is a lot that you like and remember and can recall. But much of how a great book changes you is in ways you don’t even realize, like how you think and see the world. I wrote a really long review of this book I will link with an excerpt below. But in short, this is a great book about a completely different way of looking at work and careers.
On the other hand, once it does come together, it's a revelation: so obvious that you wonder how you looked at it differently before. In this way, the book is an anti-hack.
Something that made me laugh is that, well into writing this essay about the book, I still thought The Pathless Path was a stupid title. But again, Millerd has lead me on a journey, where through writing about the book, I get it. The Pathless Path is about going somewhere, but not following anything. This is how the book is an “anti-hack” book.
This concludes the 44 Best Books of the 21st Century.
If this takes off, I will write a companion piece about books written in the 21st Century I really want to read.
In the meantime, what are your favorite books of the 21st Century? What’s your canon?
Inspiring list! I too totted up a meagre 3 titles read from the NYT list. I like the way you included personal development titles on your list, as this genre has made as much if not more of an impact on me than literary fiction. You may inspire me to write my own list!
This is a list I’m not only going to share, but one I’m going to keep coming back to. I found some of my favorites that led me know I’d love some of the titles I’ve yet to read. The funny thing about this list is that it’s actually a profile. I’m going to share this w people who are struggling to put a dating profile together. This is hands down the best way to show someone who you are — without a single selfie!!!