I really enjoyed listening to Trevor and Paul discuss their “top 10 books of the 21st century so far” on their (always enjoyable!) podcast, and so I thought I’d have a go at making my own list. I agree with them that the fun of this kind of exercise is in the conversations it prompts, with other readers, but also with ourselves. There is something clarifying about the process: it can’t possibly lead to a definitive list of the “best” books by some universally reliable standard (their two lists certainly illustrate this, as there is little overlap between them!) but it is one way to discover things about yourself as a reader, first by forcing yourself to make tough choices and then by confronting you with other people’s choices.
I certainly had a vigorous conversation (if only in my own head) with Trevor and Paul about their choices, some of which I have found unreadable (ahem, Ducks, Newburyport – but also Austerlitz, as unlike Trevor I don’t usually like “wandering” books), some of which I also thought hard about in making my own list (The Road), and some of which I am more interested in reading than before, because they spoke so eloquently about them (Flights, 2666). They both read so widely: I have been seeking out more translated books already but one thing I definitely said to myself as I looked over my own longlist was that I needed to do even more of that. 
This fun list-making project also had its sobering side: how many of us thinking about “the best books of the 21st century” will actually know much about the books that come out in the second half of the century, after all – or even the second quarter of it? We certainly won’t be around to see what the readers of the 22nd century think of our choices, fascinating as it would be to see which of them turn out to have any staying power. Perhaps our lists will look as comically misguided as the lists of bestseller lists from the 19th century, which are full of now-forgotten names. Maybe our idiosyncratic but deeply felt preferences will be starting points for the recovery projects of the future, the next generation of Virago and Persephone and NYRB Classics and Recovered Books!
So, without further ado, here’s my own list, my personal favorites of the 21st century so far. Compiling it was not a straightforward process: many of my “best of the year” titles, for example, were written well before the 21st century, so I couldn’t just pluck them for this purpose. I also didn’t start blogging until 2007, so it’s possible I have overlooked a book I read and loved but just didn’t think of while doing this, because I don’t have a record of it. Unlike Paul and Trevor, I have not ranked my titles: they are in chronological order. I know which one I would put at the top if I absolutely had to – but it’s my blog and my list so you can’t make me. 😁 I have written about almost every one of these books here or elsewhere, so I have included the links for you to follow if you want to know more about them. (How have I never written about Fingersmith?!)
Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (2001)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001)
Carol Shields, Unless (2002)
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith (2002)
Colm Tóibín, The Master (2004)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost (2006)
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall Trilogy (2009-2020)
Molly Peacock, The Paper Garden (2010)
George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017)
Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2019)
So, what do you think? Are any of these on your ‘best of the 21st C so far’ list? Are you aghast or just puzzled at any of them? Are any of them ones you’ve been curious about and now feel – as I do about Flights – that maybe it’s time to give them a try?
Novel Readings 
I’m so glad to see that you listed “Unless.” I loved Carol Shields’s novels—my first was “The Republic of Love,” followed by the strange and wonderful “Swann,” and then “The Stone Diaries.” “Unless” has an ending that devastates, and knowing that Ms. Shields struggled to finish it before she passed makes it even more bittersweet. You make me want to revisit it.
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It’s a novel that really grew on me over the years. I know many people consider The Stone Diaries her best but honestly I don’t like that one nearly as much!
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This is why I stick with the mid to late 20th century. Most that I have tried on your list amount to dreck in my opinion. But, that’s what opinions are all about ,ain’t they? Good luck with page turning. Daniel
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It’s definitely true that reactions vary and that keeps it interesting! But I wouldn’t want to confine my own reading to any particular half century: my favorites overall come from a lot of different periods.
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An interesting list, Rohan. I have read-and enjoyed-Atonement and The Master, but none of the others. I do not read much 21st (or even late 20th) century fiction…and I admit that I nearly always have some history going, though usually not 21st century, which is ‘current events’ rather than history!
Patricia
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I don’t generally read a lot of non-fiction, but I have read some great examples of it in recent years, including Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, which was definitely a contender for this list. But straight-up history is (maybe oddly, for a one-time history major!) not usually in my TBR; ditto biography – though Trevor and Paul’s discussion of Red Comet really makes me curious to try it.
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Hmm… The best ten books of the twenty-first century so far just happen to have all been written in English? Not sure I’d agree…
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Of course not, and that’s not what I said. I was pretty clear that these were my personal favorites, not the “best”! None of the books in translation that I’ve read made this top 10, but I also noted that this result (and Trevor and Paul’s lists) reinforced my sense that I needed to read more.
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A few suggestions taken from my books of the year page:
Dublinesque (Enrique Vila-Matas)
The Boy Trilogy (Jón Kalman Stefánsson)
– Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels, The Heart of Man
A True Novel (Minae Mizumura)
Seiobo There Below (László Krasznahorkai)
Zone (Mathias Énard)
Your Face Tomorrow Trilogy (Javier Marías)
The Unseen (Roy Jacobsen) + three sequels!
Flights (Olga Tokarczuk)
The Memory Police (Yōko Ogawa)
Septology (Jon Fosse)
Do any of these appeal? 😉
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Thanks for the suggestions! I mention Flights in the post. I read The Unseen and didn’t like it enough to read the rest. I looked at Septology in the bookstore and could tell it wasn’t for me.
I loved Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; other translated books I’ve read and really liked lately include The Missing Word and Elena Knows. It’s not that I don’t read any. And I keep an eye on the authors / titles that seem to get a lot of good buzz online.
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I have not read enough from this century to presume to put a list together, but the two we overlap on would be good candidates for my top 10 or 20. The Molly Peacock book is unique. I am not sure I would have heard of it if not for you. And Atonement is exactly the kind of novel meant for this exercise, superbly crafted, interesting at the level of character, detail, sentence, and structure. It’s great.
One reason, though, that I doubt my own list is that for several years now I have been more interested in writers who are not writing that kind of novel but instead working on conceptual ideas that do not necessarily result in “great novels”. I mean César Aira in Spanish, Yoko Tawada in Japanese and German, and Percival Everett in English (although ironically, since he has hit the moment just right, one of his not-great novels made that NYT list). I think these writers are highly interesting, but they are doing something different. Their books are often kinda goofy, really, although there is artistic purpose behind the goofiness.
I just started a novel that made the NYT list, Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. So far, so good. There seems to be a lot of exciting writing in American Spanish right now, as you saw with Elena Knows, most of it by women, often responding to Bolaño in some way.
I put a hold on the upcoming Alan Hollinghurst novel, so I still have some taste for the (potentially) great novel. The Line of Beauty is up there with Atonement on my semi-list.
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You are right about Atonement, of course – and yet knowing it is written precisely to satisfy readers like me doesn’t make me admire it any less. The Line of Beauty did not work well for me, though it has been so long since I read it that I don’t know why.
I tend to be put off by novels where I am more aware of the concept than caught up in the execution of it, although like all generalizations this one is inadequate. After all, what is Bleak House if not a dramatized concept?
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I love the Cromwell trilogy. And I had Unless in mi Kindle for years!! I have to put some nonfiction. My list would go:
The Cromwell trilogy by Mantel
Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary Dearborn
The Force by Don Winslow
A Reader’s Manifesto by B. R. Myers
Wellness by Nathan Hill
From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter by Seamus McGraw
The Ruins by Scott Smith
Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine
What do you think?
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Chiming in late to give the list I quickly threw together for the interactive poll the NYTimes did to accompany their feature on the 21st century best-of (which I assume is what prompted the podcast episode). I’ve got some overlap with their picks and with yours. Agreed that the fun of this is the exercise and also the conversation, as opposed to any sort of definitiveness (e.g. I made this list a month ago and looking at it now I’m not at all convinced!) Also fun to be reminded of the way our tastes overlap and don’t with others (e.g. Fingersmith from your list could easily have made mine, but Lincoln In The Bardo just didn’t work for me at all).
Temporary – Hilary Leichter
Ghost Wall – Sarah Moss
Ka – John Crowley
My Real Children – Jo Walton
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
2666 – Roberto Bolaño
A Man Lies Dreaming – Lavie Tidhar
Remainder – Tom McCarthy
Austerlitz – W.G. Sebald
The Last Samurai – Helen DeWitt
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