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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   38610 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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The NYT has dropped a list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century. According to them.

I find the list to be vapid beyond words. The inclusion of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow alone, even in the upper 70s, disqualifies it from being anything except for a circlejerk of the rag. Trash like The Fifth Season cements it.

You can walk through the list and see the same themes being hammered over, and over, and over, and over. It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

A couple years ago I collected what I think are the best hundred songs of all time. A friend's python visualization of my Spotify playlist illuminated that, despite all the deep cuts, I didn't have a single entry from before I was born. My musical blind spots are enormous, and I think most old music just fucking sucks. At least I can admit it's because I'm susceptible to the level of manufacturing that modern music goes through, along with a huge obsession with sick beats. My list is "wrong" for most people.

I can't imagine having this level of navel-gazing weakness in self-reflection. Did nobody look at this list and realize how stupid the title is? Did anyone over 25 contribute to it?

In any case as the number got higher there were at least some decent books listed that you could read without hating yourself. They're all still liberal, by default, but at least have significant redeeming qualities.

  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  • The Goldfinch
  • A visit from the Goon Squad
  • The Overstory

Kavalier & Clay portrayed the German American Bund guy as mentally ill and not some sinister fascist. And the Nazi soldier Kavalier briefly encounters in the arctic is just some soldier, not a monster.

Nazi Germany was really really awful, but the book is able to show that without... making it too cartoony. Which I think is better. Part of the reason why is that K & C isn't a good vs evil story, so it had to be done this way.

It's been so long since I read it I've forgotten many details, but not that I loved it for some of the same reasons you stated here.

A couple years ago I collected what I think are the best hundred songs of all time. A friend's python visualization of my Spotify playlist illuminated that, despite all the deep cuts, I didn't have a single entry from before I was born. My musical blind spots are enormous, and I think most old music just fucking sucks. At least I can admit it's because I'm susceptible to the level of manufacturing that modern music goes through, along with a huge obsession with sick beats. My list is "wrong" for most people.

I was at a bar over the weekend and a woman who was probably in her early 40s was complaining about the music her husband was playing on the jukebox — classic country like Waylon Jennings and Ronnie Milsap. She said it was "old people's music". I sided with the husband and told her that she's not so much complaining about the music itself as she is the cultural connotation. For example when I listen to music I focus on the melody, the harmony, the rhythm, the arrangement, the competence of the performers, the emotional impact, etc. Year of release doesn't really factor into it much. I might dock a song a few points from a critical perspective if it's merely a lazy retread of what's already been done, but that's ultimately a minor consideration. As I'm in the process of very occasionally updating my own list for this site, I'd be curious to see yours.

Here's a dump of tracks, also following the rule of limiting the number of songs per artist to 1. Otherwise a ton of artists would show up multiple times.

Side note: Excellent exercise to do with friends, and it's about the same length as a monstrous road trip. Highly recommend.

Your list is sorely, sorely lacking in classic rock. The closest you have to it on your list in some 1990-2010 era alternative rock, but that's basically a whole other world of music. And you're just missing stuff from before the 90's in general. And all the amazing music before the modern era.

A few gems for you to try:

Princes of the Universe - Queen The Spirit of Radio - Rush War Pigs - Black Sabbath Layla (both the electric and acoustic versions) - Eric Clapton Blackbird - The Beatles Rainbow in the Dark - Dio Pressure - Billy Joel The Lark Ascending - Ralph Vaughn Williams Jupiter - Gustav Holst

So, you have some of my absolute favorite bands on here (especially happy to see The Band CAMINO get a shout-out) but I find it very strange that you enjoy those bands but can’t find anything to like about the bands and genres that directly influenced them. Like, a number of these bands are clearly very inspired by 80’s New Wave and arena rock, as well as 70’s disco and power pop. Like, if you’re into slick production, multilayered instrumentation, and bubblegum melodies, I think it’s very odd not to have any interest in, say, Def Leppard, ABBA, Prince, and Cheap Trick. Even if you think that music has moved in a direction of pure improvement, taking the raw clay of Boomer Music and fashioning into the Actually Good Music of today, surely you can see that there’s at least some music from 1990 and earlier which still holds up?

If you want me to give you a list of some older music that has all of the same important qualities as the music you’ve listed here, I’d be happy to provide it.

(Also, I want to shill my favorite band Marianas Trench here, as it seems you’d love their music based on the genres you’re into.)

I've heard from multiple people secondhand that one cool thing about Camino is the members are also mostly normal and good dudes. I'm going to get to see them on this tour which I'm psyched for.

I wouldn't say that I can't find anything to like about old music at all. I enjoy a good chunk of it, it just doesn't get pushed into making the cut here. If I tried to pinpoint why, a few things come to mind:

  • I am constantly on a musical treadmill. I save playlists of what I'm listening to for literally that season of my life, and then hear more of what's produced and add to that and so on. It's almost a blessing that I'm single-driven as opposed to album-driven nowadays since some 320kbps MP3s of what I listen to would take up a lot of disk space.
  • Old music is played a lot. I love Hotel California, but after hearing it once a night every night while closing at a restaurant, I don't want to hear it again.
  • My peers as a kid generally had more limited musical tastes and I was the one making mixtapes. This was rectified by college but then I was fairly set in my ways.
  • Some of my favorite genres are younger. It's a bit of a hot take, but hip-hop and rap have undergone a lot of "pure improvement" since their inception.

Bottom line though: I'd love to have a sample playlist of your suggestions. I would prefer to rectify this blind spot rather than leave it hanging.

How big a playlist do you want? As I told the last person here for whom I made a playlist, my autistic fixation will quickly overtake me if I’m not given a limit.

The bigger it is the longer I'll take to report back. 25 or 50 is ideal IMO.

Alright, I tried not to overthink it. Whittling down a list of 100 down to 50 was an interesting challenge, and there’s a lot more I’d like to include, but I think this is a good representation. It’s weighted toward the 80’s, with a good smattering of 70’s and a bit from the 60’s. I started with a few mega-hits but tried to stay away from songs that I’m sure you’ve already heard a million times, although I’m sure there’s a few on here you’re already very familiar with. Many of these are, of course, very well-known bands, and in those cases I tried to use somewhat lesser-known songs rather than the ones everyone already hears all the time. A few - for example, ABBA and Def Leppard, two of my all-time favorite bands - were very difficult because I would have loved to include a number of their songs, but decided to stick with just one each.

”Kiss” - Prince

“And She Was” - Talking Heads

“Fat Bottomed Girls” - Queen

“Peace Of Mind” - Boston

“What You Need” - INXS

“Don’t Bring Me Down” - Electric Light Orchestra

“Open Your Heart” - Madonna

“Youth Gone Wild” - Skid Row

“Soul Man” - The Blues Brothers

“Saturday Night’s (Alright For Fighting)” - Elton John

“Vacation” - The Go-Go’s

“Surrender” - Cheap Trick

“Roam” - The B-52’s

“Jungle Love” - Steve Miller Band

“This Charming Man” - The Smiths

“Dreams” - The Cranberries

“Wasted Years” - Iron Maiden

“Rio” - Duran Duran

“Waterloo” - ABBA

“Friday I’m In Love” - The Cure

“Do You Believe In Love” - Huey Lewis & The News

“Bad Reputation” - Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

“Oliver’s Army” - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

“War Pigs” - Black Sabbath

“Higher Love - Single Version” - Steve Winwood

“Emotions” - Mariah Carey

“Fox On The Run” - Sweet

“Freeze-Frame” - The J. Geils Band

“Land Of 1000 Dances” - Wilson Pickett

“Dance Hall Days” - Wang Chung

“Everybody Wants You” - Billy Squier

“Down On The Corner” - Creedence Clearwater Revival

“Hysteria” - Def Leppard

“Lido Shuffle” - Boz Scaggs

“Would I Lie To You - ET Mix” - Eurythmics

“Kiss Me Deadly” - Lita Ford

“Paradise By The Dashboard Light” - Meat Loaf

“You Can Call Me Al” - Paul Simon

“China Grove” - The Doobie Brothers

“Breaking The Law” - Judas Priest

“Tell It To My Heart” - Taylor Dayne

“We Belong” - Pat Benatar

“Nightrain” - Guns N’ Roses

“I Was Made For Dancin’” - Leif Garrett

“Stand” - R.E.M.

“Take It Easy” - Eagles

“Young Hearts” - Commuter

“Cold As Ice” - Foreigner

“Dreaming” - Blondie

“Don’t Worry Baby” - The Beach Boys

Maybe I’ve underestimated your knowledge of this era, and this list will all be stuff you know well. (Or, conversely, perhaps I’m assuming too much, and should have just gone with a list of 50 mega-hits. Who knows?)

Twenty songs.

Twenty songs? That’s barely a warm-up! We’re trying to bring this man up to speed on four decades of music! We need to let this thing breathe.

You asked for limits, man! Work with them!

More comments

It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

No, it's not. It's "books of the 21st century" i.e. written in or since 2000, and 42/100 are 2014 or later. It's been about 24.5 years since Jan 1 2000, so you'd expect 42.8% to be in or since 2014.

Of course, the assumption that the top 100 books of this century have already been written is a level of pessimism on the NYT's part which makes Eliezer Yudkowsky look like a hopeless optimist by comparison.

I'd expect great art to take a little bit of time to marinate/be discovered, though

You're right about this - after posting I realized this point was silly, even if it leans closer to 2024 than 2000.

Archive link for those of us who don’t care to make a NYT account.

There’s more than one way to define “best.” Given a bunch of conflicting inputs, you would prefer using a logical AND. You’d only consider calling your playlist “the best” for someone who loves modern production and loves sick beats and shares your blind spots.

This NYT list is pretty upfront about choosing to OR their picks. They got unrelated inputs from a laundry list of authors and commentators. The reader is clearly expected to apply their own AND:

▫️I’ve read it
Liked it? Try “Missionaries,” by Phil Klay or “Hystopia,” by David Means.

▫️I want to read it
Read our review. Then reserve it at your local library or buy it from Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble or Bookshop.

So this a list intended to contain a “best” list. You’re using it correctly by filtering out the ones which don’t fit. For somebody—perhaps the sort who buys books off the NYT—that “best” list is different.

I spent most of the dinner I took my wife on Saturday debating this list, so thanks for posting it!

It was quite obviously political, in ways that are so blatant as to be silly. It was snobby, in ways that come out stupid. On both counts: how do you not throw a single Harry Potter book on there? Or any of GRRM's stuff? Both have been vastly influential, much moreso than fifty seven books that amount to Girl with Ethnicity finds herself through interactions with friend/mentor/historical figure/sapphic love object.

But ok, let's see what you've got: what are your ten books that should have made the list? When I tried to, I realized I don't read much new fiction, so with a strong non-fiction bias I came up with:

1 Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Absolutely essential reading for understanding American sports since 2000, and most of American business and politics too.

2 Game Change by Halperin and the other guy. Holy shit this book was everywhere when it came out. It was the whole attitude of the Obama era.

3 Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The best book for digging into the financial crisis. It amazes me that crises since have not been understood in light of '08, despite it being in such close memory.

4 Storm of Swords by GRRM. The best of the GoT/Asoiaf books, with the most iconic set piece in fantasy, definitely of the century, possibly ever. The last of the books where he knew where he was going, and the one whose events made the show what it was.

5 Dawn of Everything by Davids Graeber and Wengrow. Synthesizes a huge amount of Anthropology into a coherent vision of alternate versions of human society.

6 Circe by Madeleine Miller. Stands in for the entire genre it spawned of female views on Homeric epic. Engaged with the material, didn't sugarcoat or pussyfoot.

7 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling. This was where the series peaked, the next three books suffered from mistakes made here, but this was her best world-building and swashbuckling.

8 Catch and Kill by Ronan farrow. Massively important, but also well written and entertaining, mixes Nancy Drew with genuine reporting. Benefits from reread and reflection, as important for what Farrow didn't write as for what he did.

9 Baudolino by Umberto Eco. Eco always explores forgotten vistas of history, this is his swing at the medieval legendarium of the near and far orient.

10 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. Honestly at times I didn't love it reading it but so many things from it really stuck with me. A fascinating window into Polish society and Jewish history.

But ok, let's see what you've got: what are your ten books that should have made the list?

By year of publication:

  1. 1632 (2000) by Eric Flint
  2. The Blank Slate (2002) by Steven Pinker
  3. Freakonomics (2005) by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
  4. Lights Out (2005) by David Crawford
  5. The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins
  6. Sexual Utopia in Power (2006) by F. Roger Devlin
  7. The 4-Hour Workweek (2007) by Timothy Ferriss
  8. The Martian (2011) by Andy Weir
  9. The Rational Male (2013) by Rollo Tomassi
  10. Rationality: From AI to Zombies (2015) by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Joe Abercrombie (at least his first five books. I would argue for #2, Before They Are Hanged, as his absolute best) is a pretty reasonable contender for top fantasy author in this timeframe. The worldbuilding is kinda thin next to Martin, but the characterization is some of the best in the genre.

Storm of Swords would still make my top ten though.

7 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling. This was where the series peaked, the next three books suffered from mistakes made here, but this was her best world-building and swashbuckling.

Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half. Over a good sample of educated women who felt very passionately about Harry Potter, plus general social occasions for men to chime in. Personally feel the whole enterprise goes off a cliff as the word counts expand and the magic contracts from Phoenix onwards, but also potentially a good indicator of women preferring a more emotionally-driven story.

I only read through them once some years ago.

Book 3 was generally pretty good, but I disliked the time travel, because I wanted things to make sense (in retrospect, a little odd of a desire, given, for example, that quidditch exists). I didn't especially care for book 5. I didn't like the hallows in book 7. Book 6 was probably my favorite overall.

Back when I was dating I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half.

That's fascinating. As a male who read the 4th-7th books when they came out, I primarily recall being severely disappointed by the 7th book, in a large part because of the quality of writing in the action scenes. And perhaps I'm seeing connections where there aren't any, but I have to wonder about this apparent male/female pattern and the terrible quality of action in so many movies and TV shows that are pushed for their female leads and female production team these days.

Off the top of my head, the awful combat action in shows like Disney's Echo and Amazon's Rings of Power come to mind, but perhaps the most stark example is The Matrix: Resurrections, which was directed by the woman version of one of the male directors of the original Matrix trilogy, and which was about as severe a drop-off in quality of action as you can get in a franchise, with the combat barely comprehensible half the time and not making any sense from the combatants' point of view all of the time. This is in contrast to the first film (and even its 1st 2 awful sequels) which had very clearly visible combat where each movement by each combatant made sense (within this fictional wushu-inspired universe) and flowed into one another as if they were attempting to mime out what a real fight would look like where 2 combatants are really trying to kill each other with all their might. Unlike the 4th film (directed by a woman), the 1st 3 films (directed in half by the same person, but as a man), displayed an understanding that a fight scene is more than just 2 people waving their feet and fists around each other in fancy looking ways.

And this is where I'm probably projecting or jumping to conclusions, but with the well-known difference between men and women in terms of "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented," I wonder if men are more scrutinizing about action scenes actually making sense, while women are more accepting of them if the underlying emotional thrust is there. As a man, when I read/view a scene in which 2 people are fighting, I pay attention to how each person reacts to each punch or kick and get disenchanted when I see them behaving in ways that don't make sense given their motivation in the moment to survive and kill the other guy; for women, perhaps they're less bothered by it and just think the important part is "A defeated B at the cost of C, which leads to D," and the how that defeat occurred is just extraneous details.

Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).

(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)

I think the thing about the setting of Harry Potter is that almost all fantasy (whether by male or female authors) is written by worldbuilding autists who have a 2000 page lore codex / community wiki either in their head or on paper before they finish the first half of the first book. Rowling isn’t like that, she didn’t and doesn’t care about canon, the setting and its internal consistency and its rules were not hugely or even at all important to her except in the vague sense of what ‘felt’ right, she is not in that Tolkien tradition, she’s more like earlier authors of fairy tales, maybe. Personally I like that quality, it makes the stories feel quite different to most other fiction in the genre, lends it almost a surreal feeling.

The problem is not the HP setting is too fairy-tale-like and unsystematic (as you say, this is very much a valid choice), but that (in the later books) it tries to have it both ways. The magic in HP is actually much more well-delineated and "systematic" than in Tolkien. The problem is that (a) rules for how things work + (b) ignoring the rules when they don't suit + (c) taking things seriously, adds up to something that just doesn't work well. You can have perfectly good stories with any one or two of these, but all three together, not so much. In HP, (a) and (b) were kind of baked in by the style of story (and naturally increased over time as more material piled up), so quality decreased as (c) increased.

Tolkien is kind of interesting as a comparison point. His world and its history are incredibly detailed (though it's not really correct to say that he had a huge fixed canon that didn't change as he wrote -- it's really only the published materials that stayed consistent with each other, and even then he retconned The Hobbit), and he's good about making things like troop movements and strategy and so on check out. But the magic is not well-defined at all. The Wizards and the wielders of the rings of power (and many of the more powerful Elves) clearly have magical, uh, powers, but what exactly those are is never made clear. What's more, it's actually important for the tone of the story that this is the case! If Gandalf's or Saruman's or Sauron's (or Galadriel's or Elrond's) powers worked according to some Brandon Sanderson-like magic system, or for that matter like Rowling's (even setting aside the inconsistencies), The Lord of the Rings would be very different, and much worse, for the change.

I loved the fact that she tried to dip into things that were more serious with Goblet of Fire, things became far more "real" with the introduction of other schools, and I thought the length was more appropriate to what would happen in a school year.

That said, I've re-read Philosopher/Sorcerer's stone at least 6 (?) times and Goblet of fire ~3. The later books I've probably only re-read once. I don't think you can beat the first one all-in-all.

I used to frequently use 'do you prefer the first half or second half of the Harry Potter series' as a conversation piece, and I found it very interesting that men seem to be very inclined towards the first half and women very inclined towards the second half

Interesting, I agree that the first three books have a certain magic and innocence to them that's strongly diminished in the fourth and practically gone by the last three books. It almost felt like they were written by two different people. Personally I'd say book 3 was the best.

Magic and innocence is an interesting perspective; when I saw this question, my immediate thought was that the first half was very much "books for children". There is an innocence there for sure, but also a simplicity, with a distinct lack of logic involved in the world and plot (as HPMOR demonstrated).

Rowling's characterisation remained a weak point throughout the series, but the later novels at least managed more coherent, logical plots as well as a greater maturity in themes and even prose. The two halves are very much written for different audiences. A child coming to the series now would enjoy the first half and probably struggle with the later entries. A child who grew up with the books probably found them all enjoyable. An adult returning to the series would probably speed through the first half to get to the more interesting latter books. An adult reading them to a child would likely enjoy the whimsy of the initial books and grow weary of the length and tedium present in the later entries.

It is interesting that Rowling seems to have shifted the age of her books’ intended audience at about the same pace that her actual audience aged. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other author who did that. But then, I suppose I can’t think of any other children’s authors who had such a massive and devoted following while they were in the middle of publishing a series.

Heh, sounds like a good trick. That's probably true, or at least it used to be back in the 2010s. Now it seems like every woman absolutely hates the entire Harry Potter franchise because of the whole Terf thing with its author. Seems ridiculous to me that peole can't separate one political opinion of the author from the books, but I guess they really liked the politics of the books originally.

Possibly relevant= the books were originally aimed at a young male demographic, that's why she initialled her name and made the main character a boy. As it got more popular she got more freedom to express herself.

Now it seems like every woman absolutely hates the entire Harry Potter franchise because of the whole Terf thing with its author.

I'd say it's firmly in the guilty pleasure channel for most young UMC women, but definitely get a lot more 'literally Hitler' from those born before 1997 or so.

Huh, weird. I fall into that too.

In my mind GoF screwed up in creating the killing curse, which neuters all the magical dueling opportunities; and in bringing V back two thousand pages before he'd get killed. Keeping him awake but in the wings for three books was too strung out, leading to the weird need to do Horcruxes + Hallows in the last book.

There were some decent set pieces in the second half, but for the most part the whimsy came off.

Yeah. Vibes-based but I feel like the last 3 books contained like a tenth of the worldbuilding and new magic introduced compared to the first 4, especially since Goblet was very much 'Look at this vibrant world of wizardry' then 'bang we must gaze at our navels and be sad for 3 books'

1 No Country For Old Men

The movie was excellent, but it missed one major feature that the book had. Specifically the sheriff's monologues at the start of each chapter, which give a moral framing to the entire story. The sheriff doesn't really do much throughout the entire story, he acts more as a witness to the events and to a world which is simultaneously getting worse every day while also always having been this bad.

I thought the movie was excellent despite the sheriff's moral framing. He kept dilly-dallying and whining about the way of the world instead of doing his job, and this led directly to a few deaths. Very glad to not have heard even more from him--I don't want to hear moral grandstanding from a morally reprehensible person.

Huh, you'd rate Goblet above Prisoner of Azkaban?

I haven't heard that one before - I thought the usual take was that Azkaban was the peak, whereas Goblet was, though still readable and fun, starting to show the bloat and lack of discipline that would be at its worst with Phoenix, but still on display until the end of the series.

I think you can argue between the peak being end of Azkaban or beginning of Goblet, but for the purposes of a 21st century list: Azkaban was 1999. I do think Goblet gets extra "influence" credit on a top x list because I felt, as a 10 year old at the time, that it clearly pushed YA fiction into longer pagecounts.

...oh, well, that makes sense. I didn't check the publication dates. That's fair. I do agree that Goblet is definitely the best of the latter four Potter books.

I'm not sure I would give Harry Potter the credit for pushing YA fiction longer? Azkaban is the first 'large' Potter book - I believe Philosopher's Stone and Chamber of Secrets are both around 200 pages? And Azkaban was, as you say, 1999. But consider, say Northern Lights - that's a 1995 YA novel, it was quite successful, and it was 400 pages long.

What made you choose Circe over Song of Achilles? I have only read the latter, which was published first (and thus is the true beginning of this genre), and I found it completely amazing.

I love both, I like Circe more as an alternative angle on the story. I've always liked those, Rosencrantz and Guoldebstern are Dead may be my all time favorite play.

I came across Game Change organically a few weeks ago when looking into Obama’s reasons for running so early for President and it landed on my to-read list I keep. What is the cultural background or bias behind the book that you’re aware of?

Read it and it will be obvious. It was probably the last great Washington Consensus book, the exact moment of Obama triumphalism when the GOP says gonna go left.

I would throw the black swan by Taleb there as well. Great way of thinking about risk.

Taleb could definitely be added, but unless I'm putting together a much bigger list I'm not sure I have room, I wouldn't want it to turn into a list of books about cognitive biases and decision making.

In my mind Moneyball is the best written entree into the field. Between that and Too Big to Fail you're gonna end up in Kahneman, Taleb, etc. while also being the single most influential touchstone of the set.

I would pick Fooled By Randomness over the Black Swan, but either way Taleb deserves a spot for sure.

Black Swan captured more of the zeitgeist as it was close in time to the 2007 collapse.

Could you paste the list or give an archive link? Would rather not sign up for such a site.

What are the best books from the 21st century? (In the genres included here; not math textbooks or something.)

Nowhere in this post did you actually provide an argument about why any of their choices are bad. You just kind of pointed and sputtered at the fact that anyone could have this particular opinion. In what specific ways would your list look different? Why would I “hate myself” for reading the books included on their list?

I don't think it's difficult to figure out why the list sucks, even if I've read only ~10% of the books on it. You can read each blurb since the Times can't help but virtue signal even in this format:

A {not white | not straight | not man} struggles in {not contemporary America} against {struggles we think exist in contemporary America}. But the book is about more than that, it also deals with themes of {living | laughing | loving}.

Lazy writing with mediocre prose and crappy anachronisms is what will make you hate yourself, just for wasting your time. As I've gotten older I've gotten smarter at sniffing out when things won't get better after the first 20% of the book.

Write list of 100 best books of the 21st century

It’s less than a quarter through the 21st century. Did the people who approved this exercise stop to think, maybe we should wait til 2100 to write this? Like obviously it won’t be a representative sample of the best books of the 21st century when it’s excluding a minimum of 76.5% of the 21st century.

Presumably the “so far” is implicit and they expect their readers to understand that this will not be the last such list that will be published by the paper over the course of this century.

and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.

I almost certainly can't find it now, but I remember stumbling upon a list of movies or albums like this that was published decades back, probably in an old magazine, and realizing that it had a similar bias that had aged terribly: half of the then-contemporary ones didn't seem to have been mentioned again, but had heard of all the classics.

At least it's not a new bias, I suppose.

It is profoundly frustrating. I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons, but my every attempt at finding "Top X Book" lists is cluttered with current year thinly veiled, Gen Z, political slop. Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages? I recall 4chan put together a list of anon's most recommended reading and it was shockingly more representative than you average list from a "Paper of record".

In the November 1996 issues of Computer Gaming World, they put together an article for the 150 best games of all time. And unlike modern IGN or PCGamer lists, CGWs was 1996 probably was truly representative of the entire breadth and depth of the computer gaming history at the time. Maybe it was easier, spanning 15 years tops. The PCGamer list only shares Doom with CGW's, and the IGN list only shares Doom and Tetris.

In some ways I get it. I will plant my flag on this hill and die on it, 1997 was an apex year for computer games. Games that came out before 1997 tend to struggle greatly with graphics, sound and usability. Games that came out after are the complete package, and many from 1997-2000 remain the definitive example of their genre. And that is more or less where history largely stops in the IGN list. Why include Simcity from the CGW list when you can include Simcity 2000 from a year later? Why include WarCraft II when you can include StarCraft from 2 years later? Still, some omissions are shocking, like Day of the Tentacle, probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever, possibly only eclipsed by The Secret of Monkey Island. System Shock, #98 just keeps getting remakes, remasters, source ports, etc.

But I've digressed too far...

Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages?

Despite the endless hours spent using the internet, I am consistently reduced to 'add reddit to the search' when looking for curated media lists, and competently curated information in general. To an extent, this is a personal failure. This stuff must be out there, in whatever form - a book, a blog - but finding it in the sea of slop is tough, and the effort is lost unless one is disciplined in maintaining a proper list.

I sure would love an AI assistant I could outsource this to.

I've been attempting to broaden my literary horizons,

In what genres?

Is no one actually curated a list of classics that have endured through the ages?

Surely you have heard of the western canon?

https://www.openculture.com/2014/01/harold-bloom-creates-a-massive-list-of-works-in-the-western-canon.html

probably the fondest remembered adventure game ever

Myst was literally the best selling PC game of all time for 10 years running.

I said fondest remembered, not best selling.

I have never, literally never, heard anyone start a sentence with "Remember in Myst when..."

Myst is my go to example for explaining what Pixel Bitching is!

The great books list at St. John's college is probably useful: https://www.sjc.edu/application/files/4115/4810/0934/St_Johns_College_Great_Books_Reading_List.pdf

In my view, the 1998 Modern Library list of the best 100 novels of the 20th century has mostly held up. As of now I have read 50-60% of the books on the list and was generally glad to have read each one.

https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100#top-100-novels

Something else that you may find interesting to do, is to examine some of the books that were bestsellers in different time periods. In the '50s you had writers like Nevil Shute and A.J. Cronin; later you had authors such as Arthur Hailey and Mary Stewart. However, rather than being slop, I've generally found these writers' works to have held up quite well; to my mind this reflects that at one time, the reading public was much more male, had longer attention spans uncorrupted by digital technology, and had better liberal educations than what prevail now.

I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.

On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).

All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.

It's not a bad list, and it being 1998-1999 there's nothing to be made of certain omissions, but wow to miss Moby-Dick and Blood Meridian. Midnight's Children at least made it, but at #90, lol. Then for the lesser misses, Gravity's Rainbow, and even less so, one of Dick's works, probably Ubik--though remarkable for prescience rather than prose. But it's not like people don't know those books, and also they all made one of Time's lists. Ignoring Neuromancer is probably a miss too, but I say that looking back from 2024.

Speaking of Gibson, and the only point I could say of this, thinking of him reminded me of his short story Burning Chrome. If you (anyone reading this) are familiar with Cyberpunk 2077 but not Gibson's work, read it. A quite short story, published in 1982, and Gibson's the rare science fiction author with real chops for prose.

Note that Moby Dick came out in 1851.

I thought that, but the header text says

The editors of The Modern Library were privileged to have the assistance of a distinguished Board made up of celebrated authors, historians, critics, and publishing luminaries. In 1998 and 1999, members of the Modern Library Board participated in the “100 Best” project, voting on the 100 Best Novels and 100 Best Non-fiction works, respectively.

Maybe whoever wrote the header forgot that bit, as I'd assume it'd have an obligatory mention.

Hot take: Moby Dick is unreadable. It's most notable for being good source material for adaptations.

(doesn't excuse the list, which has Ulysses at the top. Ulysses is famous for being unreadable).

Moby-Dick is actually good. Really good. It's also casually unreadable.

There's a stupidly multilayered structure. Under the whale lore and purple prose, it's psychological. Under that it's more Jungian, archetypal. Under that, some sort of Manifest Destiny, Americana, man-vs.-nature primal thesis. You could make one of those iceberg memes or crazy masonic conspiracy diagrams out of stuff that is really, unarguably buried in the book.

But the cruft is there on purpose. The allusions, on purpose. Melville basically inhaled Bible prose for decades and then breathed it into this book, because he wanted to invoke the mythic style. People joke about the homoeroticism, except that's also an intentional move, one that complements the whole indomitable-American-spirit theme, and it's just...The more you pick at it, the more convinced you get that it's all on purpose. Melville was definitely capable of writing a tighter novel, but he wanted to write an epic. It's layered.

I can't do it justice. I really can't. I'm basing this off a really rewarding college class. Yeah, I realize that sounds both stupid and pretentious. But I swear, I god something out of it. It's not just cope. It's not! There's something great in this book.

If I could find the reading list or at least syllabus I'd share it. There has to be a good study guide out there. I hope I can find it.

Moby Dick and Bood Meridian (aka Moby Dick on land) are two of the few books I'll do a focused planned reading day on.

Get up. Breakfast. Read straight and take notes until Lunch. Repeat until Dinner. If mental energy still available, continue until bedtime. No work, no TV.

And it has Finnegan's Wake later in the list as well.

Listicles are still clickbait filler even if they're published by notionally-respectable outlets. The purpose is not actually to come up with a comprehensive list of the 100 best books of the 21st century. It's to get people to click on the article so they can either feel outraged at the writer's tastelessness or validated by the writer sharing their opinion. They will then ideally start a fight and share the article with their friends, saying "so true/can you believe this bullshit".

As voted on by 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers — with a little help from the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

It's literally just a popularity contest. They asked a bunch of writers their favorite books and tabulated the results.

Just a random, totally out of the blue question here:

What's the male/female authorship ratio here?

Seeing as women don't try as hard and are less represented among highly intelligent people*, any list of this type that's sex-equal is very suspicious.

*see "greater male variability hypothesis"

I went through the top 20 and it was (surprisingly) fairly even. But a little hard to tell because most of them have uncommon foreign names.

It seems awfully presumptuous to write a list for the 21st century given that we're not even a quarter of the way through with it.

Guess it has a better ring to it that '100 best books from the first quarter of the 21st century'.

Looks like they asked writers to name their favourite books, which was always doomed to failure. It's like asking architects to name their favourite buildings. They've been too exposed to the art form to have normal, human tastes, so they end up chasing weirdness and pretence. Only art forms that are subject to public opinion can produce good work. Fortunately, normal people still read books, so we can get a much better list from them.

Even "100 best books since the turn of the millennium" would sound better.

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