Some More Best Books of the 21st Century (Sort Of)

I recently posted the results of an informal Twitter poll to find the best books of the 21st century, creating a Top 25 chart. I would have liked to create a Top 40 or 50 but once you get beyond the first 25 books in my huge spreadsheet lots of them have the same amount of votes, so the chart would have been full of titles that were equal 27th, equal 40th and so on.

Instead I wanted to delve a bit deeper into the data. The main purpose of the poll in the first place, apart from having a bit of fun, was to pass on some recommendations of great books, so why restrict that to the 25 that came out on top?

Let’s go delving…

Close But No Cigar

There were two books that were equal 26th in the poll, and a little bit ahead of the ones that followed, so it felt right to highlight them as they only missed out because of our obsession with round numbers and charts that end in five or zero.

Naomi Alderman’s The Power was one of Barack Obama’s favourite reads of 2017 and it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction that year too, so no wonder it was high up in our poll. It was a shame that 2666 by Roberto Bolaño didn’t get a couple more votes as it would have been good to see more than just the one translated work in the Top 25. It would also have been one of the longest books in the chart, coming it at over 900 pages (what is it with you lot and massive novels?) and he would have been, sadly, the only deceased writer to make an appearance. Since he died in 2003, Bolaño appears to have published more books that 2Pac has released posthumous albums.

Spreading Themselves Thinly

As you may recall, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was the only author to have two books in the Top 25, which is impressive work, but there were lots of other authors with more than one book in the overall list. For some, if the votes had been concentrated on just one of their books they would have made the final chart, but I guess that’s the price you pay for writing lots of great stuff, the talented bastards. Here are the authors who had more than one book nominated.

Four Books

David Mitchell

Three Books

Gabriel Josipovici, Kate Atkinson, Kent Haruf, Matt Haig, Robert McFarlane (one co-authored with Jackie Morris), Sarah Hall

Two Books

Ali Smith, Alice Munro, Ann Patchett, Anthony Doerr, Bernardine Evaristo, Caitlin Moran, Celeste Ng, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Denis Johnson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Geoff Dyer, Han Kang, Hannah Kent, Hilary Mantel,
JK Rowling, Jasper Fforde, Jennifer Egan, Jessie Burton, Jon McGregor, Jonathan Coe, Julian Barnes, Kate Atkinson, Khaled Hosseini, Madeline Miller, Maggie O’Farrell, Malcolm Gladwell, Marilynne Robinson, Mark Haddon, Markus Zusak, Michael Ondaatje, Michel Faber, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Nicola Barker, Patrick Gale, Philip Hoare, Philip Pullman, Richard Powers, Sally Rooney, Sarah Waters, Sarah Winman, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Will Self, Zadie Smith

A couple of authors I had never heard of there. Gabriel Josipovici was first published more than fifty years ago and has dozens of books, both fiction and non-fiction, to his name, so I feel a bit of a numpty for not being aware of his work. The three books nominated, should you feel like checking him out, are Everything Passes, Infinity and Whatever Happened to Modernism?.

Sarah Winman was also new to me. Tin Man and A Year of Marvelous Ways are the two nominations. Winman has had a couple of titles in the Richard & Judy Book Club so I realise I am firmly in the minority in not having come across her before.

Doing It for the Kids

I guess when you ask a bunch of adults on Twitter, which is an area of social media that our children tend to avoid, for their favourite books of the past twenty years or so then you are bound to end up with a list of books that are mainly intended for adults. However, there were a few children’s books that received multiple votes and one that, for a short while, threatened to make the Top 25.

1. I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
2. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
3. Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae & Guy Parker-Rees

No surprise at all to see Mark Haddon’s novel in there, it has after all been a massive crossover hit, but wonderful for two picture books to be represented. Given how often parents have to read and re-read picture books it takes a special kind of writer to still be enjoyed 100 reads later.

Found in Translation

The Shadow of the Wind was the only work in translation to make the Top 25 and 2666 is mentioned above, but there were a handful of other translated novels that received multiple votes, the most popular being:

1. Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai (Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet)
2. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein)
3. Blinding by Mircea Cărtărescu (Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter)
4. HHhH by Laurent Binet (Translated from the French by Sam Taylor)
5. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson (Translated from the Swedish by Rod Bradbury)

No real shocks at #2 or #5, as both were massive bestsellers, and the Binet is a wonderful novel which received significant critical acclaim. I am less familiar with Krasznahorkai and Cărtărescu, though, and intend to address that forthwith. And, as an aside, the cover of My Brilliant Friend will never cease being the worst cover to ever appear on a bestselling book. It is as if someone made it by cutting images from a Littlewoods catalogue and sticking them on a holiday snap with Pritt Stick.

Non-Fiction

Our Top 25 contained only novels, not a biography, travel book or popular science title in sight. There were plenty nominated, though, and these were the top five:

1. Invisible Woman by Caroline Criado Perez
2. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
3. The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs
4. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
5. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

A varied selection that tackles a range of topics. I wonder if it is harder for a non-fiction book to be considered a ‘favourite’? They can address difficult, and/or controversial subjects and while they are often important books, are they books we love? Whatever the answer I was delighted to see these splendid titles were books that people felt passionately enough about to vote for.

On My List

One excellent benefit of compiling a poll such as this is that I am basically being bombarded with hundreds of book recommendations, and I am rarely happier than when such a thing is happening. Obviously I have taken note of the most popular books that I have yet to read but there were also some titles further down the list of 400+ books that stood out for me and have made it onto my reading list.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is the first book in Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series and wasn’t a million miles off the Top 25, receiving a number of votes. It was certainly one of the highest ranked sci-fi titles.

At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Grieg had a few very passionate supporters but I had never heard of it before. There were a number of books with long titles that stood out as I compiled the list and this was one of them.

I am not sure what I expected from a book called The Sugar Frosted Nutsack but it kept appearing in tweets and clocking up votes, and having subsequently looked up Mark Leyner’s novel I am not sure I am any the wiser. A bunch of gods living in contemporary Dubai? I will certainly give it a read and find out what the fuck is going on there.

Another book that caught my eye was This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland by Gretel Ehrlich, a travel book with a bit of history, social anthropology and environmental science thrown in.

Random Observations

And finally, just some random stuff that amused me or that I felt was of interest.

Of the Top 25 books that topped the original poll, 18 were written by women and 7 by men.

There have been 18 winners of the Man Booker Prize this century and half of them did not get a single vote in a poll in which 461 different books were nominated. Only Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, Milkman, The Sense of an Ending and Life of Pi received more than one vote. Does this tell us anything? Probably not, although it is fair to say that Booker winners don’t seem to spark a lot of love within our survey sample, with the notable exception of Wolf Hall which topped the poll.

But is is not just Booker winners that failed to stay in the hearts of the readers who voted. Only 6 of the past 18 overall Costa Book Prize winners received any votes at all, and the same number of Women’s Book Prize winners. Again, this is hardly a scientific survey so it may not be indicative of anything, but it was a stat I found interesting.

You lot seem to like long books. If you were to read every book in the Top 10 you’d have devoured 6,146 pages, and a hell of a lot of trees. You don’t need to be great at maths to work out that comes in at an average of over 600 pages per book.

I guess you must really like reading.