"It’s all well and good to (e.g.) snub Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney, and Thomas Pynchon, but to do so without mounting a defense of their omission is leaving some really good content on the table." This! Thank you! And I'd especially love some more explanation about omissions when you consider the number of repeat authors on the list(Jesmyn Ward, Alice Munro, George Saunders, etc.)!
I think they didn't want to make strong arguments because the list is based on a bunch of people voting instead of a committee with a point of view... but at the very least they should publish all the ballots so we can see what happened!
1. I coincidentally read Kindred the same year as The Underground Railroad. I wouldn't describe it as trauma porn but it did serve to reinforce how darkly funny and unusual (in a good way) The Underground Railroad is.
2. The Skull! But also The Rock From The Sky. The turtle is just a perfect encapsulation of A Certain Type of Guy.
I read Inherent Vice on a beach in Mexico in 2010 and was convinced it was my favorite Pynchon. Then I read Mason and Dixon and Against the Day and was sure M&D were. I uh...DNFed Bleeding Edge. Maybe I'll return to it, but probably not. Anyway, I totally agree that not including him is dumb...since most of the weird books on this list are obviously indebted to him. He's the Velvet Underground and Nico (I'm sure there's a bizarro VU & N in one of books, probably GR).
You're also right about Rooney, the texting sections in Convos with Friends are epic. That's the one. We can ignore the other ones.
Some of my friends noticed things like Stephen King voting for himself, and how often Gone Girl showed up in the celebrity picks. Feel like those would be funny things for a NYT columnist to talk about! Also the $9 sticker on the copy of Pachinko.
Annette Gordon-Reed voted for herself too! Also liked Scott Turow going big on all four Neapolitan novels and Thomas Chatterton Williams voting for only two out of three on the Cusk trilogy.
Dude Turow on the four Neapolitan is definitely as funny as Gary going in for Neverland, the most boring book of the 21st century. I love Zadie, but she should just say it’s boring and move on. And she forgot a third direction for the novel: authors gazing deeply into their own eyes.
I love this list. There are enough of my all-time favorites, enthusiastically endorsed, that I'm confident I'll also love the new-to-me reads listed here. Might make this my list for the remainder of 2024.
The final NYT list did include quite a few nonfiction books. I'm really not sure how one would compare a nonfiction book vs. a novel for a list like this; they seem to be just different modes. And even nonfiction is a vast realm of different kinds of books. I'm not sure how one assesses whether Joan Didion's memoir is better or worse than Tony Judt's thousand-page history of postwar Europe.
Great list! I'm curious if you would agree with my feeling that, even as the stature of Pynchon's work has grown in the Twitter era (particularly as a shibboleth for a brand of irony-heavy conspiracy-curious left political sentiment), Bleeding Edge has been curiously overlooked. It rocks! It's about tech AND NYC! Why isn't it "the Brooklynite's choice"?
1. Gosh damn 2666 is great. Really worth a revisit.
2. Normal People would make my top 10. Have yet to read Conversations. She’s got a new one coming out in September that I’m excited about.
3. I really wish Paul Thomas Anderson was less interested in trippy California aesthetics cuz Bleeding Edge would be an awesome book to adapt, especially in this age of decaying internet.
4. The Likeness is my favorite French too. I haven’t been a big fan of her post-Dublin Squad work but I did love The Hunter, which right now is probably the best thing I’ve read in 2024.
I was sort of shocked at Piranesi not making it, as it's basically *the* undisputed champion of literary fantasy of the last 24 years. The Rooney snub equally surprising-- she's a bad sentence writer, but that didn't stop Egan from making her way onto the list! Knausgaard I have to imagine was kneecapped by their being six Mein Kampf books, all of them being reasonable favorites, spreading his votes too thin. Pynchon, I've seen compelling arguments that it's not "his century," but Bleeding Edge, while maybe "lesser" than like, Crying or Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, is simply better than anything ever written by the likes of Michael Chabon or Junot Diaz. By far the biggest omission that proved the list to be a crock of high-minded engagement bait by a lying, failing, terminally diseased newspaper in the twilight years of it's sad empire, was Olga Tokarczuk!
I've fallen in love with M. John Harrison's writing recently - I hadn't heard of him before this year but his name kept coming up, and now I've almost constantly got one of his on the go. Glad he's got a shout here! His 'anti-memoir', Wish I Was Here, is one of the strangest and most beautiful books I've read for years.
justice for The Likeness! It's the best Tana French novel yet it feels underrated/underappreciated somehow? so glad to see it recommended here!!! thanks for sharing.
Read Bleeding Edge when it came out and was all 'meh Pynchon lite', reread last year and it's a laugh riot. Though this time I had the Pynchon wiki open on a laptop for all the references and that just added to the fun. Is there a word for that yet? If not maybe invent one yeah?
(full disclosure, Against The Day is probably my fave all timer book)
It'd be interesting to dissect which entries were helped or harmed by the quality and/or popularity of their televisual adaptations. All The Light We Cannot See = Clearly Harmed.
Doerr was another guy like Chiang who was on a ton of the public ballots but still got shut out! I suspect Station Eleven was helped—adaptation a lot better than the book, IMO.
I think Rooney was hurt! I love those adaptations, but people are obsessed with how pretty the characters are, which doesn’t seem accurate to the novels imo
I read Piranesi, and Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness off the back of this newsletter - and enjoyed them immensely. Plan to keep on working my way through your excellent recommendations!
"It’s all well and good to (e.g.) snub Karl Ove Knausgaard, Margaret Atwood, Sally Rooney, and Thomas Pynchon, but to do so without mounting a defense of their omission is leaving some really good content on the table." This! Thank you! And I'd especially love some more explanation about omissions when you consider the number of repeat authors on the list(Jesmyn Ward, Alice Munro, George Saunders, etc.)!
I think they didn't want to make strong arguments because the list is based on a bunch of people voting instead of a committee with a point of view... but at the very least they should publish all the ballots so we can see what happened!
True! And agreed! And not to feed the media machine but that would only lead to more engagement/views anyways! Content left on the table
1. I coincidentally read Kindred the same year as The Underground Railroad. I wouldn't describe it as trauma porn but it did serve to reinforce how darkly funny and unusual (in a good way) The Underground Railroad is.
2. The Skull! But also The Rock From The Sky. The turtle is just a perfect encapsulation of A Certain Type of Guy.
3. Justice for Louise Erdrich
I read Inherent Vice on a beach in Mexico in 2010 and was convinced it was my favorite Pynchon. Then I read Mason and Dixon and Against the Day and was sure M&D were. I uh...DNFed Bleeding Edge. Maybe I'll return to it, but probably not. Anyway, I totally agree that not including him is dumb...since most of the weird books on this list are obviously indebted to him. He's the Velvet Underground and Nico (I'm sure there's a bizarro VU & N in one of books, probably GR).
You're also right about Rooney, the texting sections in Convos with Friends are epic. That's the one. We can ignore the other ones.
Some of my friends noticed things like Stephen King voting for himself, and how often Gone Girl showed up in the celebrity picks. Feel like those would be funny things for a NYT columnist to talk about! Also the $9 sticker on the copy of Pachinko.
Annette Gordon-Reed voted for herself too! Also liked Scott Turow going big on all four Neapolitan novels and Thomas Chatterton Williams voting for only two out of three on the Cusk trilogy.
Dude Turow on the four Neapolitan is definitely as funny as Gary going in for Neverland, the most boring book of the 21st century. I love Zadie, but she should just say it’s boring and move on. And she forgot a third direction for the novel: authors gazing deeply into their own eyes.
I love this list. There are enough of my all-time favorites, enthusiastically endorsed, that I'm confident I'll also love the new-to-me reads listed here. Might make this my list for the remainder of 2024.
I hope it delivers! Let me know what you think!
The final NYT list did include quite a few nonfiction books. I'm really not sure how one would compare a nonfiction book vs. a novel for a list like this; they seem to be just different modes. And even nonfiction is a vast realm of different kinds of books. I'm not sure how one assesses whether Joan Didion's memoir is better or worse than Tony Judt's thousand-page history of postwar Europe.
Great list! I'm curious if you would agree with my feeling that, even as the stature of Pynchon's work has grown in the Twitter era (particularly as a shibboleth for a brand of irony-heavy conspiracy-curious left political sentiment), Bleeding Edge has been curiously overlooked. It rocks! It's about tech AND NYC! Why isn't it "the Brooklynite's choice"?
I hope it's sort of his 21st century Vineland, will age well and be appreciated better with some more distance
1. Gosh damn 2666 is great. Really worth a revisit.
2. Normal People would make my top 10. Have yet to read Conversations. She’s got a new one coming out in September that I’m excited about.
3. I really wish Paul Thomas Anderson was less interested in trippy California aesthetics cuz Bleeding Edge would be an awesome book to adapt, especially in this age of decaying internet.
4. The Likeness is my favorite French too. I haven’t been a big fan of her post-Dublin Squad work but I did love The Hunter, which right now is probably the best thing I’ve read in 2024.
I was sort of shocked at Piranesi not making it, as it's basically *the* undisputed champion of literary fantasy of the last 24 years. The Rooney snub equally surprising-- she's a bad sentence writer, but that didn't stop Egan from making her way onto the list! Knausgaard I have to imagine was kneecapped by their being six Mein Kampf books, all of them being reasonable favorites, spreading his votes too thin. Pynchon, I've seen compelling arguments that it's not "his century," but Bleeding Edge, while maybe "lesser" than like, Crying or Gravity's Rainbow or Mason & Dixon, is simply better than anything ever written by the likes of Michael Chabon or Junot Diaz. By far the biggest omission that proved the list to be a crock of high-minded engagement bait by a lying, failing, terminally diseased newspaper in the twilight years of it's sad empire, was Olga Tokarczuk!
I've fallen in love with M. John Harrison's writing recently - I hadn't heard of him before this year but his name kept coming up, and now I've almost constantly got one of his on the go. Glad he's got a shout here! His 'anti-memoir', Wish I Was Here, is one of the strangest and most beautiful books I've read for years.
justice for The Likeness! It's the best Tana French novel yet it feels underrated/underappreciated somehow? so glad to see it recommended here!!! thanks for sharing.
Read Bleeding Edge when it came out and was all 'meh Pynchon lite', reread last year and it's a laugh riot. Though this time I had the Pynchon wiki open on a laptop for all the references and that just added to the fun. Is there a word for that yet? If not maybe invent one yeah?
(full disclosure, Against The Day is probably my fave all timer book)
It'd be interesting to dissect which entries were helped or harmed by the quality and/or popularity of their televisual adaptations. All The Light We Cannot See = Clearly Harmed.
Doerr was another guy like Chiang who was on a ton of the public ballots but still got shut out! I suspect Station Eleven was helped—adaptation a lot better than the book, IMO.
I think Rooney was hurt! I love those adaptations, but people are obsessed with how pretty the characters are, which doesn’t seem accurate to the novels imo
This was great. We might all need more lists in our lives these days.
Thank you for mentioning Milkman!!
Do you have any thoughts on The Road making it but Passengers/Stella Maris not?
McCarthy is an embarrassing blind spot for me !! I’ve read nothing even though I know he’s theoretically right up my alley.
I thought that No Country for Old Men would have made a list like this but it actually did not.
Best business book of 2023?
Ryan Holiday, "The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph"
I read Piranesi, and Tana French's In the Woods and The Likeness off the back of this newsletter - and enjoyed them immensely. Plan to keep on working my way through your excellent recommendations!