If best-of book lists are fun to argue about then ’s list of the has already provided hours of entertainment. We’ve argued over the merits of individual books on the list, how the list reflects the current state of literature and criticism, and why there’s so little poetry on it. But let’s talk a little bit more about methodology I was one of 503 participants—“novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers”—who contributed to the list by voting for our top ten books of the 21st century.
Listen, I love a list and I love a good thought exercise and I was flattered to be asked. Later I would be disappointed that the didn’t list the names and occupations of all 503 of the contributors in the feature. It would have provided a fuller picture of who exactly the list was by and for.
We received some criteria from the but not much: our chosen books could be fiction or nonfiction, as long as they were published in the United States in English on or after Jan. 1, 2000. It was up to us individually to define what “best” means to us: “Brilliantly written? Utterly pleasurable? Powerfully important? Use your judgment.
” We were given a link to a new feature called with a nice user interface to help us jog our memories of some of the books we may have loved. I am thankful that I still use Goodreads to track my reading (I know, I know) so that I wouldn’t need to rely on the TBR’s guidance to remember what I loved. So many of my favorites didn�.