The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week The New York Times Book Review rolled out the results of an ambitious survey it conducted to determine the best books of the 21st century so far. On this week’s episode, Gilbert Cruz chats with some fellow editors about the results of that survey and about the project itself.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review and this is the Book Review
0:11.0	Podcast.
0:12.6	On this week's episode, I'm very excited to finally talk about a project that we've been
0:16.6	working on for much of 2024 and which is finally out there in the world.
0:22.0	A hundred best books of the 21st century so far.
0:25.3	If you're listening to this show, if you're listening to a podcast about books, I have to think
0:29.7	you've already seen part or all of it.
0:32.9	Joining me this week are three editors
0:34.7	who have been deep in the weeds with me on this
0:37.5	since January.
0:38.7	Tina Jordan, hello?
0:40.3	Hi.
0:41.1	Jew Monica Teib, welcome back. Hi Gilbert. And Scott. Hi, I'm excited to have all of you on. So I'm hoping we can have a free-flowing discussion about this effort,
0:55.8	about some of the books on the list, books that didn't make the list. There's a lot to dig into here.
1:00.8	And I want to start by asking someone else who's not me, Tina, why did we do this?
1:08.0	Why did we do this?
1:09.0	Because we looked around and we, it was almost the quarter century mark.
1:16.0	We're book nerds who like to categorize and make lists and we thought what are the best books of the 21st century so far and we started to
1:25.5	argue about it we started to talk ourselves about the things we'd read since
1:29.9	January 1st 2000 that we loved and then we thought hey maybe there's something here
1:35.6	but let's put this out to a lot of people. Because normally we would have
1:40.0	just done this in-house we would have pulled the editors, we've pulled the critics
	...

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