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I was on the Book Riot Podcast this week, subbing in for Jeff and sitting down with Rebecca to discuss the latest in the wonderful world of books and reading. Among other things, we talked about The New York Times’s list of the 100 Best Books of the Century, which at the time of recording had not yet been released in full. The top 20 titles would be revealed the following day and Rebecca asked me on the spot if there were any names I expected to see there. So, of course, I promptly forgot how time works as well as the details of every book I’ve ever read.
It was a question I should have anticipated; I was, after all, on a newsy books podcast and knew we’d be discussing the list ahead of time. But in that moment my brain turned to useless gray sludge. I forgot which years constitute the 21st century and said I was surprised to not see titles from the greats of magical realism (One Hundred Years of Solitude and The House of the Spirits were published in 1967 and 1982, placing them solidly in the 20th century. Insert facepalm here). Rebecca kindly did me a solid in sharing some of the authors she expected would make that top 20, and I immediately regretted not having enough wits about me to come up with no-brainers like Colson Whitehead and Kazuo Ishiguro. But hey, it happens.
Then on Monday morning as I was sitting down to finish up a post on an entirely different topic, editor Danika Ellis suggested we round up a list of our staff’s top 10 books of the century to share on social media. I went to put my list together—a process I found rather stressful!—and felt something I hadn’t felt in a while: I started to feel very unserious.
Something I said on the show is that one of the reasons I love Book Riot’s Best Of roundups (we released our Best Books of 2024 So Far list last week) is that they are not only diverse and inclusive from a marginalized voice perspective, but are genre-inclusive as well. Our coverage of books is expansive, and so are our lists of the best books we’ve read each year. I have always felt very at home in a list that is just as likely to feature a buzzy literary fiction title as the third entry in a cozy mystery series.
But as I tried to come up with that top 10 list and saw how much of my reading was genre, I kept adding and deleting titles with weird logic. Sure, that mystery sent chills up my spine in the way I remember getting from Golden Age crime writers, but was it a soul-shaking read? That romance really healed something in me and is the first example of enthusiastic consent I ever read, but was it important enough to make the cut? Something about the release of this big “serious” list was making me second guess my reading habits because the truth is I haven’t read many of the books on that list. I recognize most of them, have said I will someday read several, and can talk to you confidently about many of their premises and cultural impact. But I haven’t read The Friend by Sigrid Nunez or The Road by Cormac McCarthy, or anything by Joan Didion or Michael Chabon, ever. I’ve read exactly ten of the books on this list of the best 100 books of the century, and it’s bugging the hell out of me.
I want to note that the list itself is a pretty good one. The contributors are readers, writers, and literary folks of all stripes, as I saw in browsing the picks of some of the more prominent contributors, including Roxane Gay, Stephen King, Morgan Jerkins, Alma Katsu, Jason Reynolds, Sarah MacLean, Min jin Lee, and Stephen Graham Jones. And those are just some of the big names: in total, over 500 literary luminaries were invited to cast their ballots, including Book Riot’s own Jeff O’Neal, Rebecca Schinsky, and Sharifah Williams. Do I wish there was more genre representation in the list? Absolutely. And in clicking through the nominations, I did see a lot of submissions for books I’d have loved to see make the final cut.
But they didn’t, and so I’m over here weighing this nagging insecurity. And that, folks, is what we call cognitive dissonance. Because I know that train of thought is some bullshit. C’mon, Diaz, what year is this? Are we really dusting off this tired old piece of discourse now? I’m the Managing Editor of the largest independent editorial book site in North America, one whose entire mission is dedicated to the idea that coverage of books and reading should be just as diverse as books and readers are. We champion marginalized voices and vehemently assert that genre, children’s, and young adult fiction should be taken every bit as seriously as adult literary fiction. I personally read an average of 75 books a year, co-host a books podcast, and both write and edit hundreds of pieces of bookish content every year. I know that no one is any less of a reader for gravitating towards books that don’t necessarily make it to Best Of lists.
But, see… I’m the Managing Editor of the largest independent editorial book site in North America. It feels like I should be reading more of the books that end up on those big important lists. Since those lists tend to be very literary fiction heavy, I can’t help but feel like I got the assignment wrong, like I’m not a serious enough reader to be sitting in this chair with this title and doing what I do.
I chose to sit and write about the feeling because it took me by surprise that I could feel this way after all of these years of writing and talking about books on the internet. It turns out those imposter feelings can and will decide to creep up on you when you don’t expect them to.
So as tired as this discussion is, I’m putting my silliness out there in case you need a reminder, too. If you read that top 100 list and felt a way about how many you have or haven’t read, don’t. It’s a good list of some truly excellent works of literature, and there are also thousands of other fantastic books that didn’t make the list. Is your reading bringing you joy? Teaching you something? Making you think? Making you feel? Is it diverse and inclusive? Is it just a good damn time? If so, then you’re doing just fine.