A Personal Best Book List

Alternate title: Suck it, New York Times

If you want to rile me up, give me a list of best books.

And if you want to see me pout, tell me I’ve read fewer than 1/10 of the books on that list.

My corners of the internet were all aflutter this week over the New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list. I eagerly checked back each day to see the new installment of books as they slowly released the full list.

By Monday, I was pissed.

That’s IT?!

I consider myself well read. I average between 60-70 books a year. If I’m talking to someone and they mention a book, chances are I’ve read it.

So to learn that I’ve only read 7 percent of what the paper of record¹ considers the best 100 books of the last 24 years was … well, it was rude. (And I’d actually only read five of my own volition. I would have NEVER picked up The Road, perhaps The World’s Most Depressing Book, had it not been for a college English class.)

I started wondering what would be on my own list. (Other New York Times readers did, too, and I like their resulting list a lot better … partially because I’ve read 22 books on it.)

I immediately thought about Station Eleven, a book I read in 2018 with scenes that I still think about monthly. It’s a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel, far outside my typical genre preference, but it has some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read, and it links seemingly disconnected stories together in an incredibly creative way. (It’s on the NYT’s original list.)

I also thought about Gone Girl. I read this in 2012 along with the rest of the world, and I can still tell you exactly where I was when I turned the page and read the book’s big twist.² Again, thrillers are not my top pick (maybe because so few of them live up to Gone Girl), but Gillian Flynn’s twist remains among the most clever goosebump-inducing moments I’ve experienced in pop culture. (It’s not on the NYT’s original list, but it is on their reader-selected list.)

But then I started thinking about the books that were important to me when I was growing up. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and I was 10 years old at the start of the 21st century,³ so I have lots of book memories from the last 24 years.

And all I could think of was Jennifer Weiner.

Adorable Michigan bookstore that I spent just one minute in so we could stay on schedule. (Thank you for keeping me honest, Patrick.)

Jennifer Weiner writes, for lack of a better word, chick lit. (We say “women’s fiction” now, but before we were woke, we called it chick lit.) She’s on the smarter side of chick lit, and she breaks the mold often, but she’s still writing about female protagonists falling in and out of love.

Jennifer Weiner published her first book in 2001, lining up nicely with the 21st century borders we’ve drawn here. I probably read it a couple years later, as a freshman in high school.⁴ And I proceeded to devour everything else she had written — and would write: To this day, when I see she has a new book coming out, I immediately request it from the library.

She isn’t my favorite author. I wouldn’t recommend her books to every reader. She doesn’t write stories that stick with me for years or change my reading habits or leave any lasting impression beyond the 250-300 pages I spend in each world.

But I like reading her books. She’s a reliable 3.5, even 4 star author for me. And isn’t that kind of the point of reading?

After I read the New York Times list, I started looking for their other annual notable books lists.⁵ I realized that, especially in the last five years, I’ve started to read quite a few books on these lists. But I’ve only finished a handful. Because the books that make these lists are often, as I saw someone phrase it the other day, unrelentingly sad. Let’s go back to The Road, shall we? A father and his son are on a journey after an event that has killed almost all life on earth. The boy’s mother has died by suicide. The father dies toward the end of the book. The boy stays with the body for three days. Other gut-wrenchingly sad things happen. WHY ARE WE RECOMMENDING THIS TO ANYONE.

There is no Jennifer Weiner on either New York Times list — neither its original nor its reader-selected picks. She didn’t make my own personal list of “the best books of the 21st century if we can pretend the 21st century started in 1998 because of Harry Potter.”⁶

But she represents something more important than any list: Read what you like. Read to escape, or to learn, or to experience a world different than your own, or to have a little fun. Don’t let anybody make you feel bad about reading whatever you want to read.

Unless it’s The Road.

Brattle Book Shop in Boston, where I bought a copy of Maurice Sendak’s “The Night Kitchen” while pregnant with Foster.

Pressley’s 10 Best Books of the Last 26 Years

(In order of publication year, oldest to newest)

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone: … duh (not a Potterhead; still read every book at least once and saw every movie)

Bloomability: My favorite book growing up (excluding From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, but “Pressley’s 10 Best Books of the Last 26 Years Except for One that Was Published in 1967” just didn’t quite … flow)

Interpreter of Maladies: Taught me to love short stories

Prep: Taught me to love coming-of-age stories

Gone Girl: Taught me to love a cleverly written twist

Station Eleven: Taught me to think outside the genre box

When Breath Becomes Air

Educated

Know My Name: Along with the previous two, taught me to love real, raw memoirs from virtual unknowns

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: Includes the single most beautifully written scene (about Max, IYKYK) I’ve ever read

1. Well, kind of: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html#methodology

2. The Thunderbird Inn in Savannah, Georgia. I gasped so loudly I probably woke up the people in the room next door.

3. I turned 11 in August 2000. I am weirdly proud of being an 80s baby, even if I can only claim it by 4 months.

4. I have a lot of feelings about this now because Jennifer Weiner’s books include A Lot of Sex with A Lot of Details, something I don’t know if I’d want my own high school freshman daughter to be reading.

5. That link has lists from 2004-2019, in case you’re also interested in judging yourself against 15 years’ worth of arbitrary measuring sticks.

6. Yes: I, a Southern Baptist, read and loved Harry Potter. This part of my life’s trajectory will deserve its own newsletter one day so I can tell the story of how my dad, after a Tammy in our church found out I was reading HP, sarcastically told her he actually *wanted* me to become a witch. (That is a grammatically and punctuation-ally tough sentence. Thanks for sticking with me. Also, if you grew up evangelical, you NEED to click that link.)