Open Thread: Best Books of the 21st Century?

We’re 25 Years In! You Tell Me.

It just hit me yesterday that we’re a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century. Naturally, that made me think about all the books we’ve dumped on the galaxy in the past twenty-five years. We publish hundreds of thousands every year, and most sink without a ripple. But some remain relevant and even grow in importance. What books published in the last twenty-five years stand out to you?

I’ve got some ideas, but I want to hear yours.

Photo by Dewang Gupta on Unsplash

When it comes to nonfiction, here are several I think will continue to matter for years to come. You can see the shape of my own thinking in some of these titles.

• Robert Louis Wilken’s The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (2003).

• Charles Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005)

• Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007)

• Larry Siedentop’s Inventing the Individual (2014)

• Joel Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth (2017)

• Tom Holland’s Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019)

• Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World (2020)

• Johan Norberg’s Peak Human (2025)

As for fiction, here’s how I’m leaning.

• Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (2000)

• David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004)

• Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004)

• Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses (2004; English translation 2012)

• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)

• Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009)

• Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus (2012; English translation 2015)

• Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014)

Both of these lists reflect my limited interests and reading history, not to mention personal quirks of literary taste. But that’s great because you don’t have those limitations. You’ve got your own—not to mention your own quirks! And I want to hear all about them.

So, now that we’ve stuffed twenty-five years in the sack, what books do you see with staying power? What are your contenders for the best books of the past quarter century?

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