Our Favorite Books from the NYT Best Books of the 21st Century List

We’re starting off strong with My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, because she’s not just one of our favorites—she seems to be everyone else’s, too. Ferrante is the only author on the list for three separate titles, the others being The Story of the Lost Child and The Days of Abandonment. 

Not only is My Brilliant Friend now a HBO series, but its popularity is also making a comeback as reading material. The first in an incredible series, the timeline spans over 60 years. It introduces us to two friends in this first book, fiery Lila and bookish Elena, in a poor neighborhood in 1950s Naples. Through the lens of their friendship, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it itself is transformed, and as the lives of these two women are changed along with it. 

The winner of many other awards, among them the 2016 Pulitzer prize for fiction, The Sympathizer is a gripping espionage tale that explores identity, love, and America in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The narrator is a half-French and half-Vietnamese communist double agent army captain. Following the Fall of Saigon, he comes to America, and reports back to his communist superiors in Vietnam whilst building a new, fake life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles. 

Another Pulitzer prize winner and inspiration for an award-winning HBO series, Olive Kitteridge is the hefty novel that can handle the heat of all its attention. Fusing together the stories of 13 characters in one book, Olive Kitteridge tells the story of them all. 

Kitteridge is a retired schoolteacher who lives in Crosby, Maine–right at the edge of the continent, just how she likes it. She deplores the changes to her little town, and the whole world for that matter, though she doesn’t always recognize the small-scale changes in those around her: a lounge musician plagued by heartbreak, a former student who has lost the will to live, Olive’s own adult child who’s ruled by her irrational sensitivities, and even Henry, whose loyalty to his marriage is both his blessing and his curse. 

As Olive watches everyone grapple with the things that trouble them, she begins to understand herself and her life more deeply. At its core, Olive Kitteridge is a profound navigation of the human condition.

In a beautiful reinvention of the coming-of-age model, We The Animals is at once sly and intense in its representation of familial unity and the transformation one makes when they go from child to adult. It’s the story of Paps and Ma from Brooklyn, along with the three chaotic boys they raise. 

The boys tumble and crash their way through childhood; smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from garbage, cowering away when their parents battle, and tiptoeing around the house when Ma is home from her graveyard shift. Ma is white, and Paps Puerto Rican, and their love is simultaneously serious and dangerous. 

As they build and destroy their family over and over again, the boys learn that love in this family is fierce and absorbing, and that both chaos and euphoria come as a result of belonging completely to one another. 

Yet another Pulitzer prize winner (and a recent one at that) Demon Copperhead is also a type of coming-of-age story, but in a different vein. Barbara Kingsolver took significant inspiration from the anger, compassion, and faith of Dickens’ David Copperfield and gave the Victorian epic a modern, Appalachian twist. 

In it, Demon Copperhead is born to a single, teenage mother in a single-wide trailer in the mountains of Southern Appalachia. Armed only with his father’s good looks and copper-colored hair and his dry wit, it’s a wonder Demon survived at all. 

As he navigates the horrors of foster care, child labor, neglected school systems, athletic success, addiction, love, and loss, he confronts his own invisibility in a society where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates is known as “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” by Rolling Stone, and by the rest of us. Between the World and Me has only further proven that point. Written as a letter to his adolescent son, Coates uses personal narrative to analyze history, report on the present, and pave an avenue for the future of understanding America’s race crisis. 

He introduces the point that the idea of “race” has only ever been damaging to Black people no matter which way you spin it; and so he attempts to answer questions like what is it like to inhabit a Black body and how do you reckon with it? And how can we overcome this history fraught with hate and free ourselves from the burdens of being Black? 

He shares with his son and his readers all the revelatory experiences that revealed to him the truth about his place in the world. And he proposes ways to move forward. 

Helen MacDonald’s multi-award-winning novel manages to combine nature writing with memoir, and heartbreak and hilarity, and presents it through the lens of unflinching bereavement in H is for Hawk. When MacDonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, the grief was almost too much to bear. 

Though she had always been captivated by hawks, which led to her being a falconer, she had never been tempted to train the goshawk, one of the most vicious predators, before her father’s passing. But once she saw the same fierce and feral anger in the hawk that she felt within, she knew that training one would be the only way to live through her grief. 

Turning to guidance of T.H. White’s The Goshawk, she projected herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her.” But this journey into Mabel’s world tested the limits of MacDonald’s humanity. 

Alison Bechdel presents a groundbreaking graphic memoir  illustrating the fraught relationship between her and her late father. Bruce Bechdel was not just an English teacher and an art director for the local funeral home (nicknamed the “Fun Home” by Alison’s family) – he was also gay. Unfortunately, Alison did not discover this fact until she went off to college and came out as a lesbian. He passed soon after this revelation, leaving Alison to solve the mystery of his legacy alone.

Atonement is, as the title suggests, the exploration of guilt, forgiveness, and the desperation to atone. With WWII as the backdrop in England in 1935, we’re introduced to 13-year-old Briony, who misinterprets a letter sent from the housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner to her older sister, Cecelia. In an attempt to protect her sister, Briony wrongfully accuses Robbie of a crime, changing all three of their lives forever. Briony will live the rest of her life desperate for atonement. But there’s a shocking twist in this book that you definitely won’t see coming. 

So incredible that now there is an Oscar-nominated film about it, Erasure can best be described as “quietly devastating.” In it, we meet Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a previously critically-acclaimed writer whose most recent manuscript has been rejected by 17 publishers. 

Struggling with real family tragedies like his mother’s worsening Alzheimer’s and his father’s previous suicide, he can’t help but seethe when works like We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, written by a woman who visited some family in Harlem for a few days, reach new heights of popularity and he can’t even get a publisher to take on his new piece after producing several successful works with real substance. 

To cope with his rage and despair, he writes My Pafology, an indictment of Juanita Mae Jenkins’ best-seller under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. He didn’t expect it to be taken seriously, nevermind published, but suddenly it’s the next big thing, and Erasure is the story of how he copes with the personal and professional fallout. 

In yet another Pulitzer prize winner, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is set in New York City, 1939. Joe Kavalier is a young artist who has recently pulled off the miracle of escaping from Hitler’s Prague. To bring the rest of his family to freedom, he needs to make big money, and fast. 

Luckily for him, his cousin, Sammy Clay, is looking for an artist who will help him bring the comic book to life. As the two let their fantasies, fears, and dreams drive them, they create unforgettable characters–the Escapist, the Monitor, and Rosa-Saks-inspired Luna Moth–to begin the charge of America’s newest novelty. Though the shadow of Hitler has fallen across Europe, the Golden Age of Comic Books has begun.

The Road is Cormac McCarthy’s at once bleak and brilliant Pulitzer prize winner. In the midst of the destruction that has transformed America into an apocalyptic hellscape, a father and his young son walk. They always go in the direction of the coast, though they have no idea if matters will improve when they get there. But among glimmers of hope and humor, they persevere, and their relationship becomes the only good thing in a world of utter devastation.

When Joan Didion’s life descended into grief and she could see no light at the end of the tunnel, she wrote the light into existence. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband was already dead, having suffered an unexpected and fatal coronary after working and living together for 40 years. In the months that followed, Didion reinvented her views on death, illness, probability, luck, children, marriage, memory, the limits of sanity, and the idea of life itself. And the result became The Year of Magical Thinking.