You Dummies, You Absolute Dummies, THESE Are the Best Books Of the Past 25 Years

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As of middle school I wanted to become a movie director when I grew up, and I read and watched a lot of very strange things. (I cannot say that I made much of Wild Strawberries, for example; no spaceships.) Anyway, at some point in all that I learned that the true, technical definition of the term “blockbuster” is, or at some point was, “a movie that is so successful that it reintroduces people to the very idea ‘going to the movies in the first place’ and thus is not only successful in itself, but is the cause of success in adjacent movies.” That’s what a big listicle like the recent New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” piece does. We all respond with our own little lists, making fun of ourselves and of the Times for participating in the supposedly vapid exercise known as the listicle as we do so, and the thing is, that stuff gets read. One day a few months ago I dashed off this list of the best English-language novels of the last 50 years and it got me more subscriptions than stuff I’ve worked on much harder.

I think it’s time to stop apologizing for the listicle-form, frankly. Lists are nice. They can be continuous or discontinuous as the writer desires, some items calling back to earlier items and other items coming in at the front door frozen and inappropriately dressed like an important stranger in an English mystery, and the fun of deciding how much of each to do is a little like the fun of deciding how silly/serious a mix tape will be. You can cover a lot of territory and your reader can learn a lot painlessly. A good listicle is a valuable thing. The Times one wasn’t that good of a listicle, although it was better than I expected (Lydia Davis!), but that’s more because committee-authored lists are usually duller than individually-authored ones. When I read the directors’ lists for that Sight and Sound poll, I learn about movies I didn’t know about before; when I read the Sign and Sound poll, it’s just to find out if e.g. Godard is shifting downward in the canon relative to e.g., I don’t know, Fassbinder. It’s to see tectonic activity within the canon, and what’s fun is to hang out on the borders of the canon. Just like when you’re in some beautiful old European city you’ll have a more memorable experience at the second most beautiful basilica.

Anyway, with no shame, here are the best 100 books of the century, according to me, suckers. I am going to replicate the Times’s most insane move and combine fiction, nonfiction, and poetry like it’s NBD. These books are not listed in order of goodness. There may be slightly more than 100.

Gone and Canaries in the Mineshaft, Renata Adler

Her most recent two books besides the anthology that came out a few years ago. Gone is one of those books where you know it’s a masterpiece because of how much it does with a horrible premise (“Waaah I’m sad that the Shawn New Yorker doesn’t exist anymore”). Mineshaft has a number of her classics and is full of strange phrases that will stick in your mind forever (“The porch overlooks no such thing”).

123 and Infinite Ascent, David Berlinski

He’s a reactionary and the last time I looked at him it looked like he was going full fash. However. He understands math and writes about it beautifully and clearly. If there are other people doing that job as well, let me know about them.

Neoreaction: A Basilisk, Elizabeth Sandifer

Speaking of reactionaries! If you’d like to understand the intellectual milieu that influenced the Thiel-em[et]ic nonsense that in turn influenced our potential next Vice President, Sandifer’s entertainingly angry and thorough reading of texts by Nick Land, “Mencius Moldbug” (I can’t type that fake-ass name without retching) and others will catch you right up.

Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds

I require one thing in a book of nonfiction: that it tell me about postpunk bands I don’t know about yet.

Stories in the Worst Way and “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” Garielle Lutz

One of my favorites of the School of Lish/this-sentence-has-a-mind-of-its-own writers.