Earlier this year, the New York Times released their list of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” The splashy interactive project was equal parts listicle and ballot, inviting readers to select the titles they’d read and generating an instantly viral personalized graphic that testified to their taste. (I’ve read 41, mine said flatly, a lower figure than I’d been expecting.)
In a section on methodology, the New York Times Book Review explains that staffers “sent a survey to hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries,” asking each of them to pick their ten best English-language titles published in the United States in the past twenty-five years. Staffers kept their definition of best hazy on purpose—it could mean a reader’s favourites, or it could mean the works of literature they thought were most likely to endure. Then, a second (and optional) round pitted two random titles against one another and asked the respondents to choose between them.
