By the Numbers: The New York Times Best Books Ratings
We’ve nearly reached the quarter mark of the Twenty-first Century, so it must be time to emphasize the horse-race aspects of contemporary literature. This appears to be the premise at The New York Times Book Review, which has released three lists in recent months acclaiming “The Best Books of the Century.” In April, The Times published an extensive compendium of over 3200 fiction, poetry, and non-fiction titles chosen from books reviewed by their staff over the past 20 years.[i] In July, the competition underwent further winnowing with “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century,” a numerically ranked inventory compiled by a voting electorate of just over five hundred “literary luminaries.”[ii]
Just days later, the Times offered yet another list, titled “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” Reportedly, “we knew we’d hear from readers who were incensed or gutted or driven wild by grief. How could So-and-So’s book not make the cut?”[iii] (I note in passing that considerable overlap exists among the three compendia.)
A semblance of democratic principles is comforting, so we might consider that the process is trending in a positive direction with participation by the general public. For my purposes, however, I chose to examine a segment of the largest and most top-down of the lists. I isolated the fictional works of the past ten years from April’s multi-thousand item inventory. My plan: to interrogate the selections in hopes of revealing unstated assumptions. Any comment on any book appearing in The New York Times joins an extensive discourse of aesthetic and sociological pronouncements that deserve exploration.
In the interests of full disclosure, as a novelist who cherishes no hope of ever seeing my work referenced in our national “newspaper of record,” I confess to holding a somewhat jaundiced view of what the underlying criteria might be. After all, the once well-known author Mary Hunter Austin critiqued what she saw in 1920 as “the centralization of publishing trades in and around Manhattan.” Geography appeared to reduce American literature to whatever “a small New York group thinks ought to be written and thought.”[iv] Scholars such as Jon Lauck and others have extensively confirmed that little has changed in the more than one hundred years since.[v] Indeed, consolidation and profit motives in publishing have only increased in recent decades, while small presses and self-publishers struggle to bring attention to books that “major” outlets happily ignore.[vi]
My primary aim in examining the past ten years of outstanding fiction was to analyze settings to reveal quantifiable trends. Setting does not receive a great deal of focus in criticism. Indeed, I was struck by the frequency with which location went entirely unmentioned in The Times’ reviews of their favorite books.
I cannot guarantee that all aspects of my methodology are entirely scientific. I identified 437 books by 380 authors; this excludes volumes of poetry and some short story collections (both grouped by the Times under the rubric “fiction”). This was due to the difficulty of characterizing a setting in these writings. Of the 422 novels, many feature multiple settings. To address this dilemma, I chose an “all of the above” approach, identifying 566 settings, which I divided into eleven geographical regions.
Readers may be horrified to learn that I did not, in fact, read every page of every book in the data set. (In my defense, I suspect that not all members of the NYT staff read every book, either.) To ascertain where the most salient events of a plot take place, I relied on reviews, fly leaves, Amazon and Goodreads synopses, skimming, and posting questions online. For the most part, I did not include settings that I found confined to summarized backstory. I did attempt to distinguish and account for those where dramatized scenes occurred with character interactions. I hope readers will concede that varying degrees of subjectivity in literary decisions are unavoidable.
The frequency by which my eleven geographical regions occur as settings in the “best” fiction of the century is summarized below.
Figures are derived from “The Book Review’s Best Books since 2000,” published in The New York Times on April 29, 2024. Details of methodology and other aspects of this study are available by inquiry via the contact form below.
Items marked by asterisk on the chart above:
The Greater American Northeast*—Combines New England, Pennsylvania, and the Mid-Atlantic seaboard. I have included the metro regions of Washington CD and Baltimore in this grouping. Apologies to readers who deem these essentially southern cities.
The American South*—Includes Texas and Oklahoma with apologies to those who consider these states part of The West.
The American Midwest*—My decision to consider multiple settings within works resulted in several novels showing a Midwestern component solely by virtue of including limited episodes in Chicago. It may be worth interrogating the special role of this metropolis in regional and national discourse as a literary setting.
Some elements of these numbers are embarrassingly obvious, but I will point out that only one of the eleven regions represents a single metropolitan area: The Greater New York City area. The remaining ten regions include multiple states, provinces, or nations. As such, more fiction takes place in this limited urban setting than in several larger regions combined. Note that all other parts of the Empire State—Syracuse, Buffalo, the Southern Tier and so on—are placed in the The Greater American Northeast grouping. If we combine these two into an overall American Northeast region, it becomes still more dominant with roughly 26% of all settings.
It seems fair to say that the New York Times deems literature depicting their home locale to be “the best” in all of world literature. In this regard, it’s worth observing that The Times clearly means to present not merely American but international fiction. My findings indicate that settings in other countries constitute 46% of the total, which may reflect intentional decisions. I also calculated that titles in translation make up 12.35% of the 437 books in my data set. As a former literary translator (Russian to English), I applaud efforts to bring work from abroad to the attention of American readers. However, when we assess the imbalances of The Times’ preferences, one might conclude that a disclaimer would be in order: “Best Books of the Century For Those Who Prefer Eastern Cities and Enjoy Reading About Foreign Lands.”
In conclusion, I suggest a few avenues for further inquiry along the lines of the present study. Earlier in the twenty-year retrospective, an extreme imbalance in authors’ genders was painfully obvious; this began to approach 50/50 by the mid-2010s; one might elucidate the process whereby editorial evolution led to an egalitarian approach. More recently, non-binary writers have made an appearance. The delineation of genres has also changed over the years, which may reflect a degree of acceptance beyond the traditional high-brow novel. One can only hope that openness to the rest of our country may one day join the diversities celebrated by the New York Times. And it could be enlightening to generate an explicit—though, likely, very short—list of the publishing houses whose books are most approved.
The author invites those seeking further information on this study to reach out via the contact form:
Notes
[i] The New York Times Books Staff. “The Book Review’s Best Books since 2000.” The New York Times, April 29, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/top-books-list.html?. Accessed on August 8, 2024.
[ii] The New York Times Books Staff. “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” The New York Times, July 8, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html?. Accessed on August 8, 2024.
[iii] The New York Times Books Staff. “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” The New York Times, July 18, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/reader-best-books-21st-century.html. Accessed on August 8, 2024.
[iv] Quoted in Lauck, Jon K., p. 105. From warm center to ragged edge: The erosion of Midwestern literary and historical regionalism, 1920-1965. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017.
[v] Lauck, Jon K., p. 105. From warm center to ragged edge: The erosion of Midwestern literary and historical regionalism, 1920-1965. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017.
[vi] Fister, Tonya. “What Does the Consolidation of the ‘Big Five’ Book Publishers Mean?” Ask.com, August 16, 2022. https://www.ask.com/culture/consolidation-of-big-five-book-publishers-explainer. Accessed August 8, 2024.