Reading in Public No. 44: What do we mean when we call a book "the best"?
Why the term best gets us so fired up and how I define a best book
Like so many of us, I got completely swept up in the New York Times’ Best Books of the 21st Century list last week. Love it or hate it, the list excelled at spurring conversation about books, which is—I would argue—the most important thing for a list like this to do. In their roundtable podcast about the list, a few members of the Book Review editorial board nearly said as much
There are many reasons this particular list took on a viral quality when other such projects don’t—the rollout, the sharing of ballots and methodology while still shrouding some things in secrecy, the interactive element of the list—but I think one reason this thing took on a life of its own is because it dared to use the term “best.” Furthermore, it doubled down on the idea of best by ranking the books within the list itself.
Now in some ways we in the book world have become immune to the phrase “best books.” Everyone who shares book opinions publicly (myself included) puts out best books of the year lists come December. But in the context of an individual reader putting out a list, we understand the connotation of “best” to mean personal best or favorites—not an objective arbitration of merit. And we understand that this individual hasn’t read all of the books published in a given year—not even close—so best is also limited by the scope of one person’s reading.
But it means something different when a major publication—a major publication with taste making literary influence and one famous for calling books “notable”—creates an aggregated best of list. So today I want to parcel out what we might mean by “best” and why this term ignites a fire within so many of us.
First, a quick aside. When I taught A.P. Language and Composition, my favorite assignment to teach was the definition essay. Within the conscripts of the AP Lang exam, most of the rhetorical argument essays students have to write really come down to arguments of definition—how you define a particular term within a particular context (some past student examples I remember are what it means to be pretty vs. cute in the language of high school, what does it mean to have faith outside of religion, or how we define cultural appropriate in a give time period). While this kind of thing drives some readers crazy because it’s pure rhetorical exercise, as a language nerd, I find it infinitely fascinating. Because I think that at the root of most arguments is an argument over how we define a set of terms.
Which takes us to the Best Books of the 21st Century list, itself a sort of rhetorical proposition. When I saw that the NYT didn’t define the term best for those who submitted ballots1, my mind immediately leapt to the definition essay. Each ballot is, in a way, its own argument for what makes a book the best. Sarah MacLeans’ romance-heavy ballot is making an argument that this genre deserves consideration in the conversation and Scott Turow’s ballot with all four Neapolitan novels is arguing that Elena Ferrante is the best writer of the 21st century. The aggregated list then becomes either a larger cultural consensus about what is best2 about what makes a book the best.
So, for me, this list may be about how we define best when it comes to literature as much as (if not more than) what the best books actually are. I actually like the fact that best was left up to each individual, but I would have loved to get a sentence or two from everyone explaining their own reasoning3.
Regardless of how anyone is defining it, best is a loaded term because all it literally means is better than everything else. I know this is obvious, but it’s also an easily overlooked aspect of why this term matters. Best is inherently hierarchical, and, in this case, that hierarchical element is compounded by the fact that fiction and nonfiction are lumped together, authors can appear more than once, and, of course, the books are then ranked. With this list, they’re telling us that when they mean best they really mean it in the true hierarchical form, without regard to genre or author4.
This list is very different from something like The Atlantic’s list of The Great American Novels that was published earlier this year. That list is unranked, not limited to a set number, and not describing the books as best. It’s more specific in its project because Great American Novels are a particular type of book so while we can argue over whether the books do or don’t fit the description and what is missing from the list, we’re not necessarily comparing the books one-to-one saying, for example, that The Great Gatsby is a Greater More American Novel than The Catcher in the Rye. The Atlantic list prompted some chatter. It’s certainly a list that I’d like to read more from, but it wasn’t even close to the literary cultural moment as the NYT list.
With this ranked best-of list, it’s much easier to join the conversation by disagreeing with the hierarchy, no matter how many or how few of the books you have read. I haven’t read every book on the NYT list either, but I can say with the utmost confidence that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is not a better book than Station Eleven, On Beauty, or Me We Reaped—all of which it appears above in the NYT list. And I can be appalled at books that aren’t there because I firmly believe that they are better than some of the books that are on the list. The combined specificity of a ranking system with the complete lack of limiting factors in how we are judging superiority, is the perfect combination for maximum discussability.
And this is not the kind of conversation we often have in the readerly world5. We readers bend over backwards to talk about how books aren’t bad, they just aren’t right for us. I myself tend to give dozens of caveats before launching into my own best books posts and podcasts—I want to make sure everyone knows I’m not positioning myself as the arbiter of taste and that I’m presenting my bests with a large dose of humility. I appreciated that the NYT list avoided all this rigamarole and went for it—and that the discussion of the list encouraged all of us to do the same. It made the book internet so fiery! Instead of hiding behind terms like favorite or “this book didn’t work for me,” we were adamantly insisting on the books were better than those on the list. Best is a powerful word.
In my eyes, the aggregated list seems to indicate that many submissions defined best in terms of sentence-level prose and what I can best describe as a transportive quality. Many of the books I’ve read on this list check at least one of these boxes. Clearly there were writers contributing to this list who thought about the sentences they’d studied in MFA programs or the writers they try to emulate when they made their lists. There are also a lot of sweeping historical fiction novels and diverting tales that do allow for a sort of escape, even if they can’t be described as escapist fiction (there aren’t many light or fun books on this list…). There wasn’t a ton of experimental fiction or particularly voicey novels. There wasn’t much autofiction. Based onthe books I have read, there was a tilt towards traditional narrative styles and expansive stories. At this point, that’s all I can glean about how some of the submitters consciously or unconsciously defined best. I hope more writers and critics share their personal definitions of best and how they created their ballots in the coming days and weeks.
All in all, I feel somewhat freed by this moment to start using the terminology of good, better, and best more often when it comes to talking about books. But I also want to define—for you and for myself—what I mean by best. I’ve written many times about some of the things I love most in my books: a connectivity between the book and books that have come before, strong narrative voices, structurally driven novels, and books where the ending makes me think differently about the entire narrative. But these don’t necessarily make a book a best book. They’re qualities I love in fiction and styles that most suit my taste, but best means something different to me.
My definition of a best book fits one of Italo Calvino’s defintion of a classic book. A best book is “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.” Best books are ones that I can reread multiple times because I know I’ll get something new out of them. They are the ones that so perfectly capture a moment in time that people will read them in 100 years to find out what life was like now or those that are timeless in a way that lets them speak across centuries. Best books evolve our understanding of what storytelling to do and offer nuance perspectives on the stories we thought we understood.
Is all of this subjective? Well, yes and no. There’s room for debate and discussion, and the predictive quality of this definition means a lot of it is guesswork. We can’t know what books will “stand the test of time” with any degree of certainty—I think many readers and critics from previous eras would be shocked (even appalled!) at what books we now consider classics. There’s also a very reasonable argument to be made that the best books are the ones that perfectly say what they want to say on a first reading! On the other hand, there is a level of objectivity to examining a book for its complexity, which is not the same as literariness or intellectualism or pure confusion. And in my view of best, complexity and nuance are two of the most important qualities of a best book for me—I want to be able to revisit a book and find something new there every time I open it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the term “best.” Does it make you excited? Argumentative? Contrary? Intrigued? Why did this best of list get us all so riled up? Most importantly, how do you define a best book??
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Happy reading!
Sara
They went on to muddle this by including additions like “most important” and “influential” when introducing their own list.
Or a lowest common denominator situation with the books that appealed more widely to this select group of 503. This list doesn’t feel like that to me, but I think a list with this methodology could become that and I’m interested to see how the public list pans out.
We have gotten some of this. Book Review editors have explained some of their thinking in this piece and in this podcast episode. Nick Hornby and Max Read wrote newsletters about it.
I have mixed feelings about the blend of fiction and nonfiction. I think it’s an interesting and worthwhile project, but it also makes the absence of specific genres (romance, memoir, mysteries, etc.) all the more evident.
Although this is the kind of thing we did all the time when planning curriculum and while I hated it at the time, the discussion around this list made me miss it.
I want all my reading to be this: A best book is “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”!❤️
Great post! I honestly feel like “best” is a weak/overgeneralized/left to individual description word for describing books at this point. It’s great for SEO, grabbing attention, etc. but I’m more struck by other ways of describing books. “Books that made me think” “books that exceeded my expectations” etc etc.