Culture Crash: A Few Of Our Favorite Book Recs

The New York Times recently published a list of the 100 greatest books of the 21st century so far. Admittedly, I haven’t read most of the books on the list.. But i have read some. The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai is incredible, ditto The Road by Cormac McCarthy. But inevitably, the list made me think about some of my favorite books that didn’t get a mention on the list. So here are three of my favorite books of the century so far that didn’t make it on The New York Times list.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer tells the story of Oskar, a precocious 9 year old boy who lost his father in 9/11 and is on a quest to find what lock is opened by a strange key his father left behind. The novel also features another timeline about Oskar’s grandparents and the firebombing of Dresden during World War II. It includes plenty of tender, open-hearted writing that will absolutely devastate you but in exactly the right way.

The second book on my list is I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid, which is maybe the most unsettling book I’ve ever read… and I read a lot of horror. The book is about a man, Jake, bringing his girlfriend to meet his parents on their farm for what turns out to be a creepy and disastrous trip. Full of tension and musings on the nature of a relationship heading south, Reid’s novel is short enough to read in one sitting but creepy enough that I had to put it down a few times.

And finally, my favorite book of the century to date, Stephen King’s 11/22/63. King himself submitted a ballot for the New York Times list and controversially included a work of his own, Under the Dome. But for my money, 11/22/63 is the superior work. The novel is about a man who goes through a time portal back to 1958 to stop the assassination of John F. Kennedy. While that’s the premise, the trick of the book is that it’s actually just about living in the past. Full of rich details from the 1950s and 1960s, 11/22/63 is at times a romance, and at times a pulse-pounding sci-fi novel that doesn’t overstay its welcome, even at 849 pages.

Interestingly, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and 11/22/63 have all been adapted to the screen via two movies and a miniseries, but I don’t think any of those adaptations came even close to the magic of the source novels, and I think even viewers of those versions will find plenty to love in the original texts.