Sunny's top 100 books of the 21st century

women and queers edition

Hi nerds

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have seen the New York Times latest interactive piece compiling the Top 100 Book of the 21st Century. I, along with some of my bookish peers, immediately noticed a few authors who were snubbed, so I got to work on compiling my personal top 100.

I gave myself a few restrictions, so the below list is made up of only women and queer authors. Translated works post 2001 count, but I also let a few books in that were repackaged recently (re: McNally Editions) that I would argue truly found their readership for the first time in the past 20 years, despite their earlier pub dates. I also limited myself to just one title per author, which was probably the hardest part of this list making.

I also want to note that this isn’t necessarily my favorite top 100 books, nor what I am deeming the ~greatest~. Some I’ve included simply for the cultural phenomenons they’ve become in my realm of the bookish internet.

Finally, I am not a genre or poetry reader unfortunately, so this list leans literary and is restricted to titles I’ve already read. All books have been compiled on Bookshop.org here if you’d like to purchase any of them. The below list is not ranked, I’m not doing that to myself! I’d love to see your own if you make one. Let me know what you think I left off in the comments, I’m ready to fight.

The Top 100

• Just Kids: the only romanticizing of 1970’s New York I can stand for.

• Boy Parts: finally an American Psycho but for the girlie pops.

• Dancing On My Own: a brand new essay collection I think everyone should read.

• Hunger: my introduction to fat phobia and diet culture.

• Commonwealth: this wouldn’t be a list by me without an Ann Patchett.

• A Room Called Earth: neurodivergent rep at it’s finest.

• The Night Circus: my carney ass loves this fantasy novel.

• The New Me: satirical workplace culture, classic “women vs. the void”.

• The Idiot: a perfect campus novel.

• A Field Guide to Getting Lost: this broke my brain in college.

• Dept. of Speculation: vignette perfection!!!!

• Circe: greek myths and witches for grown ups.

• Little Weirds: a tender and perfect essay collection.

• Assembly: a perfect execution of restraint.

• Calypso: again, this wouldn’t be a list by me without Sedaris. I love him.

• White Teeth: what can be said about Zadie Smith that hasn’t already been said?

• The Doloriad: literally the most evil book I’ve read to date.

• Nevada: trans roadtrip narrative, a queer cornerstone.

• Birnam Wood: a perfect sprawling character driven thriller.

• Beautyland: the most earnest novel on this list.

• No One Is Talk About This: perhaps the great Twitter novel?

• Sisters: a modern gothic ghost story.

• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: queer smut!!!

• Detransition, Baby: queer questioning of what it means to make a family.

• Infinite Country: border politics and big family dramas.

• Bunny: do we think this was the first TikTok book for lit fic? Horror lite.

• Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead: misanthrope representation.

• Real Life: bad friends and bad sex in the Midwest!!!

• The Undocumented Americans: I loved this personal exploration of citizenship.

• Pond: one of a kind, shimmering.

• The Glass Castle: one of my favorite memoirs of all time.

• The Friend: dog freaks unite.

• Land of Milk and Honey: food writing!!!

• Martyr!: sad sack artist, diaspora, hidden identities.

• The Rabbit Hutch: Blandine is one of the most memorable narrators ever.

• White on White: an excellent art novel.

• I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness: maybe my favorite desert novel?

• The Performance: climate change, a book in acts, I loved it.

• Lapvona: this is my favorite Moshfegh, fight me!

• The Life of the Mind: academia woes.

• The Wall: dystopian adventure novel excellence!

• Cold Enough for Snow: what claim do we have to know another's inner world?

• The English Understand Wool: I could have read 1000 pages more of this.

• Hurricane Season: one of kind, relentless, harrowing.

• A Little Life: some call it trauma porn, some call it the book of our generation.

• Girl, Woman, Other: a polyphonic modern classic.

• Convenience Store Woman: lonely and charming.

• Freshwater: a completely effective depiction of dysphoria.

• The Sluts: cursed!!!! I loved it.

• No One Belongs Here More Than You: this changed my teenage brain chemistry.

• I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: surreal, eerie, perfect.

• Luster: women on the verge, art, race, open marriages.

• Indelicacy: I loved this tiny novel. Labor, class, women.

• Pew: hysteria and mass psychosis build in this creepy little gothic story.

• Open Throat: we need to be reading more about gay mountain lions.

• Severance: our great apocalypse novel.

• Motherhood: Heti went inside of my brain to write this.

• Tonight I’m Someone Else: this book reminds me of a heatwave. Desire, youth!

• The Employees: an incredibly singular look at work and consumption.

• A Manual for Cleaning Women: this book smells like cigarettes and windex.

• The Body Is Not an Apology: an actually helpful guide to radical self-love.

• Pachinko: an intergenerational family epic.

• Burnt Sugar: THE mommy issues novel!

• The Year of Magical Thinking: loss and charting the unknown waters of grief.

• A Minor Chorus: queer Indigenous survival.

• Strangers to Ourselves: I really loved this deep dive into mental health.

• Second Place: my favorite Cusk. Art, marriage, family.

• The Copenhagen Trilogy: a masterful piece of confessional writing.

• Painting Time: for everyone with art school trauma.

• Mona: the third act of this short novel is incredible.

• Monstrilio: literary horror with a monster metaphor.

• In the Dream House: the most original memoir I’ve ever read.

• Hot Milk: rage, myth, modernity!

• Monarch: cryptic and weird, Jungian and eccentric.

• Death by Landscape: an incredible essay collection about the age of extinction.

• Vanishing Twins: marriage, queerness, LA.

• The Shame: internet obsession and envy.

• Braiding Sweetgrass: sacred Indigenous nature wisdom.

• Sarahland: maybe my favorite short story collection ever.

• The Pisces: classic Broder, still her most memorable to me.

• Bluets: there’s no one like Nelson, a genre busting legend.

• The Days of Abandonment: unhinged Ferrante is my favorite Ferrante.

• Boulder: motherhood, thankless identities, freedom.

• Emergent Strategy: society-help to craft the collective future we deserve.

• Paradise Rot: horror and wonder, hyper-sensual.

• Dogs of Summer: 90’s queer girlhood expertly depicted.

• The Book of Ayn: radical selfishness and ego-death in our modern age.

• Y/N: the extremities of fan culture, a lucid fever dream.

• Fake Accounts: a precise skewering of internet culture.

• Brutes: girlhood is horror!!!

• Tender is the Flesh: we love a cannibalism plot.

• Something New Under the Sun: a darkly satirical take on our ecological reality.

• Normal People: it was a cultural reset.

• The Hard Crowd: Kushner is one of my favorite thinkers, I love this collection.

• Hamnet: transportive, the only book that could get me to care about Shakespeare.

• Revenge of the Scapegoat: familial trauma, chronic illness, academic labor.

• The Goodby People: post-Manson, pre-Disney Los Angeles.

• The Seas: a perfect, sparkling coming of age novel.

• They: an uncanny depiction of artistic suppression and its consequences.

• The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish: sisters, abuse, mental illness.

That’s it for today! Love you, mean it! — CJ