Below is a table of New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century which I intend to read. Alongside Goodreads/StoryGraph I will also update this table with my progress. Currently 5 books read from list (May, 2026)
| Author | Book title | Status | Genre | Pages | Rating (dnf-5) |
| Elena Ferrante | My Brilliant Friend | Unread | Fiction | 336 | DNF |
| Isabel Wilkerson | The Warmth of Other Suns | Unread | History | 640 | |
| Hilary Mantel | Wolf Hall | Unread | Historical fiction | 653 | |
| Edward P. Jones | The Known World | Unread | Fiction | 432 | |
| Jonathan Franzen | The Corrections | Unread | Fiction | 568 | |
| Roberto Bolaño | 2666 | Unread | Fiction | 912 | |
| Colson Whitehead | The Underground Railroad | Unread | Fiction | 320 | |
| W. G. Sebald | Austerlitz | Unread | Fiction | 416 | |
| Kazuo Ishiguro | Never Let Me Go | Unread | Dystopian fiction | 288 | |
| Marilynne Robinson | Gilead | Unread | Fiction | 256 | |
| Junot Díaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao | Unread | Fiction | 340 | |
| Joan Didion | The Year of Magical Thinking | Unread | Memoir | 227 | |
| Cormac McCarthy | The Road | Unread | Dystopian fiction | 287 | |
| Rachel Cusk | Outline | Unread | Fiction | 249 | |
| Min Jin Lee | Pachinko | Unread | Historical fiction | 496 | |
| Michael Chabon | The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay | Unread | Fiction | 639 | |
| Paul Beatty | The Sellout | Unread | Satire | 304 | |
| George Saunders | Lincoln in the Bardo | Unread | Historical fiction | 368 | |
| Patrick Radden Keefe | Say Nothing | Unread | Non-fiction | 464 | |
| Percival Everett | Erasure | Unread | Satire | 263 | |
| Matthew Desmond | Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City | Unread | Non-fiction | 418 | |
| Katherine Boo | Behind the Beautiful Forevers | Unread | Non-fiction | 288 | |
| Alice Munro | Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage | Unread | Short stories | 320 | |
| Richard Powers | The Overstory | Unread | Fiction | 512 | |
| Adrian Nicole LeBlanc | Random Family | Unread | Non-fiction | 432 | |
| Ian McEwan | Atonement | Unread | Fiction | 371 | |
| Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | Americanah | Unread | Fiction | 477 | |
| David Mitchell | Cloud Atlas | Unread | Fiction | 544 | |
| Helen DeWitt | The Last Samurai | Unread | Fiction | 530 | |
| Jesmyn Ward | Sing, Unburied, Sing | Unread | Fiction | 304 | |
| Zadie Smith | White Teeth | Unread | Postcolonial Literature | 448 | |
| Alan Hollinghurst | The Line of Beauty | Unread | Fiction | 501 | |
| Jesmyn Ward | Salvage the Bones | Unread | Fiction | 258 | |
| Claudia Rankine | Citizen: An American Lyric | Unread | Poetry, Non-fiction | 160 | |
| Alison Bechdel | Fun Home | Unread | Graphic novel, Memoir | 232 | |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates | Between the World and Me | Unread | Non-fiction | 176 | |
| Annie Ernaux | The Years | Unread | Memoir | 256 | |
| Roberto Bolaño | The Savage Detectives | Unread | Fiction | 577 | |
| Jennifer Egan | A Visit from the Goon Squad | Unread | Fiction | 352 | |
| Helen Macdonald | H is for Hawk | Unread | Memoir | 300 | |
| Claire Keegan | Small Things like These | Unread | Fiction | 128 | |
| Marlon James | A Brief History of Seven Killings | Unread | Fiction | 688 | |
| Tony Judt | Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Unread | History, Non-fiction | 960 | |
| N. K. Jemisin | The Fifth Season | Unread | Science fiction, Fantasy | 512 | |
| Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Unread | Memoir | 160 | |
| Donna Tartt | The Goldfinch | Unread | Fiction | 784 | |
| Toni Morrison | A Mercy | Unread | Fiction | 176 | |
| Marjane Satrapi | Persepolis | Unread | Graphic novel, Memoir | 153 | |
| Han Kang | The Vegetarian | Unread | Fiction | 160 | 4 |
| Hernan Diaz | Trust | Unread | Fiction | 416 | |
| Kate Atkinson | Life After Life | Unread | Fiction | 544 | |
| Denis Johnson | Train Dreams | Unread | Novella | 128 | |
| Alice Munro | Runaway | Unread | Short stories | 352 | |
| George Saunders | Tenth of December: Stories | Unread | Short stories | 251 | |
| Lawrence Wright | The Looming Tower | Unread | Non-fiction | 480 | |
| Rachel Kushner | The Flamethrowers | Unread | Fiction | 383 | |
| Barbara Ehrenreich | Nickel and Dimed | Unread | Non-fiction | 240 | |
| Hua Hsu | Stay True | Unread | Memoir | 208 | |
| Jeffrey Eugenides | Middlesex | Unread | Family saga | 529 | |
| Kiese Laymon | Heavy: An American Memoir | Unread | Memoir | 256 | |
| Barbara Kingsolver | Demon Copperhead | Unread | Fiction | 560 | |
| Ben Lerner | 10:04 | Unread | Fiction | 256 | DNF |
| Mary Gaitskill | Veronica | Unread | Fiction | 257 | |
| Rebecca Makkai | The Great Believers | Unread | Fiction | 421 | |
| Philip Roth | The Plot Against America | Unread | Fiction | 391 | |
| Justin Torres | We the Animals | Unread | Fiction | 128 | |
| Andrew Solomon | Far From the Tree | Unread | Non-fiction | 976 | |
| Sigrid Nunez | The Friend | Unread | Fiction | 224 | |
| Michelle Alexander | The New Jim Crow | Unread | Non-fiction | 336 | |
| Edward P. Jones | All Aunt Hagar’s Children | Unread | Short stories | 400 | |
| Tove Ditlevsen | The Copenhagen Trilogy | Unread | Memoir | 384 | |
| Svetlana Alexievich | Secondhand Time | Unread | Non-fiction | 470 | |
| Robert A. Caro | The Passage of Power | Unread | Biography | 736 | |
| Elizabeth Strout | Olive Kitteridge | Unread | Fiction | 288 | |
| Mohsin Hamid | Exit West | Unread | Fiction | 240 | |
| Tayari Jones | An American Marriage | Unread | Fiction | 320 | |
| Jon Fosse | Septology | Read | Fiction | 825 | 3.75 |
| Gabrielle Zevin | Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow | Unread | Fiction | 416 | |
| Lucia Berlin | A Manual for Cleaning Women | Unread | Short stories | 432 | |
| Elena Ferrante | The Story of the Lost Child | Unread | Fiction | 480 | |
| John Jeremiah Sullivan | Pulphead | Unread | Non-fiction, Essays | 384 | |
| Fernanda Melchor | Hurricane Season | Unread | Fiction | 224 | |
| Benjamín Labatut | When We Cease to Understand the World | Unread | Fiction, Non-fiction | 192 | |
| Siddhartha Mukherjee | The Emperor of All Maladies | Unread | Non-fiction | 608 | |
| George Saunders | Pastoralia | Unread | Short stories | 208 | |
| David W. Blight | Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom | Unread | Biography | 912 | |
| Torrey Peters | Detransition, Baby | Unread | Fiction | 368 | |
| Lydia Davis | The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis | Unread | Short stories | 752 | |
| Hisham Matar | The Return | Unread | Memoir | 256 | |
| Viet Thanh Nguyen | The Sympathizer | Unread | Fiction | 384 | |
| Philip Roth | The Human Stain | Unread | Fiction | 361 | |
| Elena Ferrante | The Days of Abandonment | Unread | Fiction | 192 | |
| Emily St. John Mandel | Station Eleven | Read | Dystopian fiction | 336 | 2 |
| Zadie Smith | On Beauty | Unread | Fiction | 464 | |
| Hilary Mantel | Bring Up the Bodies | Unread | Historical fiction | 432 | |
| Saidiya Hartman | Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments | Unread | Non-fiction | 432 | |
| Jesmyn Ward | Men We Reaped | Unread | Memoir | 272 | |
| Ann Patchett | Bel Canto | Unread | Fiction | 352 | |
| Ali Smith | How to Be Both | Unread | Fiction | 384 | |
| Denis Johnson | Tree of Smoke | Unread | Fiction | 624 |
I have also uploaded a .txt file here to create a Python program which allows me to select books to read based on the following criteria: page count, genre, status.
Cover to Cover 