Discerning subscribers to the final December issue of the 1968 Sunday New York Times Book Review were introduced to a new tool of literary evaluation when editor Francis Brown premiered the original year-end-list of the best titles published in the previous twelve months. Editor since 1949, Brown’s novelty exchanged shoe leather for the ivory tower as it were. The New York Times had used a proprietary formula to calculate best sellers since 1931, expanding to analyzing sales beyond the five boroughs a few months later, and the nation at large a decade after, but “The Ten Best Books of 1968” was something manifestly different, a guide not for consumers, but for readers, in keeping with the bread-and-butter reviews that were regularly published. Brown was a preternaturally cautious newspaperman through-and-through, but this new list – separate from the commercial concerns of the established weekly roundup – proved that the Sulzbergers wanted to appear as concerned with Parnassus as they were with Mammon. What strikes me today is the general quality of the ’68 list when compared to that year’s top sellers, for while there are some bona fide classics in the later (Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, John Updike’s Couples) the bulk are paperback broken-spine beach reads like Arthur Hailey’s Airport and Fletcher Knebbel’s Vanished, the former selling an astonishing 170 million. Today both are out of print. Meanwhile, the more high-minded critics’ list included poetry by John Berryman, three volumes of George Orwell’s collected essays, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and rather shockingly for a mainstream publication (no matter how liberal its reputation) the Black nationalist Eldrige Cleaver’s Soul on Ice.
As the Grey Lady turns, so does the rest of American journalism, and from Brown’s innovation a thousand yead-end-best-of-lists have blossomed across any publication that focuses on culture. Not just books, obviously, but also movies, albums, television shows – any aspect of cultural production that can be categorized and classified, ranked and evaluated. Newspapers from the Times to The Washington Post, legacy publications such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic, trade publications like Publishers Weekly and Kirkus (the later with their coveted starred reviews), and comparative internet upstarts such as The Millions and Literary Hub (disclosure that I’m an emeritus writer at the first and a current staff writer at the later) list their favorites in one-way-or-another. There are variations different periodicals’ criteria; The Millions features dozens of December essays from individual writers focusing on what they’ve read that year rather than sopping to the myth of objectivity, while the later is arguably more known for its “Most Anticipated” of forthcoming books than a ranking of those that are already available, but the idea broadly remains that there are good works and bad, and that commercial appeal doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with quality. Consider the differences between The New York Times’ respective lists of 2025, for though the Best Seller List contains a few critical darlings such as Percival Everett’s Pulitzer Prize winning James, the bulk of it features the expected genre purveyors of John Grisham, James Patterson, and Stephen King. Meanwhile, “The 10 Best Books of 2025” includes works by Kiran Desai, Arundhati Roy, and Charlotte Wood, none of whom appear on the best seller lists (but unlike most of those on the best seller list will presumably appear on syllabi and in anthologies generations hence).
Obviously, part of the reason for that endurance is precisely because cultural gatekeepers, insomuch as they still exist, have blessed some titles and ignored others, even if the general public’s tastes are different. Early twentieth-century British reporter Alfred Hamsworth supposedly said that “News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising,” and while it would be erroneous to exactly describe those lists of best sellers as being purely neutral (all those right-wing pundit titles bought in bulk by the GOP to artificially gin up the numbers would like a word), there is a bit of the stench of the commercial about lists which are supposedly meant to be dedicated purely to quality. Any of us who work in publishing have piles of the same galleys and advanced reader copies sent out by dogged publicists at Big 5 and indie presses alike, these being the titles that have been decided will be the most likely to get good reviews, to receive awards, to end up on lists at the end of the year. These are the books that aren’t for a one-night-stand like the best sellers, but the marrying kind of book. Examine a cross-section of those lists and you’ll see certain titles appear again and again. Emily Temples at Literary Hub breaks this year down by the numbers, reporting that Miriam Toews’ A Truce that is Not Peace and Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People appear on ten national lists, Susan Choi’s Flashlight and Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea on fifteen, and Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny and Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me on an astounding twenty-one year end best of lists. I should cop to having read none of these books but being familiar with the authors I’ll also admit that I imagine these are all worthy and excellent books, though the realist in me also acknowledges that the persistence of publicity and marketing departments is undeniable in the attention some titles get. Just as it’s not a surprise that Santa seems to be more generous to rich kids, that the usual suspects are feted is hardly shocking.
And yet, though Brown’s long-ago decision may have about it the undeniable feel of a gimmick, there is still tremendous value in the motivating idea and ideal of such a list. Clearly year end book lists aren’t critical theory or literary criticism, but they do offer a faith in the sense that some titles are worth reading, are worth rereading – that literature serves a function beyond the merely commercial. Defending cultural gatekeepers, especially if you are one, is admittedly not a good look, and yet nonetheless I think that an argument must be made that such lists correct unfeeling market forces. British novelist W. Somerset Maugham compiled a list of his favorite books for the 1939 Paris edition of The New York Times, a kind of precursor to Brown’s editorial innovation, in which he included Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, describing them as titles to “help you live more fully.” The old humanistic hobby-horse, for sure, and yet is Maugham wrong that there is something in Defoe, Swift, or Austen that helps one live more fully, that assists in seeing the world in different ways, or altering the individual consciousness of a reader so as to consider that which would have been unapparent to them before? For that matter, a half-century-onward, don’t Mailer or Cleaver offer us more than Hailey’s Airport or Knebbel’s Vanished? There remains something essential in gatekeeping, in listening to those who’ve read deep and wide and said “This is worth spending time with,” not because they’re right (and they’re often wrong) but because such a position offers the possibility that there are qualities which elevate certain works beyond the dictates of mere finance. Even if there is something undeniably low-brow about slotting books into a ranked list as if you’re Rob Fleming in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, as an exercise it still celebrates the idea that some works don’t just exist to take up time, but can actually be rewarding.
Today the bottom-line logic of best seller lists appears almost quaint, as the levelling of the algorithm has replaced an examination of a few dozen lower Manhattan booksellers’ bank statements. Both Goodreads and Amazon reviews have promised a democratizing effect, the overthrow of elitist gatekeepers ushering in a readers’ utopia, but like everything from student evaluations to Uber rankings, it’s another aspect of neoliberalism’s mania in quantifying existence, in knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing (with apologies to Oscar Wilde). Being a writer complaining about Goodreads is even worse than being a gatekeeper defending his position, but uttering an opinion about the site is at least more ethically sound than the imbecility of responding to one’s own negative reviews, and so I’ll say that even when we strip away all that is transparently bad faith about such sites (the brigading, the moral panics, the political bloviating) we’re still left with the fact that the bulk of written reviews there are very, very stupid. For example, Everett’s James is deigned to have only added a “woke twist to a classic novel,” while another reader simply says that “there wasn’t anything I enjoyed about it.” The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny by Desai is said to be “Twice as long as it should have been,” while Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me is evaluated as an “Absolutely pathetic and painful read” penned by “Another female writer with mother issues.” Strolling through the hallowed and hushed halls of the canon on Goodreads and you will find that James Joyce’s Ulysses has 3.76 stars, Herman Melvill’es Moby-Dick has a rating of 3.56 stars, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter a rating of 3.44. There is little sense of the historical importance of these works, what they’ve done that shifted a genre or disturbed a convention, how they challenged a culture. Only that BookMan69 didn’t enjoy them. None of which is to say that every reader has to enjoy Hawthorne or Melville. I’ve never read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the bit I’ve encountered of Tolstoy I haven’t enjoyed – which is fine! – but I can also acknowledge that War and Peace is bigger than my mere entertainment.
Despite what should be disdained about the old fashioned cultural gatekeeping, its biases and favoritism, snobbishness and rarefication, the reign of algorithmic criticism does what all such gambits of neoliberal, corporate hucksterism do, which is to claim that they’re empowering people when what they’re really doing is distilling humans into the sludge of mechanical, lowest-common-denominator thinking. As the formulas of Jeff Bezos replace thoughtful consideration, the role of the gatekeeper takes on an ethical gloss as much as an evaluative one. The fundamental rule of popular criticism isn’t to venture whether a given reviewer enjoyed a book or not, for that can only be at most incidental, but whether to figure out if a book did what it claimed it was going to do. To only focus on personal engagement with Desai is to tell us nothing about Desai and everything about the reviewer. Film critic Roger Ebert, who performed a masterclass in how one writes popular criticism, explained in 2012 that his famed “star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.” That is a subtlety that the algorithmic machine ignores, where somebody giving one star to Stephen King because the reviewer doesn’t like horror is granted equal weight to somebody that’s familiar with the contours and history of the genre and the best way to place a given text in relationship to that broader tradition. Algorithmic machine criticism claims to elevate the individual voice but burnishes it into a collective mundanity, all while serious critical consideration is judged as passe at best and exclusionary at worst. Far from being some sort of egalitarian victory, it signals the final triumph of the MBAs over the humanists who used to populate the upper echelons of editorial pages and publishing houses. Gerald Howard in The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature celebrates his subject (a Pittsburgher!), who was the editor at mid-century Viking Press responsible for the rediscovery of both F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as an executive with a “passionate commitment to the cause of American literature,” a man who true to the book’s title “was in the thick of it, for longer and with greater influence than just about anybody else.” Today, when publishers are owned by hedge funds and private equity, the commitments of a Cowley are almost unthinkable, where today the (irrational) corporate logic is to give a six-figure advance to a TikTok influencer who won’t earn out rather than giving fifty $20,000 advances to somebody who could be the next Fitzgerald or Faulkner. When Penguin Random House’s imprint Crown can give a million-dollar advance to Senator John Fetterman for a book that didn’t even sell out in his own hometown, it’s clear that anemia has spread through the industry.
Castigate those best books of the year lists as being chummy, insidery, and distant if you want, valorize the algorithm as a populist panacea if you wish, but what makes gatekeepers important isn’t that they’re correct, or even can be correct, but that such discourse and disagreements are when the culture becomes self-aware, when it thinks about itself. They are discussions, they are invitations. A best of list isn’t empirical, it’s a game, and it’s meant to be playful. To be audacious, to be galling, to be annoying, but most of all to be interesting. Popular criticism is, at its most vital and important, dominated by a particular ethic. As a variation on Ebert’s claim, I’d say that any review of a work must address four fundamental questions: 1) What was the artist trying to do?, 2) Did they do it?, 3)Is it worth doing (I’m more agnostic on this), and 4) Did they do anything new, with that final question one fit for literary historians and scholars as much as print-and-paper men. This is, categorically, a different venture than just telling someone if you liked a book or not, which is perhaps a fine thing to do with friends and family, but of limited interest in a broader sense. What criticism is intended to be is the culture’s thinking, fractured and contradictory as it can be (as any consciousness is), which is assembled through the discourse of individuals, not their reduction into an inchoate digital mass.
When The Guardian published its list of the hundred best books of the 21st century, with indispensable titles such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ prophetic Between the World and Me (number 7), Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantastical Never Let Me Go (number 4), or Hilary Mantel’s cutting Wolf Hall (number 1), it’s clearly not science, but a conversation. The New York Time’s comparable attempt, with Colson Whitehead’s irreverent The Underground Railroad (number 7), Roberto Bolano’s harrowing 2666 (number 6) and Elena Ferrante’s empathetic My Brilliant Friend (right at number 1) isn’t definitive, but contingent, mercurial, open-ended. The point is to get people not just talking about books (good enough) but actually reading them. It’s to give a diagnostic and holistic overview of the state of literature today. Edwin Frank, the visionary editor of the New York Review of Books Classics series, argues in his Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, that the corpus of writing which includes everything from Ulysses to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, wasn’t just an “exploding form in an exploding world,” but indeed a fictional character in its own right. It makes one wonder, in our own epoch of limited attention spans and artificial slop, if the 21st Century Novel could be spoken of in such terms? The great intervention of the lists from The Guardian and The New York Times was that it convinced me that the contemporary novel does have its own personality, its own consciousness. Beyond the dictates of marketing (many bookstores certainly took to displaying those books which were listed), these editorial compendiums make an argument about the state of literature over the past twenty-five years, about writing that can encompass everything from the intimate tales of Ferrante and the Machiavellian drama of Mantel to the dystopia of Ted Chiang and the social conscious of Zadie Smith. What the personality of such lists encompasses, at their best, is the argument made by David Mitchell in his century-spanning metafictional masterpiece Cloud Atlas (number 28 for The Times, 9 for The Guardian, and number one for me) when he writes that “Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” In the same way, our books are not our own, whether we’re their authors or their readers. They are bound to all of us, and with every interpretation and debate, every conversation and analysis, their relationship to themselves and to us shifts and evolves, for the act of reading itself is as great a drama as what’s contained in the pages of a novel.
