In 2019 the Guardian published a list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century:
- Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – not read
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – not read
- Secondhand Time by Svetland Alexievich – not read
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – not read but owned
- Austerlitz by WG Sebald – not read
The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman – readBetween the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates – readAutumn by Ali Smith – read- Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – not read
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie – not read by owned
- My Brilliant Friend by Elen Ferrante – not read
- The Plot Against America by Philip Roth – not read
- Nickel and Dime by Barbara Ehrenreich – not read
Fingersmith by Sara Waters – read- The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert – not read
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen – not read by owned
The Road by Cormac McCarthy – read- The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein – not read
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon – readLife After Life by Kate Atkinson – read- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari – not read
- Tenth of December by George Saunders – not read
- The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon – not read
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan – not read
Normal People by Sally Rooney – read- Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty – not read
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage – Alice Munro – not read
- Rapture – Carol Ann Duffy – not read
- A Death in the Family by Karl One Knausgaard – not read
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead – read- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson – not read
- The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee – not read
- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel – not read
- Outline by Rachel Cusk – not read
- The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal – not read
- Experience by Martin Amis – not read
The Green Road by Anne Enright – read- The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst – not read
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith – not read
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion – not read
- Atonement by Ian MEwan – not read
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis – not read
- Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine – not read
- Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit – not read
- Levels of Life by Julian Barns – not read
- Human Chain by Seamus Heaney – not read
Persepolis by Marjane Satrap – read- Night Watch by Terry Pratchett – not read
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson – not read
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood – not read but owned
- Brooklyn by old Toibin – not read but owned
- Small Island by Andrea Levy – not read
- True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey – not read
- Women & Power by Mary Beard – not read
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan – not read
- Underland by Robert Macfarlane – not read
- T
he Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon – read - Postwar by Tony Just – not read
- The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson – not read
- Dart by Alice Oswald – not read
- This House of Grief by Helen Garner – not read
- Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn – not read
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – not read
- On Writing by Stephen King – not read
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn – read- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli – not read
- The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker – not read
- The Constant Gardener by John le Carre – not read
- The Infatuations by Javier Marias – not read
- Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller – not read
- Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware – not read
- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff – not read
- Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick – read
- Days Without End by Sebastian Barry – not read
- Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk – not read
- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman – not read
- Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera – read
- The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin – not read but owned
- The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – not read
- Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang – not read
- Harvest by Jim Crace – not read
- Coraline by Neil Gaiman – not read
- Tell Me How it Ends by Valeria Luiselli – not read
- The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy – not read
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins – not read
- Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis – not read
- Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood – not read
- Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman – not read
- Bad Blood by Lorna Sage – not read
- Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck – not read
- Light by M Joh Harrison – not read
- The Siege by Helen Dunore – not read
- Darkmans by Nicola Barker – not read
- The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell – not read
- Chronicles Volume One by Bob Dylan – not read
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara – readHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling – readThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson – read- Broken Glass by Alan Mabanckou – not read
- I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron – not read