What's the Best Book of the Past 125 Years? We Asked Readers to Decide. (NYT)
In October, as we marked the Book Review’s 125th anniversary, we invited readers to nominate the best book published during that time. This was a nod to our history: In its first few decades, the Book Review often asked readers to anoint the best books, the best short stories, the best poems. We wanted this project, like those early ones, to reflect readers’ tastes and preferences.
Responses began pouring in from all 50 states and 67 countries. In November, we presented a list of the 25 most-nominated books (one per author) for a vote. After tallying more than 200,000 ballots, the winner, by a narrow margin, is …
THE WINNER
To Kill a Mockingbird
By Harper Lee
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/28/books/best-book-winners.html
THE RUNNERS-UP
2. The Fellowship of the Ring
3. 1984
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude
5. Beloved
The story of the nominations we received is not consensus, but diversity — not just in the sheer number of books that readers nominated, but in the ways that they interpreted what “best book” meant. Of the more than 1,300 books nominated, 65 percent were nominated by only one person. And only 31 percent nominated a book that made it to our list of 25 finalists. Here are some titles that speak to the breadth of readers’ choices.
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