Curating the Canon, with Gilbert Cruz

27:26But what this list is saying is that enough people of the 291 people that we polled thought on their own that these books were thrillers. Enough people thought that that they made it onto the list, unprompted from us or anything like that.

27:44Jeff:It's fascinating. Yeah, it's a theory of canon that's not unlike a theory of language that is descriptive rather than proscriptive. proscriptive, right? Rather than this is what a word should mean, this is how people actually use language, right? So there's a version of list making, which is a thriller means X or a romance, especially, you know, some of these other genres may have firmer boundaries, right, around them that you could use. But this is all right, we're going to go out and we're going to describe the thriller is what people say a thriller is. And they cannot be wrong, right? That's sort of the idea is like, in aggregate, the people cannot be wrong about a thriller is, which is fascinating, And I think that does allow some of the, as Rebecca said, warranted criticism of the canon, like of its infallible, you know, because of the canonizations of saints, for God's sake, like that's it comes like it's like a scriptural, like divine thing.

28:32this is more we're more polling people that has a reason to have a stake in the game and what they say goes so it's not really it's not really a critical enterprise actually maybe the writing of the descriptions are a critical enterprise but it is a journalistic almost like a political sampling prospect at the same times and there's trade-offs to that like where do you feel the trade-off do you feel a trade-off anywhere do you feel it in like well i'd really like to have a for me you know not speaking for the times but like where do you feel the limits or the the friction or the inconveniences of that descriptive approach?

29:04I think a potential trade-off might be less room for surprise, right? One thing that is true if you rely on a single critic, let's say, or a group of critics to produce, to come to a consensus on what is and what is not great, is that you will always leave room for the idiosyncratic thing. Yeah, right. You know, look at our, the Times also did the 30 greatest American living songwriters.

29:34Jeff:It was a really interesting list. And that was, that was a list that, that was a project that was produced in a different way. It used some of what we do, which is polling people. But after that poll came in, a group of critics came together and then debated and put stuff on and took stuff off because they were trying to make an argument. They were not just reflecting journalistically in the way that we are. This is the data. They were saying, actually, Billy Joel sucks. I don't think this. Please do not at me. I like Billy Joel. But they were saying, no, no, no, no, no. No Billy Joel. Even if a million of our readers think he's in the top five, no Billy Joel, but instead this person, right?

30:16Critics or a critic can make an argument, whereas what we are doing here, I think positively, but some can see it as a downside, is reflecting, you know, an aggregate opinion. In this case, it's an aggregate opinion of experts, which I think makes it more valuable than other aggregate opinions. Yeah, that's probably where the critical intervention is, is the selection of the pool of quote unquote voters, right? That's one way of mitigating, altering the Goodreads effect that Rebecca and I talk about all the time, because we look at a list of the Goodreads most popular books of X and it's usually uninteresting to us for what we do now as its other value, right?

30:55As a data point. But you could probably, if you're going to put your thumb somewhere, it would be on the selection of people that you're offering the ability to vote, right? Because I'm guessing there's not a lot of self-published authors on the list, right? I mean, I'm just guessing something like that. And there's a lot of thriller activity that happens about that, but that's a critical choice of like X versus Y and how we're going to do the sampling, right? Absolutely. I mean, we, we, we want to pick people who are names. We want to pick people who are known to a lot of our readers, you know?

31:30And, you know, the thing is, we send out so many invites, you know, for books, for movies. I think we sent out over a thousand for thrillers here. We probably sent out over 500, maybe over 600. And even the New York Times can only control so much. There are just some people who are going to be like, I'm not doing that. Like, it doesn't matter how big a journalistic institution we are. There are just some people who are not going to participate. So there are people who are not going to participate. There are people who try as you might. They're just not checking their emails or what have you. And so we really tried to reach out to the biggest pool possible.

32:14And then we get who we get. And a further complication is there are some people who only participate if you keep their ballot private. And that complicates it a little bit because you go to this ballot page, you see all these wonderful people. Lee Child, S.A. Cosby, Gillian Flynn. They're all like, yes, print my ballot.

32:35Jeff:But then you have other people who voted for herself, which I love. Side note here. Let's normalize this. Yeah, I agree. Let's know, you know, you wrote the best thriller of the century so far. You should get to vote for yourself. Absolutely. Yes, that is totally applicable in Flynn's case. Even if you didn't. Yeah, yeah. Be proud of your work. There are a lot of people who voted in this, who I tried to convince to make their ballots public. and because they voted for their own book, they're like, I just can't. And they wouldn't say why, but I think it's because they were a little embarrassed.

33:10And I understand that. But also, let's be proud of our work. It's okay to vote for your own book. Maybe you could just auto-check. Maybe you could say, which of your books would you like to vote for? There you go. You sort of nudge them. You can use behavioral psychology to say, okay, you're going to vote for one of your books. Or we just don't. We say you cannot vote for your own thing. just to simplify it. Oh, no.

33:34Jeff:They should get to. Again, I ask, I would never ask you to name names out of school, but have you gotten pushback from people that you've asked to participate who have given reasons or objections why they won't participate? Oh, to the project? You mean to the whole thing? Yes. There are a precious few who are like, I don't think we should be ranking art in this way. And I was like, all right, just go be boring. I don't know what to say. It's just like, that's just the silliest thing I've ever heard. Like, we do it all the time. It's fine. So, yeah, I've heard a couple of that. There was one person who eventually ended participating after an email exchange who was like, well, anything could be a thriller.

34:19So this is not valuable. And, you know, we sort of hashed that out. Oh, the anything can be everything crowd? Yeah, that's a tough one to wrangle. I was like, well, I don't know that I can totally convince you otherwise, but this is why I think this particular project is important and why there is an actual frame that can be put around this genre or this broad genre in some way.

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36:01Jeff:Today's episode is brought to you by FlameCon 2026. Get your full weekend passes at flamecon.org. FlameCon is the world's largest queer comic con created by Geeks Out. It features a two-day comics, arts, and entertainment expo showcasing creators and special guests from all corners of the LGBTQ plus fandom. It features thoughtful discussions, exclusive performances, screenings, cosplay, and more. And it's happening this August 15th through the 16th. and just so you know it is the world's largest and longest running lgbtq plus pop culture comic books and cosplay convention it's also one of the most affordable ones um it's got top name guests it's located right in the heart of manhattan new york city at the new venue the marriott marquee times square special guests like casey mcquiston the author of red white and royal blue Al Ewing, comic book creator for Marvel and DC, books Venom and the Queen in Black crossover and Mortal Thor, and Kosoko Jackson, author of The Forest Demands It's Due.

37:06Jeff:There's also an exhibitors hall that is filled with art and artists, comic books, books, apparel, all the things, all the convention things that you would want or need. Make sure to get your full weekend passes at flamecon.org. And thanks again to Flame Con 2026 for sponsoring this episode. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe, or white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I think even, I think one thing that's emerging through this project and the durability of people's interest in a Canon or a list or a group of works of art that are worth more attention for their own sake than everything.

37:55Like not every work is equally worth paying attention to, right? Like I think we've come to understand that. Then what do you do is the answer. And I think what's so surprising to me is even as there's these caveats and there's fuzziness and trade-offs, you look at one of these lists, a well-made list, this, and there's other well-made lists out there. And you're like, yeah, like that kind of checks out, right? Like very often, very infrequently, am I looking at a list by something that's done with good intention and some kind of rigor, either, even if it's independent of a kind of rigor, they're like, you know what?

38:28That's a really interesting group of books that hold together. That's cohesive, even with all this stuff about criticism and the fuzziness of genre and the vicious of time. I think it's so fascinating that you look at one of these lists and you're like, yeah, that seems about right. And you haven't read everything. I've heard of some of these and I haven't heard of the other ones. I do think the thing I'm not sure how to reconcile with, and I was just thinking about this today because John Crowley just passed away. And I don't think the Times has written an obit, which I found surprising. But maybe this is proving the rule, which Harold Bloom included him in the Western canon book that I read as a teenager a million years ago.

39:03and so I read Little Big by John Crowley, this really weird fairy book from 1983 and I'm like, that book ruled and no one else has talked about it. But like the specificity of an individual nerd going like pointing with enough finger at that thing, that is I think what we lost. And I don't know how you get that back. I don't know where that's gone, Gilbert. I mean, it is, you know, ideally there are a few people out there on Bookstagram or Booktalk or on YouTube who we can each encounter, who are like, this person actually is truly introducing me to some stuff I don't know, as opposed to just rehashing the same titles over and over again.

39:46You know, hopefully we'll all be blessed to find that one person, you know, that works for us. In the context of the things that we are doing here, I do think it is looking at those individual picks. Like, even Gillian Flynn's. She had one book on there. I can't remember what it was, or two books on there that I just had never heard of before. As soon as I saw them on her list, they weren't on the main list. I was like, what is this? What is this? Wow, this is like a supernatural detective story or something. It takes place in London. That's interesting, right? A big part of this for me as a user, but hopefully for people who even spend 90 seconds with one of these projects, is have we introduced you to something you didn't know about?

40:31Did we remind you of something that you've always wanted to read and totally forgot about? I find that to be very valuable. And, you know, we have this feature that started with the books list several years ago where you can say, I want to read it or I've read it. And now on the Times app and on the Times website, you can go to your UTAB and sort of see the stuff that you've kept track of, right? You can start keeping track of books that you want to read on The New York Times and then refer to it later. In the past week, we've seen tens of thousands of people save hundreds of thousands of titles of books that they want to read.

41:09It is incredible.

41:10Jeff:It's just a great innovation because I'm so tired of scrolling a long list, trying to count in my brain how many of them I've read. Like 100 is a lot to count through or 50 is a lot to count through. And it's so nice to be like, yeah, there's my 22 out of the 50. And just anecdotally, that's how many of the 50 best thrillers I had read. And I'm not a big thriller reader. So I think that that's one more piece of evidence that the attention coalesced around the ones that were so good they broke out of just like thriller circles and into mainstream reader, mainstream literary person circles to the place that I was familiar with them.

41:47And I think it's interesting also to think of, if we're just talking about the thriller list here, this as sort of, you know, practitioners love S.A. Cosby. Right? He had the number eight book. He had the number 11 book. He had another book on there. They love Tana French. There are these people that pop up over and over again. I'd be curious, once our reader list is published, to see what the differences are. Are there other writers who have more, like, I suspect Stieg Larsson might have more titles? Are you going to get a Frieda McFadden? Is that where you're going to see a Frieda McFadden, just sort of because how many people have read those books in the last three years?

42:26Because that's an interesting thing. Yeah, exactly. And so the difference between enthusiasts and practitioners, obviously practitioners can be enthusiasts, but I think if you are, there's a world in which you're like, this person does my craft so well that I hold them. in higher esteem than just the regular reader.

42:46Jeff:This is how we were, this is at least how I was taught to learn more about books and the universe of literature coming up before the internet was a thing was like, read authors, see who they refer to, like, whose books do they talk about in interviews? Do they mention other authors in their acknowledgements? Read those people that influenced them. And then you just go down the wormhole of who influenced the people that influenced your favorite author, you know, like, Stephen King has influenced everybody. He comes up in so many zero to well-read episodes from like Coulson Whitehead, who's not doing anything similar to what Stephen King is doing to like a whole bunch of other modern authors.

43:23Jeff:But if all those roads point to Stephen King, then I'm sure Stephen King's got a list of other people he loves that you can read and you can find it in this thrillers list. He does. Trace those. He does. Both of present day people and also the people that came before him that he references over and over again. If everyone read Stephen King, then the people that Stephen King read were Shirley Jackson, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, John McDonald. He has his people. And there's this whole line of influence that continues to go down. Yeah, it's like a lineage almost. I don't know that I would have guessed, Gilbert, that Thriller would be the first specialized list out of the gate.

44:05I don't know how much you can talk about the talking about that went into order of operations for other book lists. What was appealing to you all about prioritizing a thriller list? Several things. So one, we thought we were going to publish in summer and thrillers. Okay. That's not the main reason, though, but that was a factor. The main reason is that the New York Times has for decades, decades and decades and decades, had a crime or thriller column. So the New York Times book review has monthly columns, thriller, historical fiction, romance, etc., in which we have one person, mostly who's not on staff, although in thrillers they are on staff, whose job it is to review three or four titles in a genre every single month.

44:50And the thriller column has been around for a very, very long time. Sarah Lyle, who's an amazing writer on staff, does it now. And so there was just this idea that like there's a built up history of the New York Times covering this genre. We see by the numbers that whenever we publish one of these genres, the digital readership is pretty strong. And so those were sort of the two main factors as we were thinking about what are the different genres that we could start with? We could start with romance, historical fiction, science fiction, fantasy. but this was the one that felt like for our readership right now, given our history of covering the space for 50, 60, 70 years, like we feel like we can do it.

45:34More comfortable terrain. Yeah, that's interesting. Rebecca and I were talking on a recent BR pod about kind of the worm turning a little bit from romanticcy to thrillers and the most popular books, the best-selling books, and that seemed like auspicious timing. Like, okay, we're kind of in a thriller moment, and then I do think there's something to the idea of institutional memory but also the times has an association there. But I think when people are willing to, because the thing I don't know that people have kind of caught on to is that making a thriller list under this aegis is making an argument that thrillers are worth taking seriously.

46:07The genre is worth taking seriously. I guess my own thought, Rebecca, and I'm not sure we haven't talked about this, like of the genres that are most likely to enter the regular canon or the vanilla canon. I'm trying not to hierarchize here. I think sci-fi goes first of the genre. just historically because it tends to be more about ideas. Thriller, I think, is deeper. I think it's later on the list, historically speaking.

46:34Jeff:I think that's right. I think that's right. Even just looking at the 45 books that we've covered on Zero to Well Read so far, the ones that haven't been kind of straight up literary, if you divided them by genre, more of them have been out of science fiction than other genres. And that's, of course, not just like we're not doing a power ranking of titles. We're looking for a certain mix and a certain variety. But when I look at things that are considered classics that happen to be genre and you get Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 and the parable of the sower, there, of course, are some classic mysteries.

47:12Jeff:We could get into Agatha Christie. There are some classic thrillers. We might be talking about Stephen King on this show later in this season. but I think you're right there that science fiction for whatever reason like has crossed over to mainstream canonical status a little bit more but thrillers are read I think by more people like the sales numbers bear that out and and maybe that part of that what's going on there is that there are just more thrillers so it's harder for a thriller to break into classic status than other genres what do you I don't know I'm guessing I'm pulling together a lot of threads here Gilbert What do you think about this theory?

47:47I think, I mean, I buy totally that the sci-fi novel or the dystopian novel actually can be something that has plot, that has character, but also has ideas that sort of stick, you know, that get incepted in your mind. And the thriller is just like, it's a great time. And the best of them have memorable characters and memorable twists. It sets a mood, makes you uncomfortable. or it makes you comfortable given the generic conventions, but you're not thinking about humanity or something like that afterwards. There is also a sense in which part of why thrillers, I think, always feel present is because you see them on the big and small screens as much as anything else.

48:39Like, you know, on this list of 50, at least half of them have been made into a movie or a miniseries. Probably the most adapted list. I did think about that. Or recurring series, right? It's just like there's something about sort of the plot heaviness of thrillers that make it perfect for screen adaptations. Whereas you can really screw up a great sci-fi novel because you're crossing. Well, it costs a lot of money. I mean, that's the other thing. A thriller, you know, a contemporary thriller like To Take Gonger, which is the exception that proves the rule to a lot of cases. Like it's just a bunch of people in suburban Missouri, right?

49:13You can film that relatively inexpensively. You could do a four-part BBC series of a lot of these thrillers, right? Because they're relatively contained, a few cast of characters. Notably, the action has largely already happened in a mystery kind of setting. So it's people walking around thinking things and putting things together, which makes it more attainable at the same time. I was going to think, too, about, I don't know, and I haven't gone to look, But one thing that occurred to me is historically we associate canon making with academia. And thrillers, kind of bridging off Rebecca's point, don't get taught.

49:49There's a recursive cycle. They don't get taught, so they're not in the canon, so they don't get taught. I think that's part of what happens to them. But I didn't notice a lot. Have you reached out to academics? It doesn't seem like that's a notable, interesting pool of voters for you all. No, not in this project. I believe with the 100 best books of the 21st century, we did reach out to some academics, you know, with all due respect to academics. Oftentimes, it's just, I find they can be the ones that are most resistant to participating in something like this. It doesn't feel serious enough in some way.

50:26Sure. You know, when I was in college, I took a mystery novel class with a professor who now is one of the book reviewers at NPR, Maureen Corrigan. And she introduced me to just a bunch of writers that I'd never heard before. I think you can find it, stuff like this, in academia in pockets. But there's a way in which the word canon now has achieved escape velocity, right? It's no longer limited to the world of academia. Like, as I said, we find it in the world of fandom. People just use it in every day. That's canon. That's canonical. Like, it is a thing that you just use to refer to something that is good, that is great, that is all time.

51:12One of the things we don't want to be is to feel overly academic. It just feels like that is, whether for good or ill, one of my best friends is a professor. that feels like it can keep people at a distance more than it invites them in. And one of the things we're trying to do is reach the biggest audience with each of these.

51:30Jeff:Yeah. Well, nothing is more inviting than here's a list to tell us how we're wrong. Yeah. Yeah. It's really fun to go into the comments, which we really try to do, and just grit your teeth as you respond with grace. No, this is the 21st century. yeah that's why there are no Agatha Christie novels on here yeah you know just to go back to a point you were making a moment ago about thrillers and how the genre maybe is thought of as being mostly about like hewing to the conventions solving the mystery doing something that people are comfortable with but notably like Gillian Flynn and Gone Girl that is a book about ideas that's a thriller that's not just about the solving of the thing and I wonder if that really contributes to how that book ends up at the top of it, that the best books in any genre are the ones that do both the genre conventions that people are looking for, but also elevate into a place of also being about ideas.

52:31Yeah, I think when you find a work that can combine plot, character, theme, and a little soup song of ideas like that, that's the cream that's going to rise to the top, right? I think that's part of the reason that you see Esa Cosby, for example, so well represented because he is combining place, character, plot, theme, and a thing that, you know, a lot of people don't write about, which is like race and class in America.

53:03Jeff:Yeah. Those books read like they're on rails and they're about something. And what more do you want from any reading experience, really? It's so fascinating, too, to think about that, how there wasn't a lot of overlap between this list and the initial list i mean i don't was there was there any overlap no i actually we were when we did the initial list we were quite surprised that gone girl was not i voted for gone girl as someone who participated in that ballot and just didn't appear and that was frankly part of the reason where we why we did this we saw an opportunity we said we have this great list of of a hundred books that were published this century they're all great a A lot of them are what we would refer to as literary fiction.

53:46We know that a lot of people read books that are not literary fiction. Most people read books that are not literary fiction. All right, fine. I'll let you say it. We know a lot of people that read the New York Times read books that are not classified as literary fiction. And a lot of those books are good. And so while not trying to undermine our list of 100 books in the 21st century, we know that when people read in genre, they read deeply. And we wanted to sort of tap that knowledge, passion and expertise to really go into something like thrillers. This is it was an experiment. I think it was a successful one.

54:25But we wanted to see if we broke off a genre, if we made it smaller, if we really focus, would there still be interest? And I think I think there was.

54:33Jeff:I think you did, too. A last question from me is how often can you go back to the well, do you think? Do you think this is an every decade project per genre? Because this is going to evolve and change over time. One thing I noticed, and I'll be super curious to see you on the thriller companion of the reader's picks, the reader's picks tended to be much more recent across the board. We can speculate about reasons. or you could put the other way is that the critics pick or the influencers pick or the smaller pool pick was more biased towards historical works, however you want to put it. I'd be curious to see if something happens with thrillers.

55:08But I wonder how often these things change, right? I'll be curious to see because one thing that you guys are going to do or have the ability to do if you choose to do it is to do like that core sampling of like what's going on in the glacier by drilling down every now and again and seeing how it changes. Have you thought about that? It is one of the things that I plan to think about. You've thought about thinking about it. That's all I'm asking for. Yes. I mean, it is, you know, you look at the sight and sound list that is done every 10 years, something that I've been reading since I was a teenager.

55:38They do that every 10 years. You see stuff radically change. Radically. Not only because of time, but because of the pool. They've reached out to more and more people every year. just like the Academy has added more and more people every year. And so the type of picture that wins best picture continues to evolve. You know, I don't think we are planning here on like a decade timeframe. A lot of shit is happening very quickly. Stuff is changing very fast. And so if we are going to update these, I don't think it's going to be every decade. It might be on a shorter timeframe, but maybe, But that is something that is unproven and that we need to really give some thought to.

56:19I mean, I'm telling you right. I mean, I don't need to tell you. The best thrillers of the decade would rip. That would work if you do it that way. Now, again, that would be towards just that decade. But you don't maybe have to go every time. Gilbert, thank you so much. Oh, Rebecca, anything else? I was about to get us out of here. Oh, no, we got to all my questions.

56:38Jeff:I got it all out there. Thank you, Gilbert. Thank you. Gilbert's going to be joining us for a regular episode in the not too distant future. I'll give the readers, listeners a couple hints. One is my least favorite genre. And two... It's going to be fun. I feel like anything else I feel like I'm going to triangulate it too easy. I'm not going to give it. Your two hints are that hint. Your two hints are if I gave you another hint, it would be too easy to guess. Does that count? Can I edit it? You can sit that without Gilbert and I. I'll just have a party without you. It's fine. No, I'm looking forward to it.

57:12I'm looking forward to it. But it's a genre that I don't read a lot of. Gilbert Cruz, canon editor of the New York Times. If you've got a beef, you now know that if you leave a comment, someone there is looking at it. So be sure, be kind, but you can be fulsome in your feedback for them. Gilbert, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks, Rebecca.