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Best books of the 21st century: Harry Potter, The Road or Life of Pi?

16 October 2026 · Books

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In July 2024 The New York Times asked 503 novelists, poets, critics and other book lovers to name the best books published since the start of 2000, and Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend came out on top. Lists like that are made to be argued with. On GOATvs nobody fills in a ballot: every book is picked or passed over one face-off at a time, by everyone, and the box above shows where this century's best stand in the world's list of the greatest books ever written today. Like the Times, we count only books first published in 2000 or later, so the first three Harry Potter books, which came out between 1997 and 1999, have to sit this one out.

That still leaves four of the seven. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire arrived in July 2000 and turned the series darker, with a tournament, a graveyard and the return of Voldemort. The Order of the Phoenix followed in 2003, then The Half-Blood Prince in 2005, where Harry learns Voldemort's past through Dumbledore's memories and the story ends on the Astronomy Tower. The Deathly Hallows closed the series in July 2007, taking Harry, Ron and Hermione away from Hogwarts to hunt for Horcruxes. Fans have argued for years over which of the last two is the best, and it is the first pair in the box above.

The century's thrillers sold in numbers few novels ever reach. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) sent the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon from a murder in the Louvre to a hidden secret about the Holy Grail, and drew criticism from historians and the Catholic Church on the way. Two years later The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo brought Lisbeth Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist to the world. Its author, the Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, died in 2004 before any of his Millennium novels was published; the Swedish title is Men Who Hate Women. The two meet in the second pair.

The prizes went elsewhere. Yann Martel's Life of Pi (2001), the story of a boy adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker, won the Booker Prize, and Ang Lee's film of it won him the Oscar for best director. Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), a father and son walking south through a burned, empty America, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005) begins as a memory of a quiet English boarding school and slowly shows what its pupils were raised for; Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The Road against Never Let Me Go, two quiet novels about the end of things, is the third pair.

Other books on the list found readers in every country. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (2003), his first novel, follows two boys in Kabul and a betrayal that lasts a lifetime. Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games (2008) put Katniss Everdeen in a televised fight to the death and started a wave of young adult dystopias. Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem, first published in Chinese, won the Hugo Award for best novel in 2015 in Ken Liu's English translation. And Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, came back in 2021 with Project Hail Mary, a lone science teacher waking up on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there.

Pick your side above: The Half-Blood Prince or The Deathly Hallows, Langdon or Salander, The Road or Never Let Me Go. Then see how this century compares with Homer, Tolstoy and Austen in the Books Top 100, ranked by everyone.

Vote: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows vs Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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