Consider the first question - it's easier. Anyone who's published a book since 2000 counts. If no one springs to mind, what's your favorite 21st century book? (If you can name a favorite writer, which book of theirs is your favorite?)
Let's not be persnickety. If your favorite 21st century book was actually written in the 1990s, OK. If you have three or four favorite 21st century writers, that's fine, too.
There is one important distinction here. I'm not asking which 21st century books you think are the best, the most critically acclaimed, or the most hip. This is all about your own personal taste. If you love the Twilight books, or The Da Vinci Code, I promise not to judge you. You'll actually be saying more about what you enjoy in reading if you're sharing a guilty pleasure than you might by touting some book that every critic loves. Especially if you can explain what makes that particular book tickle your fancy.
Reading books, and knowing which you enjoy, is all it takes to develop personal taste. These are the books you find Delicious. For a more informed esthetic, you look beyond your gut reactions, to reviews, prize-winners, and best-of lists. These are all indications of Excellent books.
I contend that the crucial step towards critical discernment comes when you learn to separate the Delicious (books you love) from the Excellent (books you admire). We need Delicious books to feed our enthusiasm, and we need some knowledge of Excellence to inform us, to provide a framework for measuring books against. When we write or speak about books, we want to be both persuasive and precise, which means we need both enthusiasm and knowledge.
There are many difficulties here. For one thing, there is no objective standard of Excellence. A book may be praised by every critic, and win every prize, but that does not empirically prove its worth - it just shows that a lot of people who read a lot of books agree about it. Moby Dick was pretty much ignored for half a century. Then Modernism moved all the goalposts, and more and more people came to enjoy and admire it. The enjoyment and the admiration, the Delicious and the Excellent, tend to bleed into each other naturally.
Here's an exercise, to separate and clarify these two critical axes for yourself. Write a list of the five Best Books you've ever read. Write a second list, of your five Favorite Books. Then look at each book which appeared on both lists, and weigh carefully whether they really belong on both lists, or whether you haven't elided the two lists in your mind.
When I ask, Who's Your Favorite 21st Century Writer, it's irrelevant to me how critics rate this writer. I'm just curious to know who draws the fullest and most satisfying gut reaction from you, who lights up all the taste buds in your imagination, and plays a symphony that excites and soothes your heart - in the end, metaphors fail me. I don't know how much you like to be excited, or challenged, or soothed, when you read. I have no clue what is the best balance and ordering of sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami for you. But I'd love for you to tell me.
We who read what others write about books, can easily lose track of some of that deliciousness we find in our favorite books. We fill our heads with so much knowledge of what's Excellent, and what we're supposed to admire, that we start to second-guess our own reactions. But our knowledge of the Excellent is learned second-hand. Our gut reactions often give us a fuller and more colorful response to what we read.
What do you find delicious in your favorite 21st Century writer? What do they feed you, that nobody else can cook so well?
Imagine you're at the airport, about to leave for a week on a trip. You discover you've left the book you meant to bring at home. You find one small bookstand, with fifteen new books, new releases by the authors listed in the poll. Luckily they are all stand-alone books, not sequels.