Best of

With 62 votes counted we’re ready to present the final and ultimate (despite some newcomers) aggregation of selective “best of 2017” book lists from all over — including major publications of all kinds, but also retailer and library selections, award nominees, and more. (As usual, we have updated the previous post with all of our sources noted.) This year’s final list features our first-ever two-time Book of the Year honoree, George Saunders. His story collection Tenth of December tied for top honors with Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in 2013, but both titles collected 25 votes each that year. Saunder’s new […]

Right on schedule, we have our second update on the competition for the consensus best books of the year, and as naturally happens at this point in the aggregation, there is enough data for full “top 10” lists for both fiction and nonfiction. With 54 votes counted at this point (or 33 more than Quartz has counted so far, if we were looking for web traffic), George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is pulling away as book of the year, while David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has a comfortable lead as nonfiction book of the year (and is […]

The NYT has published lists of their individual critics’ favorite books of the year, from veteran Dwight Garner, newcomer Parul Seghal, the departing Jennifer Senior, and even/still Janet Maslin. Maslin writes, “Mine is the strangest of these lists. I left The Times’s staff two and a half years ago, but apparently I won’t go away. I write intermittently about books with the potential to be popular. The good ones are hard to find.” She gives special thanks to Bill O’Reilly for his spring release Old School (written with Bruce Feirstein). “He’s right about many things, particularly when it comes to […]