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My year-in-review post will be up tomorrow. But first… I always like to list my favorite books I’ve read in the closing year. As in the past, these are not necessarily new publications, although several are. Without further ado:

I rated just one book with a 10, so the best book that I read in 2016 was

• Notes from No Man’s Land, Eula Biss – nonfiction.

I gave several a rating of 9:

• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel – nonfiction
• Smoke, Dan Vyleta – fiction
• Lily and the Octopus, Steven Rowley – fiction
• Joe Gould’s Teeth, Jill Lepore – nonfiction
• Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn – nonfiction
• Maps to Anywhere, Bernard Cooper – nonfiction
• Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, David Oshinsky – nonfiction.

There were, happily, as ever, lots of 8’s. Special mentions go to:

• Detroit Hustle by Amy Haimerl and This Is Where You Belong by Melody Warnick, two rather different books, for their work with place, which resonates with me.
• from a couple of favorite authors, The Mighty Currawongs by Brian Doyle; Make Me by Lee Child; and Jesus Out to Sea by James Lee Burke.
• For evoking worlds I lost myself in, all fictional but realistic: The Wangs vs. the World by Jade Change; A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles; A Robot in the Garden by Deborah Install (I love the name ‘Install’ for the author of a robot book!); and The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder.

I also voted this year for The National Book Critics Circle Awards. Five for fiction: Smoke, Lily and the Octopus, The Wangs vs. the World, A Robot in the Garden, and The Throwback Special; and five for nonfiction: Joe Gould’s Teeth, Bellevue, Detroit Hustle, Gods, Wasps & Stranglers… and, for that final slot, I struggled between four titles and settled on The Song Poet. (Runners up were The Girls in My Town, Every Last Tie, and The Narrow Door.) I skipped the categories for poetry, criticism, biography, and autobiography, where I didn’t feel I’d read much.

Finally, I wouldn’t want you to miss Shelf Awareness’s best of list. You’ll notice one nonfiction and four fiction titles that cross over from that list to this blog post (or vice versa).

It’s been another amazing year, and I can’t wait to see what 2017 holds. Thanks for coming around again, friends.

Filed under: musings | Tagged: best of, best of the year, lists |