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Note: I’m out of pocket during my residency period at school. I love your comments! But it may take me several days or a week or more to respond.

My year-in-review post will be up next week, as usual. But first, also as usual, I want to share the list of my favorite things I read this year.

Not as usual: none were audiobooks, because I read no audiobooks this year. Few of these are new releases (they are marked with an asterisk*).

I gave a single rating of 10, late in the game, to an essay I’ve read over and over, and it keeps getting better every time. I still have not written about this essay. I still think you should go into it blind.

• “The Fourth State of Matter,” Jo Ann Beard – nonfiction

I’ve refrained from going back and changing any ratings that I gave at the time; but I have split the books that I rated 9 into two groups, as I judge them now. This list is overwhelmingly nonfiction, since that is most of what I’ve been reading this year.

So. The top three which received ratings of 9, are:

• The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch – nonfiction
• *The Glass Eye, Jeannie Vanasco – nonfiction
• Glorybound, Jessie van Eerden – fiction

The rest of my 9-ratings, all wonderful reads:

• On Writing, Stephen King – nonfiction
• *The Signal Flame, Andrew Krivák – fiction
• I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence, Kim Dana Kupperman – nonfiction
• The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing, Richard Hugo – nonfiction
• The Essayist’s Dilemma (Occasional Papers on the Essay: Practice and Form from Welcome Table Press), Marcia Aldrich, Lucy Ferriss, Kim Dana Kupperman, and E.J. Levy – nonfiction
• Essays of E.B. White – nonfiction
• “Goodbye to All That”, Joan Didion – nonfiction
• The Business of Memory: The Art of Remembering in an Age of Forgetting, ed. by Charles Baxter – nonfiction

I gave plenty of 8s–too many, perhaps–and I’ve gone through and compiled you a slightly shorter list of my favorites from those books.

• Safekeeping, Abigail Thomas – nonfiction
• The Pine Barrens, John McPhee – nonfiction
• Queen of the Fall, Sonja Livingston – nonfiction
• A Field Guide for Immersion Writing, Robin Hemley – nonfiction
• The Pine Island Paradox, Kathleen Dean Moore –
  nonfiction
• The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard – nonfiction
• A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Harry Crews – nonfiction
• Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera, trans. Lisa Dillman – fiction
• *We Are All Shipwrecks, Kelly Grey Carlisle – nonfiction
• Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Mark Doty – nonfiction
• Inventing the Truth, William Zinsser, ed. – nonfiction
• *Mean, Myriam Gurba – nonfiction

I hope this lengthy list gives you some good ideas for your own reading! What are some of the best books you’ve read this year?

Come back next week to see a further breakdown of my reading habits in 2017, what’s changed and what’s a surprise. Happy holidays and happy reading, friends.

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