The Top 10 Books Of 2016, According To Everyone
It's December, which means Best of 2016 lists are raining (snowing?) from the sky. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them? Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best albums, songs, books and movies. You're welcome.
The 10 Best Books of 2016
10. Garth Greenwell — 'What Belongs To You'
"Nothing was as stunning this year as the shape and beauty of Greenwell's sentences." [Vulture]
Buy
9. Susan Faludi — 'In The Darkroom'
"[Faludi and her father] argue about what it means to be a woman, to be Jewish, to be Hungarian, to be a parent, and to be a daughter, and each gives as good as she gets. Big-hearted and deeply researched, this memoir illustrates how deciding who we are is seldom as simple as we think." [Slate]
Buy
8. Paul Kalanithi — 'When Breath Becomes Air'
"[A] gifted neurosurgeon's extraordinary account of facing a suddenly altered future: What happens when the doctor becomes the patient, and a young man loses his chance to grow old? This slim volume answers those questions and more — not with tea-mug bromides on bravery or dry medical jargon, but with fierce, tender honesty and almost unimaginable grace." [Entertainment Weekly]
Buy
7. Adam Haslett — 'Imagine Me Gone'
"The story, spanning decades and generations, shifts confidently between heartbreak and cathartic laughter, laying open its characters' psyches with a calm, forensic mastery. Here is a novel about depression that isn't depressing in the slightest." [Wall Street Journal]
Buy
6. Matthew Desmond — 'Evicted'
Gripping storytelling and scrupulous research undergird this outstanding ethnographic study in which [Matthew] Desmond… explores the impact of eviction on poor families in Milwaukee, Wis. [Publishers Weekly]
Buy
5. Zadie Smith — 'Swing Time'
"[A] keenly-felt exploration of friendship, race, fame, motherhood and the ineluctable truth that our origins will forever determine our fates." [Harpers Bazaar]
Buy
4. Han Kang — 'The Vegetarian'
"'The Vegetarian' seethes with quietly violent imagery and grapples with immense questions about human survival, patriarchal societies, the consequences of abuse, and, of course, eating meat. A work of magical realist horror, domestic psychological fiction, and a layered exploration of ethics, it's one of the year's true fiction must-reads." [The Huffington Post]
Buy
3. Nathan Hill — 'The Nix'
"Hill's acute, richly detailed narrative encompasses three decades of American political and social history to create absolutely addictive fiction. Perfectly drawn characters and interlocking stories and voices allow readers to live in the text." [Library Journal]
Buy
2. Yaa Gyasi — 'Homegoing'
"It's a multigenerational family saga that opens in 18th century Ghana with a depiction of the slave trade among Africans… Gyasi pulls her readers deep into her characters' lives through the force of her empathetic imagination." [NPR]
Buy
1. Colson Whitehead — 'The Underground Railroad'
"Coming in just under the wire because Oprah convinced its publisher to release the book a month early, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad enters the pantheon of one of the Great American Novels. It may not be quite as easy or escapist a read as Oprah's previous book club picks, but it is possibly the most essential." [Esquire]
Buy
Honorable Mention
11. Emma Cline — 'The Girls'
12. Rebecca Traister — 'All The Single Ladies'
13. Karan Mahajan — 'The Association Of Small Bombs'
Read More
A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points… down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked Top 10 lists all got 5 points).