The Top 10 Books Of 2017, According To Everyone
A YEAR OF GHOSTS AND FAMILY DRAMA
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It's December, which means Best of 2017 lists are here. 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 in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best albums, songs, books and movies. You're welcome. 

Methodology

The 10 Best Books Of 2017

10. David Grann — 'Killers Of The Flower Moon'

 

"The Osages' systematic murders, and the involvement of J. Edgar Hoover's then-nascent FBI, form the core of Grann's (Lost City of Z) fascinating latest; a nonfiction epic so narratively rich and cinematic, it's no surprise the film rights have already been locked in by Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese." 

[Entertainment Weekly]

Buy It

9. Min Jin Lee — 'Pachinko'

 

"Min Jin Lee's epic saga follows one Korean family over four generations, starting in the early 20th century with a young woman — pregnant out of wedlock by a man who abandons her — who saves her poor family's fate and dignity by marrying a man in Japan. From there, the book charts decades of this expanding family's ongoing attempts at not only survival but success — their cyclical struggles to find home after displacement, and to maintain their identity among a community that would maybe rather they didn't." [BuzzFeed]

Buy It

8. Patricia Lockwood — 'Priestdaddy'

 

"Poet Patricia Lockwood has crafted one of the year's most singular memoirs with this account of her father, who, after watching The Exorcist on board a submarine in the deeps of the ocean no less than 72 times, converted to Christianity." [Elle]

Buy It









7. Carmen Maria Machado — 'Her Body And Other Parties'

 

"The debut short-story collection from Machado is frank, often brutal and proudly feminist. The fiercely original and beautiful stories in this volume, a National Book Award finalist, blur genres and deal with horror, sex, disease and even 'Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.'" [Los Angeles Times]

Buy It









6. Elif Batuman — 'The Idiot'

 

"The Idiot is an exquisitely droll tale of unrequited love and a stylistic tour de force. A student of Tolstoy, Gogol, and Babel, Batuman follows her Russian heroes into territory most contemporary novelists fear to tread — the chaotic zone where plots and meaning break down and the heroine has no one to talk to but herself." [Vulture]

Buy It







5. Jennifer Egan — 'Manhattan Beach'

 

"On its surface an old-fashioned historical novel, set on the homefront in Brooklyn, New York, during World War II, this book has deep currents that get under your skin. Anna Kerrigan, whose father vanished in the 1930s, goes to work in the Brooklyn Naval Yard, defying tradition to become a civilian diver. Meanwhile, a mid-level gangster named Dexter Styles dares to imagine a more legitimate and patriotic role for his employer in American society." [Slate]

Buy It

4. Celeste Ng — 'Little Fires Everywhere'

 

"Little Fires Everywhere revolves around the case of a white couple in an Ohio town who, after a long battle with infertility, adopt a Chinese-American infant. When the child's birth mother comes back into the picture, challenging the adoption, the entire community ― a liberal-minded but almost entirely white enclave ― is drawn into the debate over what decision is better for the child and the parents. Ng's psychological insight is acute, yet generous, which makes her portrayal of well-meaning white liberals particularly revealing." [Huffington Post]

Buy It

3. Mohsin Hamid — 'Exit West'

 

"Magic doors separate the known calamities of the old world from the unknown perils of the new, as the migrants learn how to adjust to an improvisatory existence… Hamid has written a novel that fuses the real with the surreal — perhaps the most faithful way to convey the tremulous political fault lines of our interconnected planet." [The New York Times]

Buy It

2. George Saunders — 'Lincoln In The Bardo'

 

"Everything about Saunders's first novel, which won the Man Booker Prize, confounds our expectations of what a novel should look and sound like. It's composed entirely of brief quotations — some real, some imagined — from people who worked for the president, his friends, colleagues, enemies, biographers and, most strikingly, ghosts trapped in Georgetown's Oak Hill Cemetery, where Willie (Lincoln's 11-year-old son) was laid to rest." [The Washington Post]

Buy It

1. Jesmyn Ward — 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'

 

"Perhaps no contemporary novelist has done more to illuminate the unfinished business of the American South than Jesmyn Ward, whose National Book Award–winning second novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing (Scribner), summons deep empathy for a flawed young mother whose allegorical-feeling road trip across Mississippi with her children reminds us of just how far we still have to go.[Vogue]

Buy It

Honorable Mentions

11. Lisa Ko — 'The Leavers'

12. Ali Smith — 'Autumn'

13. Hari Kunzru — 'White Tears'

* 

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).

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