The Top 10 Books Of 2018, According To Everyone
It's December, which means Best of 2018 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.
The 10 Best Books of 2018
10. 'Circe' by Madeline Miller
"Madeline Miller has mastered two specific skills: writing gorgeous prose and reimagining ancient Greek literature in powerful ways. Her 2011 debut novel, 'The Song of Achilles,' drew from 'The Iliad' to weave a captivating saga with the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus at its center. And now she's returned with 'Circe,' a novel starring the intriguing sorceress briefly mentioned in Homer's 'The Odyssey.' Through Miller's lyrical writing, Circe transforms from a sweet, overlooked goddess to an extraordinary witch banished by Zeus to a deserted island. Men may have gotten the glory in Greek epics, but in 2018, Circe is fiction's most compelling protagonist."
[Paste]
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9. 'Asymmetry' by Lisa Halliday
"In 'Asymmetry,' two seemingly unrelated sections are connected by a shocking coda. The first, 'Folly,' is the story of a love affair. It narrates the relationship between Alice, a book editor and aspiring writer in her mid-20s, and Ezra Blazer, a brilliant, geriatric novelist who is partly modeled on Philip Roth. The second section — 'Madness' — belongs to Amar Jaafari, an Iraqi-American economist who is being detained at Heathrow. Halliday's prose is clean and lean, almost reportorial in the style of W.G. Sebald. This is a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years, and it manages to be, all at once, a transgressive roman à clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction."
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8. 'Educated' by Tara Westover
"The seventh child of Mormon survivalist parents, Tara Westover grew up on a remote mountain in Idaho and spent her childhood working in a scrapyard. Denied a formal education by her parents, Westover was instead taught a series of falsehoods about the government and society. But in spite of all of this, Westover's memoir, which chronicles her struggle to escape her oppressive family, is one of the most poetic and lyrical books I've read all year. And I'm not the only one who thinks so: Barack Obama included it on his summer reading list."
[Glamour]
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7. 'The Mars Room' by Rachel Kushner
"Eschewing the stylistic and formal flourishes of her much-celebrated previous novels, 'Telex From Cuba' and 'The Flamethrowers,' Kushner has produced her most straightforward book yet, while also managing to avoid the familiar motifs of women-in-prison stories, from 'Caged Heat' to 'Orange Is the New Black.' Her narrator, Romy Hall, serving a life sentence for killing the man who was stalking her, recalls a life on the working-class fringes of San Francisco; the novel takes its title from the low-end (but pleasingly easygoing) strip club where she worked. Kushner is interested in prison as an exaggerated version of the ordinary daily lives of women like Romy: a place where practical constraints bring out their ingenuity—like making cheesecake out of nondairy creamer—and where the right alliances can spell the difference between life and death. Romy's voice is noirish and fatalistic, but still, the novel is, in spirit, testimonial. 'A lot of history is not known,' Romy says. 'A lot of worlds have existed that you can't look up online or in any book.' And yet, here's this one in all its ragged beauty."
[Slate]
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6. 'An American Marriage' by Tayari Jones
"Oprah's Book Club sticker is a powerful imprimatur: it promises both literary excellence and cultural relevance. 'An American Marriage' delivers on both. It's the story of a young black couple, Roy and Celeste, who feel the lucky promise of their lives stretching ahead of them. But early in their marriage, Roy is falsely convicted of a crime, and his years in prison — and then sudden release — bring irrevocable change to their lives and their marriage. Oprah said of the novel, 'It's a love story that also has a huge layer of suspense. And it's also so current and so really now that I could not put it down.' Coupled with that suspense are heartbreaking empathy and a sharp look at America, on a powerfully intimate scale."
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5. 'The Great Believers' by Rebecca Makkai
"Rebecca Makkai's novel 'The Great Believers' is my pick for novel of the year. It's a sweeping story about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and its long, numb aftermath. As one of the main characters says about the random cruelty of AIDS, this disease has magnified all our mistakes — some stupid thing you did when you were 19, the one time you weren't careful, and it turns out that was the most important day of your life. 'The Great Believers' is filled with vivid characters, absorbing questions about art, belief and transcendence and, most improbably, lots of wit."
[NPR]
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4. 'Washington Black' by Esi Edugyan
"'Washington Black' is a book of discovery and adventure. Edugyan's soaring novel, evocative of swashbuckling stories of centuries past, traces the journey of a young slave, Wash, who escapes captivity (via hot-air balloon, no less) and embarks on a globe-trotting quest for freedom. The horrors of his upbringing haunt him everywhere he goes, from London to the Arctic. The shackles of his — of America's — past keep him from realizing his potential as an artist. Edugyan writes pointedly, illuminating one great mind of many that have been lost to history and silence. 'Washington Black' contains immense feeling — in the improbably close bond between Wash and a white man, the heartbreaking separation of Wash from his surrogate mother — and the story is permeated by grief. That Edugyan makes it so entertaining only confirms her subversive brilliance."
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3. 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' by Ottessa Moshfegh
"In the vein of one of my favorite books of last year, Elif Batuman's Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted 'The Idiot,' Moshfegh's second novel concerns a character I want to grab by the shoulders and give a violent shake. Her protagonist has just come into a decent-sized inheritance and decides to blow off her best frenemy and finance-bro boyfriend in order to spend her money on a cocktail of prescription drugs that will help her sleep for an entire year. Though it seems a little Seinfeldian in its plotlessness — the narrator spends her time either asleep on her gross couch, at her local bodega, or at her psychiatrist's office, and that's pretty much it — there's a surprising amount of stuff actually going on here. It's riveting."
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2. 'The Largesse of the Sea Maiden' by Denis Johnson
"At a memorial service, the narrator of 'The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden's title story is told he was the deceased's best friend, information that comes as news to the narrator, who barely knew him. 'Rather than memorializing him, we found ourselves asking, "Who the hell was this guy?"' A lesser writer would play the scene as tragedy, but Denis Johnson portrays it as yet another one of life's endless curious circumstances, of which he was one of fiction's finest chroniclers. Published eight months after the author's death, the collection's stories all circle around mortality in one way or another. Johnson proceeds almost casually, stringing together anecdote and incident, before making a big move, in an epiphany or a proclamation, including one of the best last lines in recent memory. A book that looks so closely at death is necessarily also about everything that comes before it: work, relationships, and always the passage of time. As one character puts it: 'You make your own hours, mess around the house in your pajamas, listening to jazz recordings and sipping coffee while another day makes its escape.'"
[AV Club]
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1. 'There There' by Tommy Orange
"In Orange's fiery debut, 12 city-dwelling Native Americans head to the Big Oakland Powwow, each with different aims. The author masterfully knits their stories together at the event, which leads to a terrifying climax. 'There There' is at once a poetic and suspenseful page-turner and a subtle condemnation of a shameful history."
[Time]
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Honorable Mentions
11. 'The Recovering' by Leslie Jamison
12. 'Frederick Douglass' by David W. Blight
13. 'Heavy' by Kiese Laymon
14. 'Motherhood' by Sheila Heti
Also this week:
The Top 10 Video Games of 2018
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 lists all got 5.5 points).
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