I pledge on Goodreads to read 52 books each year but generally read more. (I actually read 33 from TNYT list, but I didn’t like them all.) My list of “bests” is almost entirely different.

fiction
•American War (2017) by Omar El Akkad
•the Scholomance series (2020-2022) from Naomi Novak
•The Hearts of Horses (2007) and Wild Life (2000) and Falling from Horses (2015) and Unforeseen (2019) by Molly Gloss
•All Coyote’s Children (2018) by Bette Husted
•Gilead (2004) by Marilynne Robinson
•The Inhabited World (2006) by David Long
•The Known World (2003) by Edward P.Jones
•Olive Kitterege (2009) and the ones since by Elizabeth Strout
•Fun Home (2006) by Alison Bechdel
•Black Swan Green (2006) by David Mitchell
•most everything by Tana French (2007-2024)
•Circe (2018) by Madeline Miller
•Servants of the Map: Stories (2002) and others by Andrea Barrett (though I loved Ship Fever from 1996 best of all)
•Hild (2013) by Nicola Griffith
•The Gospel of Loki (2014) by Joanne M. Harris
•Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004) and maybe Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

nonfiction
•The Cost of Free Land (2023) by Rebecca Clarren
•Nickel and Dimed (2001) by Barbara Ehrenreich
•River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003) her memoir, and Men Explain Things to Me (2014) by Rebecca Solnit
•The World Without Us (2007) by Alan Weisman
•Lit (2009) by Mary Karr
•We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017) by Ta-Nehisi Coates
•Enrique’s Journey (2005) by Sonia Nazario

poetry would take me more time, but recently, I read straight through both of the chapbooks from Danusha Laméris, and ordered the one coming soon. I would be another long list…

Between the World and Me didn’t make it to my list, largely because I had just read James Baldwin when I read it, and liked Baldwin’s book much better. I tried but am not a fan of Ferrante, Zadie Smith, Roth, or McCarthy. Wilkerson wears me out. I’d have been happier had Ishiguro had stopped writing novel years ago.

Add A Brief history of the Dead (2006) by Kevin Brockmeyeier to the fiction list, which I mistakenly assumed was published earlier. Ron Carlson’s story collection, At the Jim Bridger (2002), is another. Nonfiction needs Henrietta Lacks and a bunch of others added. If I actually search along my bookcases, I will find too many more—right there Debra Magpie Earling and Emily Fridlund and Marilyn Chin must be from this century. I have sixteen bookcases, only five in Portland. [I do think you can have too many books, but never enough bookcases.]