Some of us make lists all year long: to-do lists, grocery lists, shopping lists, and the like. I am an inveterate list maker, always have been. As was my mother so I suppose I inherited this tendency as did at least one of my sisters. It’s satisfying to create a list and then check off items as they are completed. And if one is debating an important decision, such as a job offer, making a list of pros and cons can be helpful in weighing the options.
But the month of December represents the epitome of lists. ‘Tis the season. Ten best-of-the-year lists of movies, books, and music CDs populate newspapers and social media. Daily book critics write columns about their favorite books, while the Wall St. Journal solicits short statements about the books they liked from celebrities, politicians, actors, and authors. And that behemoth Amazon supplements its best books of the month in various categories with its own best books of 2018. While these lists reflect the tenor of the times, they are also a retail tool, designed to generate sales. As an avid reader and in a spirit of competition with myself, I pore over several book lists—looking in part for any overlap between them, but even more to see which of the year’s best titles, I might have already read!
Lisa Halliday’s novel, Asymmetry,which I read and blogged about, is on both the New York Times Book Review’sand the Wall St. Journal’s lists as is David Blight’s biography, Frederick Douglass. The novel, Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, appears on both the WSJ list and the Washington Post’s, perhaps an indication that I should add it to my personal to-be-read list. I was pleased to see that Westover’s bracing memoir, Educated, made it onto the NYT list and was also Amazon’s #1 pick of its top twenty books of 2018. On the WSJ list, the other title I’ve recently read is biographer Claire Tomalin’s memoir, A Life of My Own.
And just in case, you don’t end up with enough new reading material, there are the notable book lists; the New York Times named 100 notable books. while the Washington Post published its 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2018 along with a companion list of notable nonfiction.
I also checked to see if my favorite west coast newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, had a 2018 list, but it appears that it won’t be published for another week or so. Likewise, the Los Angeles Times.
As December winds down, I’ll be thinking about my favorite or best book of the year and looking ahead to what I’ll be reading in 2019. What was your best book of 2018? I’d love to include your choices in my first blog of the new year.
Here are several of the 10 Best Books of the Year lists for 2018. I included the WSJ titles since they have a very robust paywall.
Wall Street Journal
Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday
Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts
Cloudbursts by Thomas McGuane
The Consciousness Instinct by Michael Gazzaniga
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
Godsend by John Wray
Lamentfrom Epirus by Christopher C. King
A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin
Patriot Number One by Lauren Hilgers
Season of the Shadow by Léonora Miano
