Over the years, we’ve learned that the most interesting aspect of best books lists are not the consensus titles, but those that are rated very highly by just one or two publications.

Now that the New York Times Book Review has released their picks of the Best Books of the Year, we can make comparisons. Unsurprisingly, in fiction, the top two titles are the National Book Award winner, The Underground Railroad and the NBA finalist Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn.

Two other titles stand out as unusual. The Kirkus Prize went to
C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (Macmillan/FSG) a title that was also a Carnegie Medal longlist selection, but not a finalist. It is on the NYT BR list, but not among the Top Ten. The other is the number two selection by the Amazon editors, Beth Lewis’s The Wolf Road (PRH/Crown), which has so far not appeared on any other list.

What makes these titles superior in the editors’s and judges’s minds? Unfortunately, we aren’t given an insight into those deliberations, so we’re left guessing.

We’ve put together all the fiction selections into one downloadable spreadsheet, best-books-2016-fiction-and-poetry-v2. Use it to make your own discoveries and for end-of-the year ordering. UPDATE: Time magazine has released their Top Ten of Everything, including Top Ten Novels. We’ve updated the spreadsheet with those picks.

We will have the childrens and YA spreadsheet available by the end of the week and nonfiction by the end of next week.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 28th, 2016 at 11:50 am and is filed under Best Books 2016. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.