Hello again! As per tradition, I’m ranking my favorite books I’ve read over the past two years. It’s a chance to reflect on what I’ve enjoyed the most, think about some great books, and see how my tastes change over time.

1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

It was fairly difficult to decide what should be number one this time. Sometimes the decision comes down to “how excited am I to recommend this book to others?” Rebecca ended up number 1 because it is so easy to recommend and so worth reading. The 1938 classic is about a girl who marries a wealthy man twenty years older than her that she barely knows, her life at his gothic mansion, and her complicated relationship with his ex-wife. Some books are classics for a reason. The beginning and ending are justifiably famous, the story is gripping, Manderley is one of the best settings ever, and the book sent me into a mini gothic literature phase.

2. Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

My mom is somewhat infamous in my family for liking a very specific genre of movie; stories about the struggles of women in countries ravaged by war. Growing up she would be all excited to see Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame or whatever, while the rest of the family would watch Iron Man. The point of this anecdote is that as you grow older you turn into your parents, which in this case means I too am a sucker for certain types of stories. I always have at least one multi-generational family drama on this list and Hello Beautiful is this year’s winner in the category. It follows an aspiring basketball player named William and the four sisters of the Padavano family. There’s drama, there’s trauma, there’s all the hallmarks of the genre. I don’t know why these sorts of books so appeal to me, but they clearly do because I had a great time.

3. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

The first Gabrille Zevin book I read was The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, a huge hit (and later a movie) which I really didn’t care for. So I was incredibly pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this story. It is partially about video game design but that’s not the real draw. I thought the ideas about games were interesting enough to be enjoyable, but they served as more of a framing around the characters and their ongoing relationships. This would have been my #1 of the year if not for the final act which I didn’t care for. Still an excellent book though, and I’m excited for Zevin’s next novel.

4. Pale by Wildbow (John C. McCrae)

Boy, I have a lot of thoughts about this one.

Pale is a web serial from Wildbow, best known for his earlier web serial Worm (#5 on my list in 2018). A web serial is a story posted online in regular intervals. One of the best things about web serials is you can read along with a community on Discord, listen in to podcasts discussing it as it releases, and so on. Pale also features a bunch of stuff that would be very difficult in a printed book, such as more experimental chapters that were largely images or other content.

Wildbow writes easily the best magic systems of any author I’ve read and Pale’s is brilliant. It is not as elegant as the system as in Worm; if anything the system is deliberately inelegant. But I struggle to think of any other fictional magic system that feels sufficiently deep for someone to actually spend a lifetime studying it. Of the 40+ different types of magic in Pale, by the end of the book I feel like I had a moderate understanding of how one of them worked and a surface-level understanding of maybe three of them (actually implementing any of these magical approaches would take months/years of work in addition to understanding what to do). The characters are also terrific and the book has the highest highs of any book I read this year(s).

The problem is… it’s a web serial, which means it was published in serialized installments with minimal editing. This means it is long, at over 3.6 million words not counting extra material. For comparison, all the Harry Potter books combined were just over a million words. Frankly, Pale is too long. A decent editor would cut half of it, minimum, and I suspect they would cut closer to three quarters. It is often great, but simply too bloated to recommend to most people. Plus, there is the unfortunate situation where at this point a new reader somewhat misses the experience because they aren’t reading along with a community. I’m not sure I’ll read another story by Wildbow — they are just so long — but I greatly enjoyed reading this one.

5. Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton

Wow it is yet another book about an Antarctic expedition gone horribly wrong. The journey of the Belgica is actually fairly similar to that of the Endurance, except with far more death and people going insane. Having now read a lot of books about the “heroic age” of Antarctic exploration, I appreciate how this one deviated from the typical patterns. If an expedition is successful, books typically are about how a hyper-competent badass conquered the elements. If they expedition is unsuccessful, they are a tragedy about Man’s hubris in the face of nature. But the Belgica’s journey is like… bad, but most people survive? And the leader is really good at some stuff and really terrible at other stuff? The whole journey feels muddled, improvisational, and surprising, in a way that is unusual among these expeditions.

6. Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing

While The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is the OG Antarctic adventure story, Endurance is likely the most famous. It describes the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, how the expedition goes horribly wrong, and how the crew somehow manages return home with no deaths. The trials of Shackleton’s crew are utterly harrowing and their survival is extraordinary. It was also written long enough ago that Lansing could talk with some crew and their family members, something which is impossible for most modern accounts.

The book is as gripping as you would expect, but I was left with two questions: First, how good was Shackleton as a leader anyway? The book was written in the 1950s, and accounts of polar explorers written at that time tend to be hagiographies. I can’t tell if Lansing’s account reflects the biases of the time or if it is a fair portrait of an incredible leader. Second, the three lifeboats on the ship are absolutely pivotal to the story. All are unique and described in depth. Yet in both the ship blueprints and in photographs of the ship, there appear to be four lifeboats. Were there originally four and one was somehow never mentioned?? Did Shackleton depart with only three and they keep moving around in pictures so it looks like there were four?? I have spent an unreasonable amount of time now trying to figure this out and have no answers please someone let me know if you know what the deal is.

7. Uzumaki by Junji Ito

I read Uzumaki when I heard Netflix was coming out with an adaptation of the famous manga. The adaptation had a very strong episode 1, then the rest of the series was made with a different director and vastly inferior animation. So don’t watch the series, and read the manga instead.

Uzumaki follows a high school girl in a remote Japanese village which is infected with spirals (as in, the shape). The idea of a shape as the antagonist works brilliantly. Ito’s work is often compared to Lovecraft’s and I like the idea of it as a modern successor. One thing that is hard to convey in adaptations of Lovecraft’s work is the sense of incomprehension snf terror of the unknown. While Uzumaki is set in 1990s Japan rather than early 20th century New England, there is the same sense of a completely alien malevolent force looming over the story. Also warning that it is fairly visually horrific — you will know within a chapter or two if the story is for you.

8. The Wren, The Wren by Anne Enright

This is the first of multiple multi-generation family dramas to make this years list. The Wren, The Wren stands out from other family dramas for two reasons. First, one of the central characters is dead before the story begins; their presence looms over the novel in a way that I found interesting. Second, there is a lot of poetry in the book. In many ways it is a book about writing and about poetry. The book is slooow, but the absolutely gorgeous writing helps a lot. The experience of reading the book matches the birds in the title. It’s like bird watching — most of the time you are just sitting in the bush without much happening, but the scenery is beautiful while you are waiting.

9. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton’s previous work was The Luminaries; a sprawling, wildly ambitious novel (and my #2 book of 2016). So when she returned a decade later I was expecting another massive and slightly crazy novel. Instead, Birnam Wood is a shockingly conventional and normal-length thriller. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed Catton didn’t write another book that was super out-there. Still, her great writing is still here, I liked the characters, and found this to be a fun page-turner.

10. Babel by R.F. Kuang

The previous book by R.F. Kuang I read was her much-lauded debut, The Poppy War. I thought it was good but very uneven, which sometimes happens with a debut novel. With Babel, Kuang is clearly much more polished and adventurous. I love the magic system and as someone who studied abroad for two terms at Oxford her depiction of Oxford rings so true — it is hard to explain just how strange that place is unless you have been there for a while. My biggest frustration with the book is that I didn’t really care for the ending of The Poppy War, and somehow Babel magnified all my issues with that ending.

Welcome back! As per a long-running tradition, I like ranking my favorite books I’ve read over the past two years. It’s an interesting way to reflect on what I’ve enjoyed the most, as well as stay motivated to read and track my preferences over time.

It was extremely challenging to decide this top ten list, for several reasons. First, there wasn’t anything that I unconditionally loved, which made deciding my top several sports unusually tough. At the same time, there were so many books that I really liked that narrowing the list down to ten proved excruciating.

A final confusing wrinkle was where to put Pale, the long-running web serial which has devoured a lot of my reading time. It would surely rank in the top ten, but it still isn’t finished. I decided ultimately to rank this whenever it finishes which presumably will be before 2024.

Finally, shout out to The Big Short which was my number eleven. On to the top ten!

1. The Overstory by Richard Powers

This was probably the toughest book to rank out of any I read over the past two years. There are parts that really worked on me, parts that didn’t, and parts that I am still unsure about. It’s a book following a group of eco-terrorists (kind of), how they meet, and the evolution of their beliefs and actions.

The book is split into distinct acts, which is part of why it is hard to rate, because the first act is so spectacular. The opening of the book, disparate stories of characters with profound relationships to trees, is the best stuff I’ve read in the past two years. Unfortunately, once the various characters start meeting each other and interacting, the book loses momentum until it peters out in an ending I found disappointingly limp.

The other challenging part of the book is the characters. They are very strange people, and that can be alienating because it is hard to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Then again, most people aren’t eco-terrorists, so maybe the characters should act and think in disorienting ways. Nevertheless, they have an internal logic which made me feel like I really understood the characters. Finally, Powers’ prose is truly spectacular. Is it occasionally overwrought? Maybe. But I loved it just as I loved this book.

2. The Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee

Don’t judge a book by its cover because these win the award for “ugliest covers of the past two years”. The first book in the trilogy, Jade City, has this weird black cover with a green lightning bolt that looks like a janky self-published book. Then the next two books decided to go with the same ugly cover design, just in different colors. There was a limited release that had great covers, but that’s no longer available. Regardless, these books might not draw your attention but pick them up if you see them because they’re great.

The Green Bone Saga tells a story of the protracted struggle between two warring crime syndicates whose members have supernatural abilities. In a lot of fantasy novels, magic is used in military conflict. This series is far more interesting because open war would likely be catastrophic for both sides. The conflict is mostly indirect, filled with constant intrigue, tentative alliances, targeted assassinations, and questionable loyalties. It reminds me a lot of the first three books of Game of Thrones. And hey, this series actually has a reasonably satisfying ending! Overall, an exciting fantasy series that feels fresh and makes me want to read more novels of fantasy court intrigue.

3. To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alister Horne

For some reason, I seem to really like non-fiction books where the author makes it extremely clear that they personally dislike part of what they are covering. In this case, the Third French Republic is the target or Horne’s well-deserved frustration. The book covers the astoundingly successful German invasion of France during World War Two. Part of the strength of the book is the subject matter is naturally interesting — it’s hard to think many military plans in history which were simultaneously as complex, risky, daring, and almost flawlessly executed as Case Yellow. At the same time, the maddening incompetence of French leadership makes a morbidly entertaining contrast to the well-planned German attack.

The book doesn’t hold your hand much and expects the reader to have a base level of knowledge about the German invasion. At least some familiarity with the geography of Belgium and eastern France is practically required to visualize what the heck is going on. Still, it is a well-organized narrative that splits between a discussion of the underlying weakness of the French government prior to the invasion and the subsequent ways those weaknesses undermined the French defense.

4. Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson

This was the hardest book for me to place on this list. It’s well over a thousand pages and I finished it in a matter of days, then immediately gave it five stars on Goodreads (A rating I give <10% of the time). The world building continues to be absolutely spectacular and the characters are terrific. Special shout out goes to Navani who somehow manages to have a riveting subplot while spewing exposition about the magic system of Roshar.

But… for whatever reason this book didn’t stick with me as much as the others in the Stormlight Archive series. It might be because I read it so fast, like how binging series can be less enjoyable than watching them week-by-week. A book like Words of Radiance felt like spectacular payoff to the giant setup that was The Way of Kings. This book, now more than four thousand pages into The Stormlight Archive, felt… less spectacular. I don’t know. If I made this list immediately after I read Rhythm of War I would have been surprised if this book wasn’t my favorite of 2021–2022. Now, while I remember enjoying it immensely I’m not sure I can have a book that didn’t age as well as my favorite, as much as I liked the read.

5. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

Ruth Ozeki is my pick for most underrated contemporary author. I’ve loved everything I’ve read from her. So even though The Book of Form and Emptiness is my least favorite book from her, it is still really, really good. I love the edge of weirdness that pervades Ozeki’s work, and how she uses those weird elements to augment themes in her novels.

In this case, the story is largely told as a conversation between a boy and a book. On one hand, the whole “objects having sentience” thing seems like a bit of a gimmick in an otherwise grounded book. But on the other hand, the book really is about objects and how people relate to them. One of the central characters is a hoarder while another is a zen priest who is more or less Marie Kondo with a different name. The whole story is about how humans relate to their possessions, so the conversation with a book makes sense. Classic Ozeki weirdness that works.

6. Beloved by Toni Morrison

If you haven’t read anything by Toni Morrison but know of her reputation as a literary giant you might assume her books are staid, elegant affairs. But her books are wild; this is my favorite I’ve read so far because it so thoroughly embraces surreal, apocalyptic horror. The genesis of the book was a newspaper article about a slave who killed one of her children and was attempting to kill others to prevent them from being forced to return into slavery. So yup, the book is horrifically dark. It’s a difficult but certainly memorable read and if you’ve heard Beloved is great but never gotten around to reading it, give it a shot.

7. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Every time I do these lists I have at least one big, multi-generational family drama and at least one set in a desolate polar landscape. This time the winner of the multi-generation family drama category is The Vanishing Half. This is just a good book with an interesting premise and it expands upon that premise in directions that create both tension and emotional impact. There’s maybe a little bit too much going on in this book given that it’s not very long but this book is super solid and there’s a reason why it was such a hit when it came out.

8. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

One of the reasons I do this exercise is to see how my tastes have evolved over time. I read Mandel’s breakout success Station Eleven in 2015, but apparently it didn’t make my top ten books of that year. Tastes change, go figure.

Station Eleven attracted attention in part because it was a book about a catastrophic global pandemic. Interestingly, Sea of Tranquility is also very much about pandemics, including Covid-19. In Station Eleven that pandemic is a terrifying apocalyptic force; in Sea of Tranquility a pandemic is often more of a cause of boredom not just terror and death.

Mandel is channeling David Mitchell hard here with a similar nesting structure to Cloud Atlas and I think a fairly similar view of the future as Mitchell presents in The Bone Clocks. But hey, I really like David Mitchell so I’m all for it.

9. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

This is a weird one. The central conflict is tracking down a murderer which makes it a mystery novel… kind of? Frankly, I didn’t find the mystery all that interesting. It’s an exploration of the 16th century Ottoman empire which is evocative and compelling. It’s a wild story told from numerous unusual perspectives. For example, one of the many narrators is the color red. Maybe most of all it’s a story about art, using a plot revolving around Ottoman minature at a particular point in time as a lens to discuss the nature of art and beauty.

That all sounds incredibly ambitious and it only half-worked for me. But this was undoubtedly one of the most interesting and transporting books I read over the last two years. The kaleidoscopic weirdness is so consistently intriguing that I found the book surprisingly riveting.

10. Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Every year at least one book set in a desolate landscape makes my top ten and this year it’s Disappearing Earth, set in contemporary Siberia. The book follows a collection of women living on the peninsula of Kamchatka and does a brilliant job describing the challenges and small triumphs of daily live. Phillips lived in Kamchatka and her love for the area and its people shines through. While the novel sort of has a plot, it is really more of a collection of loosely-connected short stories with lovely prose. This is Phillips’ debut novel and her ability to evoke character and place is remarkable. I’m definitely looking forward to her next work — I just hope it has more of a central narrative.

For the past 6 years I’ve made a list of my top 10 non-work-related books I read that year. I swear I did this last year too and somehow can’t find where I put it, so I’m now making a master list I can track over time.

By now most of the stuff I read is academic so I haven’t been able to read for pleasure as much as I would like. I combined reading for the last two years so this is really a 2019–20 list.

1. Words of Radiance by Brandon Sanderson

I read The Way of Kings this year too and it didn’t make the list. That book felt like 800+ pages of setup followed by a frenetic series of reveals. Remarkably, in the sequel all of that setup actually pays off. Established characters living their separate stories finally meet and collide in wonderfully entertaining ways. You start getting hints to mysteries set up a thousand pages earlier. The book also benefits from a focus on Shallan rather than Kaladin. Kaladin is an interesting character but also a gloomy one with a tragic past. Shallan’s tragic past is mysterious, and her coping mechanisms make her far more fun to follow.

Fantasy series frequently have a mixture of journeys and destinations. Some series are more exciting during the journeys, like Lord of the Rings. Others, like Game of Thrones are excited when lots of characters are in one place but less interesting when characters are moving about. I now think Stormlight Archive is clearly the latter; having almost everyone we care about housed in the Alethi warcamps on the Shattered Plains made for terrific interactions. I’m excited to start Oathbringer and dreading the extremely obvious love triangle that has been set up. I just hope it’s a brief one.

2. The Last Place on Earth: Scott and Amundsen’s Race to the South Pole by Roland Huntford

I loved this book from the 1970s on Antarctic exploration for three reasons. First, I love stories of the Antarctic and polar exploration. Second, the race for the pole between Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott is a naturally thrilling tale. Third, Huntford writes with such vitriolic disdain for Scott that it is incredibly entertaining and also somewhat baffling. Scott died before Huntford was born so I don’t know where this beef is coming from but I have never read a work of non-fiction where the author so obviously loathed one of the central characters. Huntford will break away from sober-minded discussions of Antarctic logistics to describe the affair Scott’s wife is having (which btw apparently didn’t actually happen) and endorse her behavior because of how unfulfilling Scott must be as a husband. It’s wild, like you’re reading a serious historical account mixed with a diss track. Regardless the book is enjoyable, fascinating, and did convince me that Scott was a massive idiot.

3. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

As I mentioned before I like books set in desolate landscapes, and this book’s setting is incredible. Fourteenth-century northern Russia is really the most interesting character in the book, and the omnipresent cold is apparent everywhere: From the tiny ice-filled windows to preserve heat to the terror of an unusually cold winter. I also love how the main character doesn’t really know what she’s doing. Soft magic systems work best for me when a character is flailing around; Vasya realizes she’s the only hope to save her family, and has to desperately scrounge for magic as she goes. I liked the later books much less; once Vasya becomes competent she’s off to Moscow to battle a sorcerer or whatever, and too much of the series became generic fantasy that has been done much better elsewhere. But this initial book captures mystery and wonder and terror of nature brilliantly.

4. Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Allie Brosh is clearly one of the funniest people on the planet and if you have not read Hyperbole and a Half you really, really should. Brosh’s first book was essentially her blog in book form. Here, the collection of stories was meant to be a book from the start. Brosh is hilarious as ever of course, but she is also one of the best authors at veering from comedy to tragedy and making the transition simultaneously work effectively while still being jarring. This book gets very, very heavy in between the jokes. The humor doesn’t distract from the serious topics but elevates them; it’s a book not about overcoming challenges but about living despite them. Brosh has struggled through multiple tragedies in the past few years, and the book is not her getting over that grief but still smiling in spite of it.

5. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking by Samin Nosrat

Wow yes I have a cookbook in my top five books I’ve read in the past two years(!) But this book deserves it. Samin Nosrat has produced a cookbook that is a guide on how to cook, not just a collection of instructions. In fact, the first recipe doesn’t even appear until nearly halfway through the book! Instead, there are brilliant exercises on how to combine flavors. These omit specific directions in favor of explanations on how to understand what you are doing and why. I hope this is a model for cookbooks going forward, and while I’m still a mediocre-at-best cook this book has probably helped more than all other cookbooks I’ve read combined.

6. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Terrific account of mass incarceration in America and injustice within the American legal system. For me, the most interesting part was the legal history of how to determine if a policy was racist. Justices have consistently demanded that proof of racist intent, rather than just proof of harm, is required for a law to be invalidated. This is a ridiculous standard for two reasons: First, plenty of laws can have benign intent but be totally unjust in practice. Second, intent is incredibly hard to prove, and historically has placed such a high burden of proof that even the most flagrant laws have been upheld (for example City of Memphis v. Greene). As a quantitative political scientist I try to get close to truth by analysis of patterns and demonstrating that these patterns are non-random; that seems much easier than getting policy architects on the record talking about how malicious their laws are. Yet even now Courts frequently reject qualitative arguments out of hand; in the 2017 case Gill v. Whitford John Roberts dismissed evidence of partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin as “sociological gobbledygook”. The same dismissive attitude was apparent in the appalling Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the Voting Rights Act, with all too predictable results.

7. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat

This is blurring the lines a bit, as I read part of this for a class, but it’s not related to my research interests and I read the entire book because it seemed interesting not because I was planning on incorporating it into any project.

Tim Pachirat works undercover at a meatpacking plant to understand how workers there cope with the daily slaughter. As interesting as the account is, the ethics are perhaps even more intriguing. Pachirat has a PhD but poses as a poor immigrant. His language skills and other advantages mean he is able to retain a job he doesn’t need while friends he makes on the line are fired, a catastrophe for their family. Later in the book Pachirat receives a promotion to doing quality assurance at the plant. His real job is a campaign of deception: the meat coming out of the plant has feces in it, and the role of the QA team is to ensure that federal regulators don’t find out that the meat is unsafe. A USDA representative approaches him, asking that he serve as a whistleblower, imploring him to think about the safety of children who eat the tainted meat. Remarkably, Pachirat admits that he’s actually an academic and can’t reveal the confidentiality of the plant. This decision to write a scholarly book instead of a newspaper exposé undoubtedly put lives at risk from tainted food. I worry about balancing work that is valued by academics against work that actually has an impact, and this book does not assuage those concerns.

8. The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

What can I say, I like stories set in desolate polar landscapes. And few landscapes are more desolate than 17th-century Vardø, an island off the northern coast of Norway. I love the sense of place in the book, the struggle to adapt when a sudden storm wipes out almost all of the men in the town. The book is very predictable but it’s historical fiction so the real-life events are rather unsurprising. The book eschews suspense for quiet dread as the small community of women enjoy newfound independence but have to confront a society that wants them to return to their former domestic ways.

9. Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East by Stephen G. Fritz

It’s become a cliché to say that the role of the USSR during World War Two is undervalued in the West, but sometimes clichés exist because they are true. More Soviet troops (probably) died at Rzhev than US forces in the entire war, and odds are you’ve never even heard of that battle! Common misconceptions of the war are partly due to the start of the Cold War shortly after World War Two. This not only dampened interest in highlighted Soviet contributions to the allied victory, but also meant that many Soviet documents were not available to western historians.

In this information vacuum, former German Army (Wehrmacht) officers began to construct their own version of history; one where Hitler was a solitary madman who preyed upon those who lacked the spine to stand up to him while the Wehrmacht, outside of fanatical Nazi units like the SS, conducted a relatively “clean” war. Fritz demolishes these narratives, showing how often it was the military acting on their own initiative to commit atrocities, without any orders from Hitler.

10. How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe

This book is the inverse of one of Munroe’s previous books, What If. There, he provided serious answers to preposterous questions; here, he provides preposterous answers to serious questions. As usual, the book is quietly hilarious; the trick of combining outrageously understated prose with ludicrous situations works well. Yet what I enjoy most, and the key to the entire project, is Munroe’s enthusiasm for his material. He loves developing a model, demonstrating that it at least sort of works, and then applying it to whatever craziness the current focus is.

Top books per year. I have lost my notes on them.

2018

1. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
2. The Broken Earth trilogy by NK Jemisin
3. My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki
4. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
5. Worm by Wildbow (John C. McCrae)
6. What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Munroe
7. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
8. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
9. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
10. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

2017

1. The Magicians by Lev Grossman
2. A History of the World in 12 Maps by Jerry Brotton
3. Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government by Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels
4. Without You, There Is No Us: My Time with the Sons of North Korea’s Elite by Suki Kim
5. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
6. A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel
7. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
8. The Magicians Land by Lev Grossman
9. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
10. The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King by Rich Cohen

2016

1. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
2. The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
3. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
4. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
5. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
6. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
7. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
8. A Hologram for the King by David Eggers
9. 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works by Dan Harris
10. Uprooted by Naomi Novik

2015

1. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
2. The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
3. In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides
4. The Name of the Wind + The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
5. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki
6. Hild by Nicola Griffith
7. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
8. The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss by Edmund de Waal
9. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
10. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

2014

1. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities by John Cassidy
2. A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
3. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver
4. The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
5. Bring Up the Bodies by Hillary Mantel

2013

1. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
2. The Metamorphoses by Ovid
3. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
4. The Trial by Franz Kafka
5. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version by Phillip Pullman