Year-end “best of” lists are great for things like pop culture moments, celebrity snafus, or provocative photographs. But when it comes to a best-of list for books, you’re not looking for cheap entertainment or nostalgia as you click through. You want to know what you should have been reading during those commutes you spent scrolling through Instagram or playing Candy Crush.
A book is an investment, both of time and money. And while everyone—from blogging bibliophiles to The New York Times—is entitled to their opinion, the number of best-of lists out there and the variance among them has left us wondering just what books are worth bringing with us into the new year.
To find “the best of the best ofs,” we decided not only to aggregate a sampling of lists, but also to assign points based on the selectivity of each list. We used the following formula:
100 / # of books in a given list = points awarded to each book in that list
For example, when a book was featured on a Top 100 list, it received 1 point. But if it made a Top 10 list, received 10 points. So if a book made the cut for a shorter list, it was rewarded. The more lists a book made, the more points it accumulated. Many of the lists we used didn’t assign rankings or declare an overall best, so we didn’t assign weight to those that did.
After we gathered from the essentials (Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Goodreads, The National Book Awards), we threw in a few blogs and national publications and tallied up the scores. Thus, the following 10 books are those that made the highest number of lists, and especially the selective ones.
So whether it’s your New Year’s resolution to do more reading or you have an Amazon gift card burning a hole in your pocket, these are the books from last year that everyone was—and will continue to be—reading.
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Score: 64.286
Why it stands out: The No. 1 bestseller in the US for the first week of 2015, All The Light We Cannot See tells the stories of two young people living in France during World War II. The main characters are each blinded, be it by cataracts or Nazi propaganda, and Doerr examines the ways in which the voice of a stranger can guide or misguide. Partly inspired by today’s ubiquitous cell phone service that we too often take for granted, Doerr’s novel is also a commentary on the magic of radio.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Score: 51.992
Why it stands out: “My fourth novel is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America,” Emily St. John Mandel claims on her website. After the “Georgia Flu” wipes out civilization, the theater troupe trudges across the wasteland bringing art into the lives of fellow survivors. But the post-apocalyptic world isn’t exempt from new threats, despite hope for rebirth. Station Eleven jumps back and forth in time and weaves threads between characters to illustrate how, even at the end of the world, the human connection prevails.
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Score: 43.7
Why it stands out: This novel spans political violence in Jamaica in the 1970s, New York City’s crack wars in the 1980s, and so much more. Marlon James delves into the attempted assassination of Bob Marley as well as the country’s clandestine Cold War battles, following several fictional characters who encounter these real events. Critics rave about James’ mastery of both oral history storytelling and patois dialect, and his ability to craft and juggle perspectives that often contradict and obscure the truth. With comparisons to the works of David Foster Wallace and Quentin Tarantino, James has garnered the highest of contemporary praise.
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Score: 41.0
Why it stands out: Based on his own experiences as a Marine in the Iraq War, Phil Klay’s collection of short stories explores the challenges of re-assimilating into life back home. He doesn’t just relay stories of his deployment; he relays the myriad ways in which average Americans react when he tells them about it. Dexter Filkins, a New York Times journalist who covered the war, deemed Redeployment “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.” It also won the 2014 National Book Award for fiction.
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
Score: 39.0
Why it stands out: This work of nonfiction postulates a modern-day mass-extinction, triggered by the human race and its ecological irresponsibility (rather than, say, a massive volcanic eruption). From climate change to wilderness destruction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains the cognitive dissonance that ensues when a species is evolved enough to create such disruption and also realize what they’re doing. If Kolbert’s alarming thesis doesn’t entice you, her dry sense of humor and accounts of her travels—from the Bikini Atoll to the Andes to her own backyard—will keep you hooked.
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Score: 35.549
Why it stands out: The author of Cloud Atlas is back with another book told in six semi-disparate segments that build in surprising ways. David Mitchell aptly portrays the minds of a multitude of characters: a psychic teenage girl who runs away from home, a Cambridge student, an Iraq war reporter. He also leaps into multiple future years, later shifting into reverse to connect them to their fictional pasts. NPR went as far as to say that Mitchell has a “mastery over what feels like the entire world and all its inhabitants.”
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
Score: 32.692
Why it stands out: Leslie Jamison studies empathy from numerous angles, shedding light how we experience our own pain and the pain of others—physical or emotional, real or performed. From working as a medical actor hired to quiz med students on symptoms, to running alongside ultramarathoners, Jamison has gone to extremes for these essays. In them, she also draws on personal encounters with illness, and she even discusses reality TV, exposing the ins and outs of what it means to feel in today’s complex society.
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Score: 28.692
Why it stands out: A drifter named Doll rescues a neglected toddler, whom she names Lila. As an adult, Lila takes shelter from the rain in a church, whose minister later baptizes her and eventually becomes her husband. But one morning, Lila goes out to the river and essentially un-baptizes herself. Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams (above), wrote for The Atlantic: “Robinson resists the notion of love as an easy antidote to a lifetime of suffering or solitude, suggesting that intimacy can’t intrude on loneliness without some measure of pain.”
Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
Score: 25.286
Why it stands out: Read this one before it’s time to binge-watch it: In November, Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman signed on to develop a TV series adaptation of the book. It’s the story of three mothers whose children attend Pirriwee Public primary school, where one night at an after-school event, chaos erupts. One parent winds up dead, but it’s unclear whether it’s by accident or murder. Overall, the book comments on the lies women tell themselves and others in order to uphold a perfect image.
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Score: 25.286
Why it stands out: Filled with suspense, this mystery novel has a surprising twist at the end—one so unexpected that some reviewers barely mention it for fear of sparking spoilers. Its teenage narrator uses fairy tales to describe situations. The characters are self-absorbed, wealthy WASPs on an island off Martha’s Vineyard, and The LA Times calls it “a classic story of decaying aristocracy and the way that privilege can often hamstring more than help.” It’s also a King Lear allegory, if you’re into that sort of thing.
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