The Ultimate Best Books of 2017 List
Or: Clarity in Consensus
It’s the end of the year, and everybody has an opinion. And of course, where there’s an opinion, there’s a listicle. The river of Best of 2017 lists can be exhausting this time of year, so as a public service, and because my math skills are always in need of a little exercise, I’ve created a streamlined master list of the books that the most people loved this year. Of course, I couldn’t include everything (like NPR’s enormous list of favorites). But I looked at the end-of-year roundups from 35 outlets and tracked a total of 520 discrete books in order to figure out the most critically popular books of the year. Does that mean they are the Best? You’ll have to decide for yourself, by reading them.
It’s interesting to compare this list of the “best” books to the most recommended books of fall (though it’s not a perfect match-up, of course, because many of these books came out in other seasons)—for instance, everyone was pretty sure they were going to like Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, and Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, and then they did! Success. Other books fell a little in the relative rankings. But all in all, it’s pretty satisfying to see how much people loved and recommended books by women and people of color this year.
For the record, the best-of lists I consulted for this master list are from the following outlets: GQ, The New York Times, Vogue, Vulture, USA Today, Luna Luna, Publisher’s Weekly (Top 10), The Washington Post, The Chicago Review of Books (Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction), The New York Public Library, The LA Times (Fiction and Nonfiction), Financial Times (Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Nonfiction), Popsugar, Newsday, Library Journal, Elle, Amazon, Book Riot, EW, Cosmopolitan, The Economist, The Stranger, The Wall Street Journal, Bookpage, Shelf Awareness, NYLON (Fiction and Nonfiction), Entropy (Fiction and Nonfiction), Buzzfeed (Fiction), HuffPost (Fiction), Paste (Nonfiction and Novels), Esquire, The Boston Globe, TIME (Novels and Nonfiction), The Chicago Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail. NB: wherever publications had multiple lists, I went with the shorter one—so, for instance, I counted the NYT “Best Books” list but not their “Notable Books” list. This choice was made for my sanity.
(Some of these lists, I should say, bizarrely included books published in 2016—I caught what I could, but all mistakes in that area are the responsibility of the outlet in question.)
And now, without further ado…
The Best Books of 2017, per the power of the list:
On 22 lists
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
On 19 lists
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
On 14 lists
Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann
On 13 lists
Pachinko, Min Jin Lee
Priestdaddy, Patricia Lockwood
Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng
On 12 lists
Hunger, Roxane Gay
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
On 9 lists
We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates
Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang
On 8 lists
You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, Sherman Alexie
On 7 lists
The Power, Naomi Alderman
Manhattan Beach, Jennifer Egan
The Future is History, Masha Gessen
The Leavers, Lisa Ko
White Tears, Hari Kunzru
The Answers, Catherine Lacey
The Rules Do Not Apply, Ariel Levy
Home Fire, Kamila Shamsie
Borne, Jeff VanderMeer
On 6 lists
Stay With Me, Ayobami Adebayo
The Idiot, Elif Batuman
What We Lose, Zinzi Clemmons
What Happened, Hillary Clinton
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, Samantha Irby
The Changeling, Victor LaValle
On 5 lists
American War, Omar El Akkad
All Grown Up, Jami Attenberg
Grant, Ron Chernow
Sunshine State, Sarah Gerard
Goodbye Vitamin, Rachel Khong
The Burning Girl, Claire Messud
Made for Love, Alissa Nutting
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
The Blood of Emmett Till, Timothy B. Tyson
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
On 4 lists
What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky, Lesley Nneka Arimah
The Best We Could Do, Thi Bui
Marlena, Julie Buntin
Ill Will, Dan Chaon
The Dark Dark: Stories, Samantha Hunt
One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul
Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
The Ninth Hour, Alice McDermott
Homesick for Another World, Ottessa Moshfegh
New People, Danzy Senna
Bunk, Kevin Young
On 3 lists
Future Home of the Living God, Louise Erdrich
So Much Blue, Percival Everett
Electric Arches, Eve L. Ewing
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris
World Without Mind, Franklin Foer
Stephen Florida, Gabe Habash
American Fire, Monica Hesse
The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff
The Refugees, Viet Thanh Nguyen
Mrs. Fletcher, Tom Perrotta
After the Eclipse, Sarah Perry
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Taylor Jenkins Reid
Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney
The Golden House, Salman Rushdie
Autumn, Ali Smith
Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The Book of Joan, Lidia Yuknavitch
On 2 lists
Salt Houses, Hala Alyan
Large Animals, Jess Arndt
The Golden Legend, Nadeem Aslam
The Destroyers, Christopher Bollen
The Heart’s Invisible Furies, John Boyne
The Vanity Fair Diaries, Tina Brown
Nomadland, Jessica Bruder
When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, Chen Chen
Too Much and Not the Mood, Durga Chew-Bose
Blind Spot, Teju Cole
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, Patty Yumi Cottrell
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Reni Eddo-Lodge
Ali, Jonathan Eig
Homo Deus, Yuval Harari
Compass, Mathias Enard, trans. Charlotte Mandell
Things We Lost in the Fire, Mariana Enríquez, trans. Megan McDowell
Go, Went, Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck
Abandon Me, Melissa Febos
Locking Up Our Own, James Forman Jr.
This Is How It Always Is, Laurie Frankel
Difficult Women, Roxane Gay
Ants Among Elephants, Sujatha Gidla
Janesville, Amy Goldstein
Turtles All the Way Down, John Green
The Doll’s Alphabet, Camilla Grudova
Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan
Notes on a Foreign Country, Suzy Hansen
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, ed. Darryl Pinckney
The Grip of It, Jac Jemc
A Separation, Katie Kitamura
Autumn, Karl Ove Knausgaard
After Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus
Since We Fell, Dennis Lehane
Bluebird, Bluebird, Attica Locke
Who Thought This Was a Good Idea, Alyssa Mastromonaco
Afterglow, Eileen Myles
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, Morgan Parker
Calder, Jed Perl
The Lost City of the Monkey God, Douglas Preston
Ghost of the Innocent Man, Benjamin Rachlin
Imagine Wanting Only This, Kristen Radtke
Fever Dream, Samanta Schweblin, trans. Megan McDowell
Theft By Finding, David Sedaris
Improvement, Joan Silber
The Mother of All Questions, Rebecca Solnit
Anthony Powell, Hilary Spurling
My Heart Hemmed In, Marie NDiaye, trans. Jordan Stump
My Absolute Darling, Gabriel Tallent
Frontier, Can Xue, trans. Karen Gernant
Wait Till You See Me Dance, Deb Olin Unferth
Why Poetry, Matthew Zapruder
