
It’s official. We are fully into the “Best Books” season. Amazon has compiled their extensive lists of the best books of 2016. The list I find most helpful is NPR’s Book Concierge. NPR
editors and critics selected over 300 titles from last year they considered the best and organized them by topic. My personal favorite topic is “Seriously Great Writing.” Newspapers also weigh in with their choices. The New York Times has issued their editors’ choices of the ten best books while the Chicago Tribune as well as The Washington Post have published their picks.
What books appear the most on all these lists? Access the best book aggregator at Quartz Media to find out. They combine 36 prominent “Best Books” lists to create a “definitive” list of the top 20 titles for the year. Not surprisingly, Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the most popular title. It appears on 24 different lists. The next most popular is Swing Time by Zadie Smith. Rounding out the top five are Evicted : poverty and profit in the American city by Matthew Desmond, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, and The Vegetarian by Han King. Check out the rest of the list here. I hope you find a few new titles to read!