Reading All the Lists So You Don’t Have to Since 2017
Happy List Season, children. I hope you’ve been good. Just like every year, I have arrived to present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all (or at least many) of the Best Of lists on the internet and count which books are recommended most.
Is consensus the same as quality? Not always. Is this basically a popularity contest? Sure. But if you want to know which books The Critics are talking about, this is one way to do it. (Three of my own personal favorite books of the year made it to the top five below, which I can only assume means I am either a) boring or b) correct or c) both??)
This year, I processed 58 lists from 49 outlets, which collectively recommended more than 1,300 different books (…help). 90 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists (weirdly this is the exact same number as last year, despite there being more books recommended in total this year), and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.
21 lists:
Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me
20 lists:
Katie Kitamura, Audition
19 lists:
Lily King, Heart the Lover
18 lists:
Megha Majumdar, A Guardian and A Thief
16 lists:
Nicholas Boggs, Baldwin: A Love Story
Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
Ian McEwan, What We Can Know
David Szalay, Flesh
15 lists:
Susan Choi, Flashlight
Sophie Elmhirst, A Marriage at Sea
14 lists:
Angela Flournoy, The Wilderness
13 lists:
Daniel Kehlmann, tr. Ross Benjamin, The Director
R.F. Kuang, Katabasis
Yiyun Li, Things in Nature Merely Grow
Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness
12 lists:
S.A. Cosby, King of Ashes
Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter
Han Kang, tr. e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris, We Do Not Part
11 lists:
Chloe Dalton, Raising Hare
Robert Macfarlane, Is a River Alive?
Karen Russell, The Antidote
10 lists:
V.E. Schwab, Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Miriam Toews, A Truce That Is Not Peace
Sarrah Wynn-Williams, Careless People
9 lists:
Allegra Goodman, Isola
Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel
Jill Lepore, We the People
Thomas Pynchon, Shadow Ticket
8 lists:
Scott Anderson, King of Kings
Geraldine Brooks, Memorial Days
Caroline Fraser, Murderland
Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood
Adam Johnson, The Wayfinder
Vincenzo Latronico, tr. Sophie Hughes, Perfection
Charlotte McConaghy, Wild Dark Shore
Imani Perry, Black in Blues
Torrey Peters, Stag Dance
Taylor Jenkins Reid, Atmosphere
Patrick Ryan, Buckeye
Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
7 lists:
Stephen Greenblatt, Dark Renaissance
Nnedi Okorafor, Death of the Author
Sam Tanenhaus, Buckley
6 lists:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count
Margaret Atwood, Book of Lives
Ron Chernow, Mark Twain
Suzanne Collins, Sunrise on the Reaping
Melissa Febos, The Dry Season
John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Theft
Mick Herron, Clown Town
Jonas Hassen Khemiri, The Sisters
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance
Ian Leslie, John & Paul
Ed Park, An Oral History of Atlantis
Xenobe Purvis, The Hounding
Lucas Schaefer, The Slip
Patti Smith, Bread of Angels
Vauhini Vara, Searches: Selfhood in the Visual Age
Frances Wilson, Electric Spark
5 lists:
Rick Atkinson, The Fate of the Day
Tash Aw, The South
Alison Bechdel, Spent
Leo Damrosch, Storyteller
Lyse Doucet, The Finest Hotel in Kabul
Neko Case, The Harder I Fight the More I Love You
Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
Kate Folk, Sky Daddy
Amity Gaige, Heartwood
Caleb Gayle, Black Moses
Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl
Sarah Hall, Helm
Seamus Heaney, The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Emily Henry, Great Big Beautiful Life
Florence Knapp, The Names
Beth Macy, Paper Girl
Keith McNally, I Regret Almost Everything
Suzanne O’Sullivan, The Age of Diagnosis
Olga Ravn, tr. Martin Aitkin, The Wax Child
Mary Roach, Replaceable You
Adam Ross, Playworld
Eli Sharabi, Hostage
Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures
Stephanie Wambugu, Lonely Crowds
Bryan Washington, Palaver
Charmaine Wilkerson, Good Dirt
Nussaibah Younis, Fundamentally
*
List of Lists Surveyed:
NPR’s Books We Love (Staff Picks) • The New Yorker’s The Best Books of 2025 (Essential Reads) • The New York Times’s 100 Notable Books of 2025 and The 10 Best Books of 2025 • Kirkus’s Best Fiction Books of the Year and Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and The 10 Best Books of 2025 • The Atlantic’s 10 Books That Made Us Think the Most This Year • Vulture’s The Best Books of 2025 • The Wall Street Journal’s The 10 Best Books of 2025 • The Los Angeles Times’s The 15 Best Books of 2025 • The Washington Post’s 50 Notable Works of Fiction from 2025 and 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction from 2025 and The 10 Best Books of 2025 • Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2025 (all adult categories) • The Guardian’s The Best Books of 2025 • Vanity Fair’s The 17 Best Books of 2025 You Need to Read • WBEZ/Chicago Sun-Times’s The Best Reads of 2025 • PEOPLE’s The 15 Best Books of 2025 • Air Mail’s 10 Best Books of 2025 • Town & Country’s The 20 Best Books of 2025 • Electric Lit’s Best Novels of 2025 and Best Short Story Collections of 2025 and Best Nonfiction of 2025 and Best Poetry Collections of 2025 • Amazon’s The Best Books of 2025 • The Chicago Public Library’s Favorite Books of 2025 • BookRiot’s Best Books of 2025 • Bookshop’s Best of 2025: Fiction Books and Best of 2025: Nonfiction Books • The New York Public Library’s Best Books for Adults 2025 • Powells’ Favorite Books of 2025 • The Economist’s The Best Books of 2025 • The Minnesota Star-Tribune’s The 20 Best Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2025 • The Independent’s The Best Fiction and Nonfiction Books of 2025 • Slate’s The 10 Best Books of 2025 • AP’s 10 Notable Books of 2025 • Foreign Affairs’ The Best of Books 2025 • USA Today’s Best Books of 2025, Ranked • Dazed’s The Best Books of 2025 • The New Statesman’s Books of the Year 2025 • The Christian Science Monitor’s The Top 25 Books for 2025 • Artforum’s Best of 2025: Books • Harper’s Bazaar’s The 10 Best Books of 2025 • Libby’s The Best Books of 2025 • The Observer’s Writers Recommend: The Best Books of 2025 • The Paris Review’s Our Favorite Books of 2025 • Shelf Awareness’s 2025 Best Books of the Year • The Telegraph’s The Greatest Books of 2025 • California Review of Books’ 10 Best Books of 2025 • Booklist’s Editors’ Choice: Adult Books, 2025 • The Times’s The Best Books of 2025 • The Chicago Tribune’s The 10 Best Books of 2025 • The Conversation’s Best Books of 2025 • PBS’s 14 Best Books of 2025 • BookPage’s The Best Fiction of 2025 and The Best Nonfiction of 2025 • and of course, Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025
