The "Best Books of 2019" Megalist

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/e4m42p/the_best_books_of_2019_megalist/

created by leowr on 01/12/2019 at 19:20 UTC

279 upvotes, 24 top-level comments (showing 24)

It is that time of the year again, when every book-related website, blog, newspaper, bookseller, etc. releases their *Best Books of 2019* list.

Like previous years, we have decided to put up a megathread to collect all these different lists, so you can easily find all of them. Feel free to share your favorite list here.

Are there any lists you are particularly looking forward to or lists that you pay close attention to?

p.s. r/books[1] will host a variety of end-of-year threads in the upcoming weeks, including our yearly *Best Books of 2019* vote at the end of the year and a *Your Year in Reading* thread in which you can share your own favorites of the year, so stay tuned for those!

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 01/12/2019 at 19:35 UTC*

44 upvotes, 4 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by Kalutzo at 02/12/2019 at 09:54 UTC*

29 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Here's the New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2019[1] list. I made a separate list on a different thread for those who aren't able to read the article:

1: https://nyti.ms/37CqKhY

Poetry, comics/graphic novels, stories and thrillers are included in the fiction section.

Non-fiction

*The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power** By *Shoshana Zuboff*. This intensively researched, engaging book examines how tech behemoths like Facebook and Google gather personal data they can manipulate in unprecedented ways. This gutsy debut thriller — about a black female F.B.I. agent haunted by an old case — delivers plenty of action while addressing thought-provoking issues of identity, belonging and moral compromise. “Running informants was about cultivating their trust,” the heroine says. “I found it worked best to lie frequently.”

*Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of American Conversation** By *Andrew Marantz*. The tech entrepreneurs who built social media imagined it as a community where users would connect and make the world a better place. Marantz visits the darkest, most twisted corners of the internet to show how that original blueprint went wrong.

*Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America** By *James Poniewozik*. Using his ample comedic gifts to describe a slow-boil tragedy, Poniewozik, the chief television critic of The New York Times, traces the contemporaneous histories of Trump and TV. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment is making Trump’s presidency seem almost inevitable.

*Becoming** By *Michelle Obama*. The former first lady spent much of the last decade in the public eye; her memoir shows us her life from the inside, recounting with grace, candor and wit her family’s journey from the Jim Crow South to Chicago and her own improbable rise to the White House.

*The Beneficiary: Fortune, Misfortune, and the Story of My Father** By *Janny Scott*. Scott, a former reporter for The Times, explores the consequences of generations of inherited Main Line wealth as played out in her own family.

*Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom** By *Katherine Eban*. In her stunning exposé, Eban describes an industry rife with corruption and life-threatening misdeeds exacerbated by lax regulation.

*The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777** By *Rick Atkinson*. This first volume in a planned trilogy offers a Tolstoyan perspective on the American Revolution, presenting a conflict that will be new to many readers, one that was ugly, savage and often barbaric.

*The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age** By *Leo Damrosch*. Beginning in 1764, some of Britain’s future leading lights (including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke and Edward Gibbon) met every Friday night to talk and drink. Damrosch’s magnificent history revives the Club’s creative ferment.

*The Conservative Sensibility** By *George F. Will*. Will, after a long career as a public intellectual, sums up his thinking about the meaning of conservatism in an argument that includes history, epistemology, culture, religion, politics and constitutionalism.

*The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century** By *Clay Risen*. This fast-paced narrative traces the rise of Roosevelt into a national figure and something of a legend against the backdrop of the emergence of the United States as a world power.

*The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir** By *Samantha Power.* In this autobiography, Barack Obama’s adviser and United Nations ambassador interweaves her personal story, diplomatic history and moral arguments with unblinking honesty.

*Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee** By *Casey Cep*. Cep’s remarkable first book is really two: a gripping investigation of a rural Alabama preacher who murdered five family members for the insurance in the 1970s, and a sensitive portrait of the novelist Harper Lee, who tried and failed to write her own book about the case.

*Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations** By *Mira Jacob*. Jacob’s graphic memoir is focused on what it means to be a person of color in America. Born in New Mexico to parents who immigrated from India, married to a white man and raising a biracial child in New York City, Jacob explores the tensions through talks with her relatives and others.

*Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness** By *Jennifer Berry Hawes*. This magisterial account of the 2015 hate crime and its aftermath, by a Pulitzer-winning local reporter, delivers a heart-rending portrait of life for the survivors and a powerful meditation on the meaning of mercy.

*The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America** By *Daniel Okrent*. In 1920s America, a mix of nativist sentiment and pseudoscience led to the first major law curtailing immigration. Okrent focuses on eugenics, which argued that letting in people of certain nationalities and races would harm America’s gene pool.

*Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS** By *Azadeh Moaveni*. This powerful book about the women who joined or supported the Islamic State militant group is almost novelistic in the in-depth, three-dimensional portraits it offers of individuals whose actions and motivations seem so difficult to understand.

*The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present** By *David Treuer*. This response to Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” highlights the numerous achievements of Native Americans over the past century, and celebrates their resilience and adaptability in the face of prejudice, violence and the many other obstacles placed in their way.

*Horizon** By *Barry Lopez*. The eminent environmentalist reconstructs decades’ worth of his observations of the natural world, from the Arctic to Australia.

*How to Be an Antiracist** By *Ibram X. Kendi*. In this lively and provocative follow-up to “Stamped From the Beginning,” his National Book Award-winning history of racist ideas, Kendi scrutinizes himself and the rest of us, laying out a blueprint for combating racism wherever it lurks — which, he argues, is pretty much everywhere.

*How We Fight For Our Lives** By *Saeed Jones*. This memoir by a talented poet about growing up black and gay tackles sexual violence, bigotry and shame with searing imagery and an unusual generosity of spirit: As a memoirist, Jones isn’t interested in score-settling.

*If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years** By *Christopher Benfey*. An eloquent argument that Kipling’s engagement with the United States and its writers, as well as his time living in Vermont, yielded the bulk of his most popular work.

*The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation** By *Brenda Wineapple*. With impeachment on many people’s minds at the present moment, Wineapple offers a timely glimpse of the first impeachment of an American president, detailing all the maneuvering and manipulating that went into the failed effort to remove Andrew Johnson from the White House.

*In Hoffa's Shadow: A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth** By *Jack Goldsmith*. It’s fair to say that the last thing the world was itching for is another speculative account of Jimmy Hoffa’s final days, which is precisely why Goldsmith’s gripping hybrid of personal memoir and forensic procedural lands with the force of a sucker punch.

*Know My Name: A Memoir** By *Chanel Miller.* In a powerful, gutsy memoir, Miller — the sexual assault survivor in the Stanford case — reclaims her name and her story, taking us through the trial, the support of her steadfast attorney, the humiliation of testifying and her rage at her assailant’s light sentence.

*Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America** By *Christopher Leonard*. With balance and evenhandedness, Leonard traces the phenomenal rise of Koch Industries from an obscure Wichita oil company into a global behemoth, primarily through the efforts of one man, Charles Koch, who has been brilliant at seeing economic opportunities and seizing them.

*The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts** By *Karen Armstrong*. In her magisterial new book, Armstrong argues that Scripture shouldn’t be argued literally or rigidly from a pulpit or in a library. She makes the case that, if approached in a flexible and evolving way, the old words can be effectively deployed to help the problems of the modern world.

*Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive** By *Stephanie Land*. In her unstinting memoir — a portrait of working-class poverty in America — Land scrapes by on $9 an hour cleaning houses to support herself and her young daughter.

*Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography — Herself Alone** By *Charles Moore*. The third, and concluding, volume of this enormous biographical project, taking Thatcher from her third election victory in 1987 to her death in 2013, reveals a complex figure who had a lasting and lastingly controversial impact on her country and on history.

*The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal.** By *Evan Ratliff*. Ratliff’s page-turning investigation explores how Paul Le Roux transformed himself from a nerdy kid with a talent for encryption into the boss of an international drug cartel.

*Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster** By *Adam Higginbotham*. This study of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is a gripping detective story in which mistakes pile up as the narrative moves toward tragedy.

Comment by leowr at 02/12/2019 at 07:27 UTC*

14 upvotes, 2 direct replies

The Financial Times always does a lot of different lists. You can find an overview here[1]. (FT does have a soft paywall)

1: https://www.ft.com/booksof2019

The individual lists are:

Critics' Picks[2]
Travel[3]
Thrillers[4]
Health[5]
History[6]
FT readers' best books of 2019[7]
Art[8]
Economics[9]
Business[10]
Sport[11]
Technology[12]
Fiction[13]
Fiction in Translation[14]
Literary non-fiction[15]
Poetry[16]
Audiobooks[17]
Film[18]
Crime[19]
Children's Books[20]
Science[21]
Picture Books[22]
Young Adult[23]
Photography[24]
Architecture and Design[25]
Classical Music[26]
Pop[27]
Gardens[28]
Food and Drink[29]
Politics[30]
Science Fiction[31]
Books by FT Journalists in 2019[32]

Comment by EventListener at 01/12/2019 at 20:28 UTC

39 upvotes, 3 direct replies

Largehearted Boy's amazing List of Online "Best Books of 2019" Lists[1] probably belongs here. See also 2018[2], 2017[3], 2016[4], 2015[5], 2014[6], 2013[7], 2012[8], 2011[9], 2010[10], 2009[11], and 2008[12]. Incidentally /u/largeheartedboy routinely posts all kinds of book lists to /r/booklists .

1: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2019/10/online_best_of_78.html

2: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2018/10/online_best_of_76.html

3: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2017/11/online_best_of_75.html

4: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2016/11/online_best_of_73.html

5: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2015/11/online_best_of_15.html

6: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2014/11/_for_the_sevent.html

7: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/11/online_best_of_13.html

8: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2012/11/online_best_of_11.html

9: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2011/11/online_best_of_7.html

10: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2010/11/online_best_of_3.html

11: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2009/11/2009_yearend_on.html

12: http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2008/11/2008_yearend_on.html

Comment by Odusei at 02/12/2019 at 07:20 UTC

9 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Are Best Books/Novels of the 2010s lists also okay? Lots of places are doing end-of-decade reviews.

Comment by mylastnameandanumber at 04/12/2019 at 18:22 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

NPR's Book Concierge[1]. NPR's favorite/selected books of the year from 2013 to 2019. What's nice is that you can browse by genre, topic, length and a number of other categories.

1: https://apps.npr.org/best-books/#view=covers&year=2019

Comment by platdujour at 11/12/2019 at 15:34 UTC

9 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The Best Reviewed Books of 2019: Sci-Fi and Fantasy[1].

1: https://bookmarks.reviews/the-best-reviewed-books-of-2019-sci-fi-and-fantasy/

Book marks aggregate reviews drawn from more than 150 publications to give their list of best reviewed titles.

Comment by goodgoodnotbad_ at 02/12/2019 at 02:10 UTC

8 upvotes, 0 direct replies

This one is music-related but: https://www.altpress.com/features/best-music-books-2019/

Comment by leowr at 01/12/2019 at 19:50 UTC*

25 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The Guardian put out a "Best Books of 2019 - Picked by the year's best writers[1]" list. Pretty interesting to see what some authors thought were the best books. There is surprisingly little overlap.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/01/best-books-2019-picked-by-years-best-writers

Here are their choices:

*Jojo Moyes**: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, The Truants by Kate Weinberg & You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr

*Bernardine Evaristo**: Taking Up Space: The Black Girl's Manifesto for Change by Chelsea Kwakye and Ore Ogunbiyi, Character Breakdown by Zawe Ashton & Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

*Casey Cep**: The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom, Say Nothing: A Ture Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe & Women Talking by Miriam Toews

*Mark Haddon**: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann & Rusty Brown by Chris Ware

*Raymond Antrobus**: Surge by Jay Bernard, Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky & After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou

*William Feaver**: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple, Girl by Edna O'Brien & Artists' Letters: Leonardo da Vinci to David Hockney by Michael Bird

*Lucy Ellmann**: Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela, The Evergreen: A New Season in the North & Extinction by Thomas Bernhard

*Olivia Laing**: I've Seen the Future and I'm Not Going by Peter McGough, Mother Ship by Francesca Segal & It Gets Me Home, This Curving Track by Ian Penman

*Hilary McKay**: Lampie and the Children of the Sea by Annet Schaap, The Women Left Behind by Imogen Russell Williams & Deeplight by Frances Hardinge

*Melissa Harrison**: The Heavens by Sandra Newman, Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory Migration and Taiwan by Jessica J. Lee & Three Women by Lisa Taddeo

*Lindsey Hilsum**: This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev, Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting From the Arab World ed. by Zahra Hankir & The Porpoise by Mark Haddon

*Muhammed Khan**: Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay, Rose, Interrupted by Patrick Lawrence & Fearscape: Vol. 1 by Ryan O'Sullivan

*Sally Nicholls**: Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me by Kate Clanchy, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin by Emma Darwin & The Time of Green Magic by Hilary McKay

*Bart van Es**: Coventry by Rachel Cusk, Wil by Jeroen Olyslaegers & No One is Too Small to Make a Difference by Greta Thunberg

*Elizabeth Acevedo**: For Black Girls Like Me by Mariama J. Lockington, Color Me In, by Natasha Diaz & Red At the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

*Elif Shafak**: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff, Travelers by Helon Habila & My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay

*James Clarke**: Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick, This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill & Nobber by Oisin Fagan

*Diana Evans**: Don't Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri, After the Formalities by Anthony Anaxagorou & Nudi Branch by Irensosen Okojie

*Stuart Turton**: The Hug by Eoin McLaughlin & Polly Dunbar, The Porpoise by Mark Haddon & A History of the Bible: The Book and its Faiths by John Barton

*Chigozie Obioma**: Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann, Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li & House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

*Will Eaves**: The Library of Ice by Nancy Campbell, September 1, 1939 by Ian Sansom & Inheritance by Paul Bailey

*Claire Adam**: Constellations by Sinead Gleeson, Self-Portrait by Celia Paul & My Name is Why by Lemn Sissay

*Tommy Orange**: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli and Mouthful of Birds by Samanta Schweblin

*Hallie Rubenhold**: Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, The Testaments by Margaret Atwood & Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem

*Julia Lovell**: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple, A Fistful of Shells by Toby Green & Guest House for Young Widows: Among the Women of ISIS by Azadeh Moaveni

*David Keenan**: Savage Gods by Paul Kingsnorth, Bindlestiff by Waynes Holloway & Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine

*Lesley Nneka Arimah**: Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine, House of Stone by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma & Thick and Other Essays by Tressie McMillan Cottom

*Caroline Criado Perez**: Lost Dog by Kate Spicer, Fleisman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner & Becoming Beauvoir by Kate Kirkpatrick

*Leila Slimani**: In the Spider's Room by Muhammed Abdelnabi, The Sport of Kings by C.E. Morgan & The Other Americans by Laila Lalami

*Tayari Jones:** You Will Be Safe Here by Damian Barr, Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn & The Tradition by Jericho Brown

Comment by leowr at 01/12/2019 at 21:04 UTC

25 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The reviewers on tor.com have also put together a list of their favorite books of the year: https://www.tor.com/2019/11/18/tor-com-reviewers-choice-the-best-books-of-2019/

Comment by DiamondSauced at 16/12/2019 at 00:55 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Bill Gates gives his 5 favorite reads of 2019. Note, not all were published in 2019. https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Holiday-Books-2019

Comment by leowr at 06/12/2019 at 11:33 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Lithub's "Our 50 Favorite Books of the Year": https://lithub.com/our-50-favorite-books-of-the-year/[1][2]

1: https://lithub.com/our-50-favorite-books-of-the-year/

2: https://lithub.com/our-50-favorite-books-of-the-year/

Comment by leowr at 03/12/2019 at 08:18 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Not technically a "Best Books of 2019" list, but Words Without Borders released their Holiday Gift Guide of translated books that came out in 2019: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/your-holiday-gift-guide-to-reading-in-translation-2019[1][2]

1: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/your-holiday-gift-guide-to-reading-in-translation-2019

2: https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/your-holiday-gift-guide-to-reading-in-translation-2019

Comment by [deleted] at 22/12/2019 at 00:02 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by [deleted] at 22/12/2019 at 12:48 UTC*

16 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by skienho at 10/12/2019 at 07:19 UTC

3 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Anyone have the best book list from The Economist? Was hoping someone could copy the list here because i’m not subscribed.

Comment by BacchicLitNerd at 18/12/2019 at 03:03 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Boston Public Library's 15 Top 10 lists for the 2010s: https://www.bpl.org/blogs/post/top-books-of-the-2010s/?fbclid=IwAR3leYmwjH_6lX8zR2pIu7Sr28mDfVs5uKoVo3w_BJhNXJhuCT3B1JojIgI

Comment by largeheartedboy at 01/12/2019 at 20:51 UTC

12 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Thanks for the shoutout!

Comment by Spanielmcfaniel at 01/12/2019 at 19:37 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The Guardian newspaper UK Best books of 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/30/best-books-of-the-year-2019

Comment by dogandbutterfly1978 at 01/12/2019 at 22:56 UTC

4 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Thank you!

Comment by [deleted] at 01/12/2019 at 21:40 UTC

0 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by theWanderer_420 at 02/12/2019 at 09:28 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I love magazines still. The economist is good, time a bit better anyway, i just came in from freezing cold weather. The ducks and geese just flew overhead and are still flying south in a beautiful array of v formations and it was music to my freezing ears.