As summer holidays approach in Australia, dedicated readers look forward to giving and receiving books for Christmas and to holidays filled with reading pleasure.
This is also a time for the publication of lists of the best books. I’d like to share with you some of those lists, sourced from the Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times. I like to tick off the books I’ve already read and take note of the ones I would like to read next.
The Sydney Morning Herald contacted 56 authors to nominate the best books they had read this year. They named nearly 180 titles with quite a few mentioned by more than one author. Here are the repeat nominations:
The Burrow by Melanie Chen
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbec
James by Percival Everett
Book of Roads and Kingdoms by Richard Fidler
Deep Water by James Bradley
Long Island by Colm Toibin
Näku Dhäruk by Clare Wright
Rapture by Emily McGuire
All Fours by Miranda July
Theory and Practice by Michelle de Kretser
Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst
Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
The New York Times has published a list of best books of 2024 as rated by their Book Staff. Their focus is on American titles, but you will see some crossover with the authors’ picks above. The link below gives you their top ten fiction books along with their covers and synopses: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/03/books/best-books-2024.html?smid=url-share
The next two lists from The New York Times give the top 100 books so far this century as rated by the Book Staff and by New York Times readers. I found it interesting to check how many I had read.
Again, there is an understandable US bias in the titles, but both lists do contain authors from other countries as well (Australian Markus Zuzak’s The Book Thief comes in as #33 on the Readers’ list, the only Australian title). Here are the links to the lists:
Wishing you a happy Christmas and New Year with plenty of time for reading