The year is winding down, the weather outside is becoming chillier, and I can’t wait to curl up by the fire with a great book. As in past Decembers, I am continuing the tradition started several years ago of sharing my top books of the year. I hope you will see one of your favorites or will be inspired to pick up one of these. Maybe you will even find yourself reading by the fire, too!

Fiction

• The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
• Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
• Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R. F. Kuang
• Trust by Hernan Diaz
• The Colony by Audrey Magee

Nonfiction

• The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O’Rourke
• Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen
• South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by Imani Perry
• An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
• What We Owe the Future by William MacAskill

Poetry

• Alive At The End Of The World by Saeed Jones
• Please Make Me Pretty, I Don’t Want to Die: Poems by Tawanda Mulalu
• The Hurting Kind: Poems by Ada Limón
• Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
• The Slain Birds by Michael Longley

Backlist

• Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World by Amy Stanley
• The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen
• In the Darkroom by Susan Faludi
• Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal
• Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer

There are many books I didn’t get to read this year, and I would love to hear from subscribers about their favorite books so I can add them to my never-ending “to be read” list. Please reach out with the books you loved this year, and I will share reader favorites in my January column. 

Happy Reading and Happy Holidays!