My Year in Books – 2018

A few notes about this list: These were my favorites among the books I *read* in 2018. Several of them were published in previous years, though I was pretty good about getting on reserve lists at the library early and often and so many were new releases. Some (like The Sun Does Shine) I believe would hold up as favorites at any time and recommend without qualification; others just felt perfectly suited for a particular moment (Beatriz Williams, for example, is my favorite ticket for pure escape, and I picked up The Secret Game the day I walked onto the hallowed floor of Cameron Indoor Stadium in Durham). And one warning: Between Only Child and A Place for Us, I think I used up an entire box of Kleenex.

Best Fiction: Only Child (Rhiannon Navin)

Fiction Runner-Up: A Place for Us (Fatima Farheen Mirza)

Also Notable:

• Little Fires Everywhere (Celeste Ng)
• The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai)
• An American Marriage (Tayari Jones)
• White Houses (Amy Bloom)
• Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (Kathleen Rooney)
• The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein)
• The Story of Arthur Truluv (Elizabeth Berg)
• A Hundred Summers …and anything and everything else by (Beatriz Williams)

Best Non-Fiction: The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row (Anthony Ray Hinton)

Non-Fiction Runner-Up: Becoming (Michelle Obama)

Also Notable:

• Educated (Tara Westover)
• Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (Yossi Klein Halevi)
• The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph (Scott Ellsworth)
• Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America (Calvin Trillin)
• Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death (Lillian Faderman)
• In Pieces (Sally Field)

The book I read in 2017 that, given current events, has stayed with me throughout 2018: Lucky Boy (Shanthi Sekaran)