Year-End Lists

A hand-curated, browsable index of notable year-end lists. Follow the link for each list to see essential commentary from its author, at the source.
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Highlights

2021 Books

Oprah Daily: 20 Favorite Books of 2021

14 November 2021

Cloud Cuckoo Land - Anthony Doerr

Oprah Daily: 20 Favorite Books of 2021

[see also 2023 • 2022]

  1. Cloud Cuckoo Land
    Anthony Doerr
  2. The Man Who Lived Underground
    Richard Wright
  3. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
    Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
  4. On Freedom
    Four Songs of Care and Constraint
    Maggie Nelson
  5. Great Circle
    Maggie Shipstead
  6. Putting It Together
    How Stephen Sondheim and I Created "Sunday in the Park with George"
    James Lapine
  7. The Sweetness of Water
    Nathan Harris
  8. The Lincoln Highway
    Amor Towles
  9. New York, My Village
    Uwem Akpan
  10. Infinite Country
    Patricia Engel
  11. Crossroads
    Jonathan Franzen
  12. Bewilderment
    Richard Powers
  13. Harlem Shuffle
    Colson Whitehead
  14. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
    Mariana Enriquez
  15. Mrs. March
    Virginia Feito
  16. Intimacies
    Katie Kitamura
  17. These Precious Days
    Ann Patchett
  18. The Sentence
    Louise Erdrich
  19. Major Labels
    A History of Popular Music in Seven Genres
    Kelefa Sanneh
  20. On Juneteenth
    Annette Gordon-Reed

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Year-end lists are fingerprints; aggregate statistics are smudges. Therefore, I make no tallies.