Year-End Lists

Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2017

[see also 2023 • 2018]

Fiction

• A Horse Walks into a Bar
  David Grossman
• Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
  Balli Kaur Jaswal
• Exit West
  Mohsin Hamid
• Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan
  Ruth Gilligan
• Since I Laid My Burden Down
  Brontez Purnell
• So Much Blue
  Percival Everett
• Sour Heart
  Jenny Zhang
• South Pole Station
  Ashley Shelby
• Stay with Me
  Ayobami Adebayo
• The Bear and the Nightingale
  Katherine Arden
• The Girl in Green
  Derek B. Miller
• The Marsh King’s Daughter
  Karen Dionne
• The Year of the Comet
  Sergei Lebedev
• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky
  Lesley Nneka Arimah
• White Tears
  Hari Kunzru

Nonfiction

• A Really Big Lunch

  Meditations on Food and Life from the Roving Gourmand
  Jim Harrison
• Ants Among Elephants

  An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India
  Sujatha Gidla
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet

  Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
  Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan, Heather Anne Swanson
• Cuz

  The Life and Times of Michael A.
  Danielle S. Allen
• Ghost of the Innocent Man

  A True Story of Trial and Redemption
  Benjamin Rachlin
• Give a Girl a Knife
  Amy Thielen
• Hunger

  A Memoir of (My) Body
  Roxane Gay
• Insomniac City

  New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me
  Bill Hayes
• Killers of the Flower Moon

  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
  David Grann
• No One Cares About Crazy People

  The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America
  Ron Powers
• Priestdaddy
  Patricia Lockwood
• The Best We Could Do

  An Illustrated Memoir
  Thi Bui
• The Lost City of the Monkey God

  A True Story
  Douglas Preston
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
  Reni Eddo-Lodge
• You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
  Sherman Alexie

The Stranger: Top 20 Books of 2017, plus a list of “besties”

• Difficult Women
  Roxane Gay
• The Mother of All Questions
  Rebecca Solnit
• This Is How It Always Is
  Laurie Frankel
• Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
  Kurt Andersen
• In the Long Run We Are All Dead

  Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution
  Geoff Mann
• The Rules Do Not Apply
  Ariel Levy
• Nomadland

  Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
  Jessica Bruder
• Did It! From Yippie To Yuppie

  Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary
  Pat Thomas
• Love and Trouble

  A Midlife Reckoning
  Claire Dederer
• Afterglow (a dog memoir)
  Eileen Myles
• World Without Mind

  The Existential Threat of Big Tech
  Franklin Foer
• Vinyl Freak

  Love Letters to a Dying Medium
  John Corbett
• (v.)
  Anastacia Renee
• Priestdaddy
  Patricia Lockwood
• Ranger Games

  A Story of Soldiers, Family and an Inexplicable Crime
  Ben Blum
• Conflict Is Not Abuse

  Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
  Sarah Schulman
• The Best We Could Do

  An Illustrated Memoir
  Thi Bui
• There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
  Morgan Parker
• All Grown Up
  Jami Attenberg
• What Happened
  Hillary Rodham Clinton

Besties

• Lincoln in the Bardo
  George Saunders
• We Were Eight Years in Power

  An American Tragedy
  Ta-Nehisi Coates
• The Future Is History

  How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
  Masha Gessen
• The Raincoats
  Jenn Pelly
• Good Booty

  Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
  Ann Powers
• The Trouble with Reality

  A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time
  Brooke Gladstone
• Bunk

  The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
  Kevin Young
• Ugly Time
  Sarah Galvin
• Catcall
  Holly Melgard
• Other Russias
  Victoria Lomasko
• Boyfriends
  Tara Atkinson
• Nature Poem
  Tommy Pico
• While Standing in Line for Death
  CAConrad
• Unreal City
  D.J. Bryant
• Why Poetry
  Matthew Zapruder
• My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
  Emil Ferris
• Sour Heart
  Jenny Zhang
• Dreaming the Beatles

  The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World
  Rob Sheffield
• The State of Affairs

  Rethinking Infidelity
  Esther Perel
• Why We Sleep

  Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
  Matthew Walker
• Homo Deus

  A Brief History of Tomorrow
  Yuval Harari

The Week: Best Books of 2017, divided into novels and nonfiction

Novels

1. Lincoln in the Bardo
   George Saunders
2. Sing, Unburied, Sing
   Jesmyn Ward
3. Exit West
   Mohsin Hamid
4. White Tears
   Hari Kunzru
5. Manhattan Beach
   Jennifer Egan

Nonfiction

1. Killers of the Flower Moon

   The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
   David Grann
2. The Future Is History

   How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia
   Masha Gessen
3. We Were Eight Years in Power

   An American Tragedy
   Ta-Nehisi Coates
4. Grant
   Ron Chernow
5. Hunger

   A Memoir of (My) Body
   Roxane Gay

Barack Obama: Best Books I Read in 2017

[see also 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018]

• The Power
  Naomi Alderman
• Grant
  Ron Chernow
• Evicted

  Poverty and Profit in the American City
  Matthew Desmond
• Janesville

  An American Story
  Amy Goldstein
• Exit West
  Mohsin Hamid
• Five-Carat Soul
  James McBride
• Anything Is Possible
  Elizabeth Strout
• Dying
  Cory Taylor
• A Gentleman in Moscow
  Amor Towles
• Sing, Unburied, Sing
  Jesmyn Ward

Bonus for hoops fans

• Coach Wooden and Me

  Our 50-Year Friendship On and Off the Court
  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
• Basketball (and Other Things)

  A Collection of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated
  Shea Serrano

Harper’s Bazaar: Best Books of 2017

[see also 2023 • 2020 • 2018 • 2016 • 2015]

1. Pachinko
   Min Jin Lee
2. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
   Gail Honeyman
3. Saints for All Occasions
   J. Courtney Sullivan
4. Exit West
   Mohsin Hamid
5. Anything Is Possible
   Elizabeth Strout
6. Little Fires Everywhere
   Celeste Ng
7. Lincoln in the Bardo
   George Saunders
8. Hunger

   A Memoir of (My) Body
   Roxane Gay
9. What We Lose
   Zinzi Clemmons
10. A Separation
    Katie Kitamura
11. How to Murder Your Life
    Cat Marnell
12. Joni

    The Anthology
    Barney Hoskyns
13. Marlena
    Julie Buntin
14. South and West

    From a Notebook
    Joan Didion
15. The Golden House
    Salman Rushdie
16. My Life with Bob

    Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
    Pamela Paul
17. The Rules Do Not Apply
    Ariel Levy
18. Theft by Finding

    Diaries (1977-2002)
    David Sedaris
19. Debriefing

    Collected Stories
    Susan Sontag

gal-dem: The Five Best Books of 2017 by Women of Color

1. Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
   Reni Eddo-Lodge
2. Pachinko
   Min Jin Lee
3. Your Silence Will Not Protect You
   Audre Lorde
4. Sing, Unburied, Sing
   Jesmyn Ward
5. Peluda
   Melissa Lozada-Oliva

Laura Miller: 10 Favorite Books of 2017, as published by Slate

[see also 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2018]

• Age of Anger

  A History of the Present
  Pankaj Mishra
• Augustown
  Kei Miller
• Autumn
  Ali Smith
• The Evangelicals

  The Struggle to Shape America
  Frances FitzGerald
• Golden Hill

  A Novel of Old New York
  Francis Spufford
• Killers of the Flower Moon

  The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
  David Grann
• Life in Code

  A Personal History of Technology
  Ellen Ullman
• Manhattan Beach
  Jennifer Egan
• This Long Pursuit

  Reflections of a Romantic Biographer
  Richard Holmes
• White Tears
  Hari Kunzru

Verso Books: Best Books of 2017 (some of which were published previously but were still “favourites of the year”)

[see also 2023]

Fiction

• Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
  James Baldwin
• The Corpse Exhibition

  And Other Stories of Iraq
  Hassan Blasim
• The Gift
  Barbara Browning
• Jane Eyre
  Charlotte Brontë
• The Debutante and Other Stories
  Leonora Carrington
• The Vet’s Daughter
  Barbara Comyns
• Segu
  Maryse Conde
• The Doll’s Alphabet
  Camilla Grudova
• The Secret Life of Saeed

  The Pessoptimist
  Emile Habiby
• Darker With the Lights On
  David Hayden
• Hot Milk
  Deborah Levy
• Her Body and Other Parties
  Carmen Maria Machado
• Evening Primrose

  a heart-wrenching novel for our times
  Kopano Matlwa
• First Love
  Gwendoline Riley
• Conversations with Friends
  Sally Rooney
• Love Story
  Erich Segal
• We That Are Young
  Preti Taneja
• Attrib. and other stories
  Eley Williams
• The Hoke Moseley Detective Series
  Charles Willeford
• The Underground Railroad
  Colson Whitehead

Nonfiction

• Morbid Symptoms

  Relapse in the Arab Uprising
  Gilbert Achcar
• After Kathy Acker
  Chris Kraus
• Under My Thumb

  Songs That Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
  Edited by Rhian Jones and Eli Davies
• Cosmic Society

  Towards a Sociology of the Universe
  Peter Dickens and James Ormrod
• The Greeks and the Irrational
  E.R. Dodds
• Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
  Reni Eddo-Lodge
• Capitalist Realism

  Is There No Alternative?
  Mark Fisher
• No Mercy Here

  Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity
  Sarah Haley
• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself
  Harriet Ann Jacobs
• Spheres of Existence

  Selected Writings
  C.L.R. James
• Hell’s Destruction

  An Exploration of Christ’s Descent to the Dead
  Catherine Ella Laufer
• Your Silence Will Not Protect You
  Audre Lorde
• Beyond Words

  What Animals Think and Feel
  Carl Safina
• Against the Grain

  A Deep History of the Earliest States
  James C. Scott
• The Black Pacific

  Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections
  Robbie Shilliam
• Marx’s Inferno

  The Political Theory of Capital
  William Clare Roberts
• Storming Heaven

  Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism
  Steve Wright

Memoir

• Living for Change

  An Autobiography
  Grace Lee Boggs
• Close to the Knives

  A Memoir of Disintegration
  David Wojnarowicz

Library Journal: 10 Best Books of 2017

[see also 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2020 • 2019 • 2016 • 2012 • 2011]

1. You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me
   Sherman Alexie
2. Nomadland

   Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
   Jessica Bruder
3. Hunger

   A Memoir of (My) Body
   Roxane Gay
4. Killers of the Flower Moon

   The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
   David Grann
5. Ginny Moon
   Benjamin Ludwig
6. The Ninth Hour
   Alice McDermott
7. Ghost of the Innocent Man

   A True Story of Trial and Redemption
   Benjamin Rachlin
8. Lincoln in the Bardo
   George Saunders
9. Lucky Boy
   Shanthi Sekaran
10. Home Fire
    Kamila Shamsie

Entropy: Best Books of 2017, divided into fiction and nonfiction (numbered but “in no particular order”)

[see also 2018]

Fiction

1. Isadora
   Amelia Gray
2. The Book of Joan
   Lidia Yuknavitch
3. Sing, Unburied, Sing
   Jesmyn Ward
4. Exit West
   Mohsin Hamid
5. Sour Heart
   Jenny Zhang
6. The Changeling
   Victor LaValle
7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
   Leonora Carrington
8. Down Below
   Leonora Carrington
9. Lincoln in the Bardo
   George Saunders
10. Motherest
    Kristen Iskandrian
11. No One Can Pronounce My Name
    Rakesh Satyal
12. The Dark Dark
    Samantha Hunt
13. The Red Barn
    Nat Baldwin
14. Silk Flowers
    Meghan Lamb
15. The Disintegrations
    Alistair McCartney
16. The Protester Has Been Released
    Janet Sarbanes
17. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
    Patty Yumi Cottrell
18. The Golden House
    Salman Rushdie
19. Made for Love
    Alissa Nutting
20. The Complete Ballet

    A Fictional Essay in Five Acts
    John Haskell
21. Her Body and Other Parties
    Carmen Maria Machado
22. Homesick for Another World
    Ottessa Moshfegh
23. Tales of Falling and Flying
    Ben Loory
24. Sonata in K
    Karen An-hwei Lee
25. Enfermario
    Gabriela Torres Olivares
26. The Secret Room
    Kazim Ali
27. The Ladies
    Sara Veglahn
28. The Idiot
    Elif Batuman
29. The Leavers
    Lisa Ko
30. Genevieves
    Henry Hoke
31. Frontier
    Can Xue
32. Assisted Living
    Gary Lutz
33. The Grip of It
    Jac Jemc
34. The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings
    Juan Rulfo
35. Not One Day
    Anne Garréta
36. An Occasional History
    Laura Davenport
37. The Truth About Me
    Louise Marburg
38. The Week
    Joanna Ruocco
39. Houses of Ravicka
    Renee Gladman
40. New People
    Danzy Senna
41. Before Everything
    Victoria Redel
42. Wait Till You See Me Dance
    Deb Olin Unferth
43. Home Fire
    Kamila Shamsie
44. The World Goes On
    László Krasznahorkai
45. Stephen Florida
    Gabe Habash
46. Empty Set
    Verónica Gerber Bicecci
47. My Heart Hemmed In
    Marie NDiaye
48. Little Fires Everywhere
    Celeste Ng
49. Buckskin Cocaine
    Erika T. Wurth
50. Man’s Wars and Wickedness

    A Book of Proposed Remedies and Extreme Formulations for Curing Hositlity, Rivalry, and Ill-Will
    Amanda Ackerman & Harold Abramowitz
51. Large Animals
    Jess Arndt
52. Is God Is
    Aleshea Harris
53. Pachinko
    Min Jin Lee
54. Modern Love
    Constance DeJong
55. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Mariana Enriquez
56. Notes of a Crocodile
    Qiu Miaojin
57. Ice

    50th Anniversary Edition
    Anna Kavan
58. Writers Who Love Too Much

    New Narrative Writing 1977-1997
    Edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian
59. The Passion of Woo & Isolde
    Jennifer Tseng
60. A Small Revolution
    Jimin Han

Nonfiction

1. Afterglow (a dog memoir)
   Eileen Myles
2. After Kathy Acker
   Chris Kraus
3. 300 Arguments
   Sarah Manguso
4. They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
   Hanif Abdurraqib
5. Hunger

   A Memoir of (My) Body
   Roxane Gay
6. Sunshine State
   Sarah Gerard
7. Why Poetry
   Matthew Zapruder
8. Irradiated Cities
   Mariko Nagai
9. The Book of Disquiet

   The Complete Edition
   Fernando Pessoa
10. Of Sphere
    Karla Kelsey
11. Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit
    Aisha Sabatini Sloan
12. Autumn
    Karl Ove Knausgaard
13. Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life
    Yiyun Li
14. Being a Beast

    Adventures Across the Species Divide
    Charles Foster
15. You, Me, and the Violence
    Catherine Taylor
16. We Were Eight Years in Power

    An American Tragedy
    Ta-Nehisi Coates
17. The Misfit’s Manifesto
    Lidia Yuknavitch
18. The Art of Death

    Writing the Final Story
    Edwidge Danticat
19. Swallow the Fish
    Gabrielle Civil
20. Blind Spot
    Teju Cole
21. like a solid to a shadow
    Janice Lobo Sapigao
22. Emergent Strategy

    Shaping Change, Changing Worlds
    adrienne maree brown
23. Cecilia Vicuña

    About to Happen
    various authors
24. Final Fantasy V
    Chris Kohler
25. Book of Mutter
    Kate Zambreno
26. Dying
    Cory Taylor
27. Caca Dolce

    Essays from a Lowbrow Life
    Chelsea Martin
28. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

    1940-1956
    Sylvia Plath
29. Living a Feminist Life
    Sara Ahmed
30. Ideal Suggestions

    Essays in Divinatory Poetics
    Selah Saterstrom
31. Birds Art Life

    A Year of Observation
    Kyo Maclear
32. From Our Hearts to Yours

    New Narrative as Contemporary Practice
    Edited by Rob Halpern and Robin Tremblay-McGaw
33. The Sarah Book
    Scott McClanahan
34. Long Shot

    The Triumphs and Struggles of an NBA Freedom Fighter
    Craig Hodges
35. A Woman Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother
    Anna Prushinskaya
36. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.
    Samantha Irby
37. No Is Not Enough

    Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
    Naomi Klein
38. How to Keep You Alive
    Ella Longpre
39. Bunk

    The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News
    Kevin Young
40. A TransPacific Poetics
    Edited by Lisa Samuels & Sawako Nakayasu