This weekend is the third anniversary of this blog. As I have done the first two years, I have put together a list of what I consider the ten best books I reviewed this year. To get the list down to ten books, I had to make some tough decisions. For example, if I picked more than one book by the same author as a Best Book during the year, I will only put one of them on the list, and which one I pick may be fairly arbitrary. They are not listed in the order of preference but in the order I reviewed them. This year’s list is unusual for me, because it contains one book of poetry (The World’s Wife) and one nonfiction book (Giving Up the Ghost).

• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
• The Hours by Michael Cunningham
• The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
• Stoner by John Williams
• We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
• The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• Maddaddam by Margaret Atwood
• The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
• Giving Up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel