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

Tomorrow is my second anniversary of keeping this blog. So, here I am with my second list of the year’s best ten books. This list is fairly arbitrary, because to get it down to ten books, I had to make some tough decisions. As with last year’s list, these books were not necessarily published in the past year. They are just the ten best from the ones I reviewed, in the order I reviewed them.

• River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh
• Persuasion by Jane Austen
• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett
• A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• The Strangled Queen by Maurice Druon
• Brother of the More Famous Jack by Barbara Trapido
• The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson
• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Independent People by Halldór Laxness

This week marks the one-year anniversary of my blog, so I decided that would be the perfect time to announce my top ten books instead of doing it at the end of last year. My list is a little different from other lists in one other way. It is a list of the top ten books I’ve reviewed in the past year, not those that were published that year. Also, since it was difficult to narrow down my list even though I restricted myself to the best books list, I had to make some artificial rules for myself–for example, to only select one book from a series or by an author.

So, with no further ado, here is my list, in the order of appearance on this blog (earliest to most recent):

• The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
• The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin
• Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Empire Falls by Richard Russo
• Queen’s Play by Dorothy Dunnett
• Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks
• Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh