We’ve saved the best for last, folks. After a week of rounding up the Best Reviewed Books Books of 2018—drawn from over 150 different review publications, in the sub categories of (deep breath): Memoir & Biography, Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Essay Collections, Short Story Collections, Graphic Literature, Literature in Translation, Mystery & Crime, and Poetry—it’s now time for us to announce the Top Ten Best Reviewed Fiction & Nonfiction Books of the Year.
You can check out the Fiction list here, but first: it’s Nonfiction time.
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1. Feel Free by Zadie Smith
23 Rave • 12 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Selfhood—other people’s—is what she returns to again and again, through what else but her own shifting and brilliant subjectivity … The subtlest joy of these essays is sensing Smith’s own personhood, a personhood inseparable from her intellectual life. The self encompasses both. After the bracing dynamics of so much thought, the essays in Feel Free leave the reader not with a succinct theory of metaphysical dialogue between a global pop phenomenon and twentieth-century philosopher, but rather an image: the endearing, enduring image of one of our finest public intellectuals bickering with her husband, in a car, as she hankers for a sausage roll.”
–Hermione Hoby (The New Republic)
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2. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
19 Rave • 3 Positive
“How good is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel? It’s so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations … Edinburgh was a masterpiece; so too is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. One of its beauties is how simultaneously shaped and flexible it is, both thematically coherent and varied in subject matter … Chee’s particular style of mind and habits of moral engagement hold the collection together; every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact … The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee, and it’s the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers.”
–Anthony Domestico (The Boston Globe)
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3. Frederick Douglas: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
16 Rave • 6 Positive
“David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass. With extraordinary detail he illuminates the complexities of Douglass’s life and career and paints a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the 19th century … Blight is masterful in handling this material. In these moments, the pace of this big book picks up; the details pull you in; and if only just for a moment, the larger-than-life image dips and we see the man.”
–Eddie S. Glade Jr. (The Boston Globe)
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4. The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath by Leslie Jamison
15 Rave • 10 Positive • 2 Mixed • 2 Pan
“…there’s much about The Recovering that’s inventive: its careful braiding of memoir and literary criticism, its close observation of addiction and creativity, its comprehensive grasp of the way alcoholism provokes scapegoating, solipsism, fear, shame, and solitude. And yet the redemption story won’t be blown up, behaving as if it were encased in twenty feet of concrete. Familiar as it may be, the redemption story is what helps save her … The Recovering is nearly 500 pages and has such an intense and clarified energy, such a bone-deep compulsion to work out recovery’s paradoxes, that you feel she could go on for twice as long. (And I would happily read that book.)”
–Mark Athitakis (The Barnes & Noble Review)
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5. Calypso by David Sedaris
15 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Two things David Sedaris is talking about more than he used to: Donald Trump and death. The essay collection Calypso, his first in five years, finds the beloved humorist rejiggering his tone—right along with much of the country—to meet a newly somber national mood. Or maybe it’s just the shadow of late middle age: the looming reality of mortality, the increasing pervasion of funerals and illnesses and retirements in one man’s orbit. It’s hard to tell exactly from where the motivation for the shift stems. And indeed, therein lies Sedaris’ genius—he reflects the culture inwardly. Through his peculiar mind, Sedaris captures biting truths, documenting with journalistic precision his quiet public indignities and milking them for all their tragicomic worth.”
–David Canfield (Entertainment Weekly)
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6. The Line Becomes a River by Francisco Cantú
12 Rave • 8 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Reading Cantú’s account reminded me of the scathing words I heard from the tribal activist Mike Flores, with whom, one suspects, Cantú’s mother might sympathize … ‘They act the tough guy, but if you put any of ’em out on the land under the sun without their toys, they’d be dead in two days’ … Cantú is part of this, but apart from it. He is from the ‘broken earth,’ not Texas or South Carolina; he is educated; there is a heavy-hearted softness in his dealings with those he arrests and whose language he speaks … Cantú’s account is a refreshing counterpoint to the glut of narco-thrillers and action-movie fantasies about US agents taking out drug dealers in Mexico. His disillusion with the agency he joined is total, his dismay at the system of border control is sincerely felt, and his book is a valuable contribution to the literature on what has become an increasingly scalding issue in the Trump presidency. Cantú’s story has deep roots too in American and Mexican history: death, detention, and deportation on the border.”
–Ed Vulliamy (The New York Review of Books)
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7. The Library Book by Susan Orlean
10 Rave 11 Positive 1 Mixed
“…a wide-ranging, deeply personal and terrifically engaging investigation of humanity’s bulwark against oblivion: the library … As a narrator, Orlean moves like fire herself, with a pyrotechnic style that smolders for a time over some ancient bibliographic tragedy, leaps to the latest technique in book restoration and then illuminates the story of a wildly eccentric librarian … With a great eye for telling and quirky detail, she presents a vast catalogue of remarkable characters … If the spine of The Library Book seems strained to contain so much diverse material, that variety is also what makes this such a constant pleasure to read … You can’t help but finish The Library Book and feel grateful that these marvelous places belong to us all.”
–Ron Charles (The Washington Post)
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8. See What Can Be Done by Lorrie Moore
14 Rave • 2 Positive
“Moore proves herself the rare critic who’s as satisfying to read on the volumes you haven’t heard of as on the ones you have. (Maybe the ‘autobiographical’ book reviewer is only ever reviewing one book, its subject her own powers of expressivity.) The minute attention Moore pays to what were, at the time of writing, up-and-coming authors—Matthew Klam, Joan Silber—pleads their interestingness; an essay on Silber, from 2005, borrows the passionate exhaustiveness of a TV recap … her reviews persistently worry the distinction between the human being and his or her work … Moore-as-essayist scans much as Moore-the-fiction-writer does: as lightly melancholy, with a compensatory inclination to amuse both herself and us … Still other passages sailed beyond me … Still, Moore is one of our best documentarians of everyday amazement.”
–Katy Waldman (The New Yorker)
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9. Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed
“Small Fry, an entrancing memoir by his first child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, will force readers to grapple with whether Jobs was not merely unmenschlike but a monster. It is not a stretch to say that if you read this book, you will never think of Jobs the same way again … Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten, like many such books. But from the striking opening…it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it … In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.”
–Melanie Thernstrom (The New York Times Book Review)
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10. Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown
12 Rave • 3 Positive • 2 Mixed
“Brown ignores all the starchy obligations of biography and adopts a form of his own to trap the past and ensnare the reader—even this reader, so determinedly indifferent to the royals. I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice … [Brown] swoops at his subject from unexpected angles—it’s a Cubist portrait of the lady … The wisdom of the book, and the artistry, is in how Brown subtly expands his lens from Margaret’s misbehavior … History isn’t written by the victors, he reminds us, it’s written by the writers, and this study becomes a scathing group portrait of a generation of carnivorous royal watchers … Without ever explicitly positioning Margaret for our pity, Brown reveals how we elevate in order to destroy.”
–Parul Sehgal (The New York Times)
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Our System: RAVE = 5 points, POSITIVE = 3 points, MIXED = 1 point, PAN = -5 points
