Top 5 lists: Books
13 lists
Top 5 Books That Changed How I Think
These left a permanent mark.
1–3: Atomic Habits – James Clear · Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman · Sapiens – Yuval Noah Harari
Top 5 Cookbooks You'll Read in Bed Like a Novel
Some cookbooks live splattered by the stove, but these end up on the nightstand because the writing is as good as the recipes.
1–3: Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat — Samin Nosrat · An Everlasting Meal — Tamar Adler · The Food Lab — J. Kenji López-Alt
Top 5 Short Story Collections Where Every Story Wrecks You a Little
Books you meant to read one story a night, until you looked up and it was way past midnight and you'd finished the whole thing.
1–3: Tenth of December — George Saunders · Interpreter of Maladies — Jhumpa Lahiri · Stories of Your Life and Others — Ted Chiang
Top 5 Book Endings That Made You Stare at the Wall for a While
Last pages that kept working on you long after you closed the cover, with no spoilers beyond the damage they did.
1–3: Never Let Me Go — Kazuo Ishiguro · The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald · Atonement — Ian McEwan
Top 5 Musician Memoirs That Hit Harder Than the Albums
Rock star memoirs where the writing is so good you start to worry the music was just a warm-up.
1–3: Just Kids — Patti Smith · Crying in H Mart — Michelle Zauner · Chronicles: Volume One — Bob Dylan
Top 5 Books You Pretend You've Finished at Dinner Parties
The doorstops everyone quotes, nobody finishes, and we all quietly agree not to ask follow-up questions about.
1–3: Infinite Jest — David Foster Wallace · Ulysses — James Joyce · A Brief History of Time — Stephen Hawking
Top 5 Book Narrators You Shouldn't Trust but Can't Stop Listening To
Unreliable narrators so charming, wounded or slippery that you only realize you were played after you've finished the last page.
1–3: Stevens — The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro) · Dr. Sheppard — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Agatha Christie) · Amy Dunne — Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn)
Top 5 Long Novels That Earn Every Single Page
Doorstops that never feel padded. You'll be sad to finish them, not relieved.
1–3: Lonesome Dove — Larry McMurtry · The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas · Shōgun — James Clavell
Top 5 Audiobook Narrators Who Deserve a Cut of the Royalties
The voices that turned a commute into the best part of the day and made you sit in the parked car until the chapter ended.
1–3: Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir, read by Ray Porter · Born a Crime — Trevor Noah · Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders, read by a 166-person cast
Top 5 Opening Lines That Make You Cancel Your Plans
First sentences so good you sit down on the bookstore floor and just keep going.
1–3: One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez · Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell · Neuromancer — William Gibson
Top 5 Nonfiction Books That Read Like Page-Turners
True stories so gripping you'll forget you're technically learning something and start telling everyone at dinner about them.
1–3: Say Nothing — Patrick Radden Keefe · Bad Blood — John Carreyrou · Killers of the Flower Moon — David Grann
Top 5 Short Books You Can Finish on a Sunday Afternoon
Short, complete novels for one long sit on the couch, when you want the satisfaction of a last page before dinner.
1–3: Small Things Like These — Claire Keegan · Train Dreams — Denis Johnson · We Have Always Lived in the Castle — Shirley Jackson
Top 5 Novels Worth Missing Your Stop For
Books that grab you so hard you look up and realize the train has already left your station behind.
1–3: The Secret History — Donna Tartt · Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir · Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn