Last day of the year and here's my top ten. I usually aim for half fiction, half nonfiction, but for this year I've ended up with only three novels. In no particular order:
- Make Peace before the Sun Goes Down: The Long Encounter of Thomas Merton and His Abbot, James Fox by Roger Lipsey
- The Travel Writing Tribe: Journeys in Search of a Genre by Tim Hannigan
- Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center by Daniel Okrent
- I Regret Almost Everything by Keith McNally
- The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens: A History by Nicola Clark
- Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America by Sam Tanenhaus
- Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century Dana Stevens
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Temptation by János Székely
- Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford
Great Fortune was my single favorite book of the year. I note that three of the ten were published this year, which is a lot for me. Usually I can discern a pattern or two among my bests, but this year they seem to have been all over the place.