Yes, it’s that time of year again, when I flip through my reading journal and see how many books I’ve read this year, marvel at how many I’ve already forgotten, and get re-excited about the ones I loved. Here, in the chronological order I read them, are the ones I remember most fondly. (Note: only some of these were actually published in 2016–unfortunately, I’m not a Big Time Author who gets free review copies.)

1. Dare Me, Megan Abbott: I’d heard of Megan Abbott, but somehow never gotten around to reading her books until I saw this on the discount shelf at Barnes and Noble (alongside While Beauty Slept…hooray?). Dare Me turned out to be dark and sarcastic and suspenseful and mind-twisting. It’s superficially about Mean Girls and cheerleading as a kind of warfare, but goes way deeper than I expected.
2. The Darkest Secret, Alex Marwood: Looking for a twisty, multi-viewpoint, multi-timeline thriller? Here it is. The storyline kept me guessing, and its social commentary on the British nouveau-riche gave it an added bite.
3. Party of One, Dave Holmes and You’ll Grow Out of It, Jessi Klein: OK, I’m cheating by fitting two titles in one spot, but I loved these two memoirs for the same reason: the mix of laugh-out-loud humor, genuinely touching emotional moments and perfect pop-culture references. Both are very much in the spirit of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, one of my all-time favorites.
4. The King Must Die, Mary Renault: A re-read of a classic that totally held up. This retelling of the Minotaur story was a little slow to get going, but within a few chapters I was totally lost in the ancient Greek world. Renault is required reading for anyone who wants to write historical fiction.
5. All the Good Parts, Loretta Nyhan: It’s tricky to recommend the work of someone you know personally (Loretta is fellow Chicago-area writer). That said, I got totally caught up in All the Good Parts because it had 1) a truly engaging narrator, and 2) an unpredictable plot and 3) a real dilemma at its heart: how does a woman of a certain age deal with her ambivalence about having a child? By the end of this book, I felt like I’d spent time with real people I cared about.
6. Piranha to Scurfy, Ruth Rendell: I’m a huge Ruth Rendell fan. Since her death last year, I’ve been re-reading a lot of her books, and I was thrilled to find this collection of short stories at the library, stories I’d never read. How does Rendell make creepy, unsettling characters so compelling? It’s a real-life mystery.
7. Why? Explaining the Holocaust, Peter Hayes: I read this as a homework assignment of sorts, before interviewing the author for a magazine story (he’s a retired history professor at Northwestern, my alma mater). But I soon realized it’s a book I would have read willingly even if I didn’t have to. Hayes clearly answers all the lingering questions that remain about the Holocaust (why did it happen in Germany? why didn’t the Jews fight back?) and raises questions about authoritarianism that I’m still thinking about months later.
8. Versions of Us, Laura Barnett: I’m a sucker for a good “what if” story, and this one takes you through 3 different versions of a relationship. What if they met and fell in love right away? What if they didn’t meet in college but found each other later? It was sometimes hard to keep all the timelines straight, but I really liked the idea that there are many different versions of a “happy” ending.
9. Church of Marvels, Lauren Parry: Another multiple-viewpoint narrative, with plenty of plot twists along the way. While I wasn’t sure I’d get drawn in by the Coney Island/carnival setting, it turned out to be a much richer portrait of turn-of-the-century New York than I’d expected.
10. A Wild Swan, Michael Cunningham: I’m always down for a good fairy-tale retelling. But this collection of stories went so far beyond that. I can’t even come up with a pithy, clever review because I am still reeling from the emotions and insights and clever characters that Cunningham created from familiar stories. So I’ll simply say: I loved this book. Read it.