The Top Books of 2016

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

The Italian writer Italo Calvino defined a classic as “a book that’s never finished saying what it has to say.” This year, The Times’s daily critics reviewed nearly 250 titles. What follows are their lists of the fiction and nonfiction books that most moved, excited and enlightened them in 2016 — books that, in their own ways, are perhaps not finished saying what they have to say.

The New York Times has three daily book critics: Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and Jennifer Senior. Because they review different titles, it is impossible for them to compile a single unanimous Top 10 list. They have favorites, however, and are happy to have a chance to list them here. There is also a list from Janet Maslin, who has stepped down from full-time reviewing but remains a frequent contributor of reviews to The Times.

The critics have presented their lists in rough order of preference.

Confronting Racist Objects

Millions of racist objects sit in the homes of everyday Americans. We asked for your experiences with these objects and received hundreds of responses. Some of you told us about your family heirlooms. Some described antique finds, and many of you simply wanted to know what should be done with racist objects. What is their place today, when racial tensions and racial attacks are on the rise? Here are some of your stories about reconciling, reclaiming and reinterpreting racist objects.

How Airbnb designs for trust

Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, bet his whole company on the belief that people can trust each other enough to stay in one another's homes. How did he overcome the stranger-danger bias? Through good design. Now, 123 million hosted nights (and counting) later, Gebbia sets out his dream for a culture of sharing in which design helps foster community and connection instead of isolation and separation.

A FRESH TAKE ON VENICE - BOOKS WHAT TO READ (The Economist 17 mins · The Economist’s 1843 magazine)

BOOKSWHAT TO READ

A FRESH TAKE ON VENICE

Our literary recommendations, including the latest from Javier Marías and a dark comedy from Israel

We have so many machines. Why are there still so many jobs?

Photo: Matthew Hurst/Flickr

At TEDxCambridge, MIT economist David Autor explores why decades of automation hasn’t led to near-complete job loss for humanity. Machines, he says, don’t necessarily replace humans in the workplace, but instead complement our expertise, judgment, and creativity.

Noam Chomsky - a rebel with a cause

Source: https://www.youtube.com/user/GlobalConversationYT/

How the son of an African goat herder became a Nobel Prize contender

Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Daniel A. Anderson/UC Irvine Communications)

By Chandrahas Choudhury

Chandrahas Choudhury is the author of the novels “Arzee the Dwarf” and the forthcoming “Clouds.”

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o is Africa’s most celebrated novelist, a writer and activist who has been a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in literature. For more than five decades, Thiong’o has in his novels (“Weep Not, Child,” “Petals of Blood”), plays (“The Black Hermit,” “The Time Tomorrow”) and essays (“Barrel of a Pen”) sparked much fruitful discussion and controversy about power and justice in colonial and post-colonial Kenya and — in a literary version of the same question — the place of English vis-a-vis other languages in modern African literature.

Radical Hope: Philosopher Jonathan Lear on the Paradoxical Seedbed of Courage and Cultural Resilience

“Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”

BY MARIA POPOVA

“Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future,”wrote the poet and philosopher David Whyte in contemplating crisis as a testing ground for courage. But the future at which courage must aim its gaze is often one obscured by the blinders of our culture’s current scope of possibility.

In January of 2009, Elizabeth Alexander took the podium at the Washington Mall and welcomed Barack Obama to the presidency with her exquisite poem “Praise Song for the Day,” which made her only the fourth poet in history to read at an American presidential inauguration. Seven years later, facing a radically different and radically dispiriting landscape of possibility,

J.K. Rowling Loses Her Billionaire Status Because Of Being Too Generous

J.K. Rowling was one of the richest people in the world in 2011, but since then her fortunes have decreased to such an extent that she is no longer a billionaire. Forbes announced their yearly list of the World’s Billionaires, but the Harry Potter author’s name was noticeably absent.

She was one of 129 people to be removed from the list that year, but her reason for leaving is a little different to the normal reason. The 51-year-old author’s departure was due to her sizeable donations to charity, as well as the high British taxes she is asked to pay.