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.

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

Pronouns {Johnson: Singular they}

FACEBOOK made quite a splash last week. Not with a new service or the announcement of some smashing financial results. Instead, the company will allow users to choose something besides “Male” or “Female” for the gender on their profile. It's a change that transgender people and others who do not feel 100% male or female have greeted with joy and relief.

Facebook’s radical move—radical in the best sense—was accompanied by another, but altogether less radical, change. If someone doesn’t want to be known as either male or female, that same person will not want to see, on others’ Facebook pages, the message “Wish him a happy birthday!” or “Wish her a happy birthday!” How should they be referred to?

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.