My Favorite Books of 2016

It is time for another list of books I have most admired and enjoyed recently. My last such list was on 12/29/15, when I wrote about “The Best Books I Have Read This Year” (2015). I neglected to make such a list for 2016, so although we are now almost halfway through 2017, I am going back to make a 2016 list. Following are the nine books (all novels or short story collections, mostly published in 2016), in the order that I read them. After each one, I put the date of my blogpost on that book. 1. “A Manual for Cleaning Women: Stories,” by Lucia Berlin (2/20/16). 2. “The Past,” by Tessa Hadley (2/27/16). 3. “My Name is Lucy Barton,” by Elizabeth Strout (3/12/16). 4. “Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel (3/15/16). 5. “Everybody’s Fool,” by Richard Russo (5/4/16). 6. “The Excellent Lombards,” by Jane Hamilton (9/24/16). 7. “Commonwealth,” by Ann Patchett (11/6/16). 8. “Swing Time,” by Zadie Smith (12/1/16). 9. “The Jungle Around Us: Stories,” by Anne Raeff (12/8/16). If you missed some of these in 2016, I highly recommend taking a look at them. I will save my favorite books so far in 2017 for a new list at the end of this year. (Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that three of these 2016 authors -- Hadley, Russo, Strout -- also had new books that I posted about in 2017, in fact within the past month.)