What Nobody Tells You About Those Year’s-Best-Books Lists | by Janice Harayda | Thought Thinkers

ARE THEY FAIR TO WRITERS?

Books are my drug, and when I edited the book section of a large U.S. newspaper, I was a pusher. Instead of meeting my fellow junkies on street corners, I met them in print or, thanks to a wire service that distributed my reviews, on a screen.

For 11 years, I reviewed books, assigned them to freelancers, and put the best on our weekly “Recommended” list. I also did an annual roundup of the cascade of books intended for holiday giving, such as stocking stuffers and art or photography doorstoppers.

Even so, like a marijuana user who won’t do heroin, I had my dignity.

I drew the line at compiling an annual list of the year’s best books. My reason for refusing to do one was simple: Most of those lists seemed — if not dishonest — inherently unfair.

My newspaper received more than 400 review copies a week from publishers, representing every major genre of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for adults and children. All of those categories annually had books worthy of making a best-of-the-year list.

I didn’t have the staff to vet all the review copies that arrived, and if I’d had it, I’d still have faced Gordian-knotty questions. Which is “better”: a brilliant first novel, a Nobel laureate’s poetry collection, or a reporter’s exposé of a company that was dumping toxic chemicals into a small town’s water supply?

Your answer might depend on how highly you valued fiction, poetry, and nonfiction such as journalism. Or, more to the point, how much you thought they mattered to your readers.

If you did a “year’s best books” list, as I saw it, you’d be grading on curve that involved factors other than merit. That’s partly why year’s-best book lists — unlike lists of the best new releases in other media — can misfire even at publications with larger staffs than mine. Here are other reasons why they’re untrustworthy.

1 Nobody can do justice to all the books published