Contemporary Fiction:

  1.  Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
  2. Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu
  3. The Hare, Melanie Finn
  4. Bring up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
  5. Trio, William Boyd
  6. So Long, See you Tomorrow, William Maxwell
  7. The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
  8. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
  9. Second Place, Rachel Cusk
  10. Woman in Black, Susan Hill
  11. Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
  12. Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
  13. Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell
  14. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro
  15. Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher
  16. The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel
  17. Migrations, Charlotte McConaghy
  18. Bewilderment, Richard Powers
  19. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir
  20. Antiquities, Cynthia Ozick
  21. The Guide, Peter Heller
  22. Harlem Shuffle, Colson Whitehead

Short Stories:

  1. The Doctor Stories, William Carlos Williams
  2. Dusk and Other Stories, James Salter
  3. In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway
  4. Details of a Sunset and Other Stories, Vladimir Nabokov
  5. The Haunted House and Other Short Stories, Virginia Woolf
  6. Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Classic Literature:

  1. It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
  2. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
  3. Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson
  4. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
  5. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe

Non-Fiction:

  1. Walking with Ghosts, Gabriel Byrne
  2. The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis
  3. We Keep the Dead Close, Becky Cooper
  4. What We See When We Read, Peter Mendelsund
  5. The Premonition, Michael Lewis
  6. Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary, Timothy Snyder
  7. Memorial Drive” A Daughter’s Memoir, Natasha Trethewey
  8. The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Alison Bechdel
  9. The Survival of the Bark Canoe, John McPhee
  10. Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, Michael Cunningham
  11. Seven Kinds of People You Find in Bookshops, Shaun Bythell
  12. The Appalachian Trail: A Biography, Philip D’Anieri
  13. The Plague Year, Lawrence Wright
  14. Borges and Me, Jay Parini
  15. The Art of Reading, Damon Young
  16. Lecture, Mary Cappello
  17. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route, Saidiya Hartman
  18. What About the Baby: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction, Anne McDermotSpt
  19. Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov
  20. How Wild Things Are: Cooking, Hunting and Fishing at the Bottom of the World, A. Gregory
  21. The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town, Brian Alexander
  22. Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May

Essays:

  1. The Best American Essays: 2020, ed Andre Aciman
  2. Essays, Wallace Shawn
  3. Feel Free, Zadie Smith
  4. Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
  5. One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty
  6. Lamentations of the Father, Ian Frazier
  7. Pieces of the Frame, John McPhee
  8. Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard
  9. Homo Irrealis, Andre Aciman
  10. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2010, Rachel Kushner
  11. The Best of Me, David Sedaris
  12. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders
  13. Synthesizing Gravity, Kay Ryan
  14. String Too Short to be Saved, Donald Hall
  15. The Book of  Delights, Ross Gay
  16. An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, George Perec

Poetry/Drama:

  1. Our Town, Thornton Wilder
  2. Dearly: New Poems, Margaret Atwood
  3. The Alexander Plays, Adrienne Kennedy
  4. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard
  5. Atomizer, Elizabeth Powell
  6. Poems from the Wilderness, Jack Mayer
  7. American Wake, Kerrin McCadden
  8. Bone Rosary: New and Selected Poems, Thomas Lynch
  9. Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard
  10. Different Hours, Stephen Dunn
  11. Top Dog/Under Dog, Suzan Lori-Parks
  12. Land’s End, Gail Mazur
  13. Water by the Spoonful, Quira Alegria Hudes
  14. Georgics, Virgil

Art/Architecture:

1.  Chairs by Architects, Agata Tormonoff                                                                                                                                   2.  Alice Neel Uptown, Hilton Als   

3.  Signs on Wind: Postcard Collages by Lenore Tawney, essay by Holland Cotter

Science/Nature/Gardening:

  1.  Black Hole Survival Guide, Janna Levin
  2. Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees, Roger Deakin
  3. The Green Garden, Ellen Sousa
  4. The Curve of Binding Energy, John McPhee
  5. Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, Frank Wilczek
  6. Life’s Edge: What It Means to Be Alive, Carl Zimmer
  7. What is Life: Five Great Ideas in BiologyPa, Paul Nurse
  8. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind, Peter Godfrey-Smith
  9. Under a White Sky:  The Nature of the Future, Elizabeth Kolbert
  10. The Last Garden: A Memoir, Liza Ketchum
  11. Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden, Stanley Kunitz
  12. Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli
  13. Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, Wendy Johnson
  14. Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, James Rebanks

Mysteries:

  1. Maigret at the Gai-Moulin, Georges Simenon
  2. Eddie’s Boy, Thomas Perry
  3. Maigret and the Tavern by the Seine, Georges Simenon
  4. Maigret Mystified, Georges Simenon
  5. The Sentinel, Lee and Andrew Child
  6. Maigret Goes Home, Georges Simenon
  7. Win, Harlan Coben
  8. Nobody Runs Forever, Richard Stark (Donald Westlake)
  9. Maigret and the Flemish Shop, Georges Simenon
  10. Sleeping Dogs, Thomas Perry
  11. Maigret and Death of the Harbor Master, Georges Simenon
  12. The Informant, Thomas Perry
  13. A Man Named Doll, Jonathan Ames
  14. Lock No. 1, Georges Simenon
  15. Vanishing Act, Thomas Perry
  16. The Butcher’s Boy, Thomas Perry
  17. Squeeze Me, Carl Hiassen
  18. The Old Man, Thomas Perry
  19. Maigret, Georges Simenon
  20. April in Spain, John Banville
  21. Snow, John Banville
  22. Maigret in Exile, Georges Simenon
  23. The Mysterious Affair At Styles, Agatha Christie
  24. Whose Body?, Dorothy Sayers
  25. Maigret at the Hotel Majestic, Georges Simenon