Editor David Wei-Wang pulls together an entire literary landscape of styles, schools, and scholars, and the book not only delves into each of these things in a very readable way but also generates a rather lengthy list of reading suggestions.Ħ The Egyptians by Jack Shenker (The New Press) – The slightly haphazard and internationally-visible revolution in Egypt that toppled Mubarak had long and snaking roots and a wide array of complicated aftershocks. Powers writes brutal, direct, lovely prose, and it’s never been more powerful than in this scathing, heartbreaking book.ħ A New Literary History of Modern China, edited by David Wei-Wang ( Harvard University Press) – This massive tome is a vast universe of names and publication histories and author-names entirely unknown to the Western reading world. Every city-dweller should read it.Ĩ No One Cares About Crazy People by Ron Powers ( Hachette) – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (and author of the single best one-volume Mark Twain biography) Ron Powers here combines a pitiless look at the history of mental health care in America with a deeply personal story about the worsening mental health of his own son. I finished it thinking: “Something very like that is my life too.” And also thinking: “The Times book coverage is in very, very good hands.”ĩ Welcome to Your World by Sarah Williams Goldhagen ( Harper) – Pretty much the last kind of thing I’d have expected to find on this year-end list is an urban-design study by an architecture critic, but the book Goldhagen has written is so much more than that: it’s an exuberant and ultimately luminous look at how humans live in cities, how cities live in humans, and, in a persistent note of hope sounded throughout the book, how both can do a better job. The plots, names, places, and revelations of every book she reads go into her Book of Books, and what emerges, amazingly, is an entire life. Here are the best nonfiction works from a year of upset:ġ0 My Life with Bob by Pamela Paul ( Henry Holt) – Pamela Paul, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, leads off the list with this whimsical and sometimes very moving (and, needless to say, intensely bookish) account of her life-long relationship with her own book-journal. I went into the year with clear expectations of where my favor would lie, and as usual, I was constantly being surprised right out of my certainties. But even so, the best works of what I think of as ‘general nonfiction’ in 2017 are more varied than usual, ranging from the whimsical to the terrifying to the tragic and back.

I’ve come to expect a certain amount of variety in the books that manage the near-impossible feat of making their way from galley-and-first-reading to finished-copy-and-second-reading to critical appraisal/mauling to cold reconsideration and then ultimately to this year-end list.

Best books to read 2017 nonfiction