With "Best of 2014" lists popping up everywhere, we've been completely obsessing over the ones that feature rad reads. We know that you've got at least one favorite book that came out this year, too.
Instead of the best books of the year, though, we have to thank The New York Times for their killer list of 100 Notable Books from 2014. Find the entire list below and check the gallery for the three we loved most! Looks like your holiday wishlist just got 100 times longer.
*All books selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review
FICTION AND POETRY
All Our Names by Dinaw Mengestu
All The Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
American Innovations by Rivka Galchen
The Assassination Of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel
The Ballad of a Small Player by Lawrence Osborne
Bark: Stories By Lorrie Moore
The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
The Book Of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
The Book Of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
A Brief History Of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Can’t And Won’t by Lydia Davis
The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
Dept. Of Speculation by Jenny Offill
The Dog by Joseph O’Neill
Euphoria by Lily King
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
F by Daniel Kehlmann
Faithful And Virtuous Night by Louise Glück
Family Life by Akhil Sharma
Fourth Of July Creek by Smith Henderson
A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
I Pity The Poor Immigrant by Zachary Lazar
The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson
Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel written and illustrated by Anya Ulinich
Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book by Richard Ford
Lila by Marilynne Robinson
Lovers At The Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 by Francine Prose
The Magician’s Land by Lev Grossman
The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami|
Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals by Patricia Lockwood
My Struggle. Book 3: Boyhood by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan
Nora Webster by Colm Toibin
Panic In A Suitcase by Yelena Akhtiorskaya
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
The Poetry Of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 selected by Glyn Maxwell
Redeployment by Phil Klay
Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston
A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman
Song Of The Shank by Jeffery Renard Allen
10:04 by Ben Lerner
Thirty Girls by Susan Minot
Those Who Leave And Those Who Stay: Book 3, The Neapolitan Novels: “Middle Time.” by Elena Ferrante
The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink
We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas
When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds
NONFICTION
American Mirror: The Life And Art Of Norman Rockwell by Deborah Solomon
Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters In The End by Atul Gawande
Building A Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (And How To Teach It To Everyone) by Elizabeth Green
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? written and illustrated by Roz Chast
China’s Second Continent: How A Million Migrants Are Building A New Empire In Africa by Howard W. French
Cubed: A Secret History Of The Workplace by Nikil Saval
Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories Of 33 Men Buried In A Chilean Mine, And The Miracle That Set Them Free by Héctor Tobar
Demon Camp: A Soldier’s Exorcism by Jennifer Percy
Duty: Memoirs Of A Secretary At War by Robert M. Gates
Dying Every Day: Seneca At The Court Of Nero by James Romm
Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life Of A Mass Murderer by Bettina Stangneth
Elephant Company: The Inspiring Story Of An Unlikely Hero And The Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives In World War II by Vicki Constantine Croke
Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis As Commander In Chief by James M. Mcpherson
The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — And Helped Save An American Town by Beth Macy
The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, The Brontës, And The Importance Of Handbags by Daphne Merkin
Fire Shut Up In My Bones: A Memoir by Charles M. Blow
Forcing The Spring: Inside The Fight For Marriage Equality by Jo Becker
Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha
Geek Sublime: The Beauty Of Code, The Code Of Beauty by Vikram Chandra
Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, And Death In The Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill
The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us by Diane Ackerman
The Invisible Bridge: The Fall Of Nixon And The Rise Of Reagan by Rick Perlstein
The Invisible Front: Love And Loss In An Era Of Endless War by Yochi Dreazen
The Invisible History Of The Human Race: How Dna And History Shape Our Identities And Our Futures by Christine Kenneally
Just Mercy: A Story Of Justice And Redemption by Bryan Stevenson
LIMONOV by Emmanuel Carrère, translated by John Lambert
Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart
The Madwoman In The Volvo: My Year Of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh
NAPOLEON: A Life by Andrew Roberts
No Good Men Among The Living: America, The Taliban, And The War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal
Not I: Memoirs Of A German Childhood by Joachim Fest, translated By Martin Chalmers
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
On The Run: Fugitive Life In An American City by Alice Goffman
100 Essays I Don’t Have Time To Write: On Umbrellas And Sword Fights, Parades And Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, And Theater by Sarah Ruhl
Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, And Endless War by James Risen
Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by Hermione Lee
Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights by Katha Pollitt
The Short And Tragic Life Of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark For The Ivy League by Jeff Hobbs
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby And The Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre
Stuff Matters: Exploring The Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World by Mark Miodownik
The Teacher Wars: A History Of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein
Thirteen Days In September: Carter, Begin, And Sadat At Camp David by Lawrence Wright
This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
Thrown by Kerry Howley
The Trip To Echo Spring: On Writers And Drinking by Olivia Laing
The True American: Murder And Mercy In Texas by Anand Giridharadas
World Order by Henry Kissinger
There's a Built to Spill line from Perfect From Now On: "No one wants to hear what you dreamt about/ unless you dreamt about them." Usually true—but then again, you aren't Lydia Davis. In her new collection, Can't and Won't, Davis handily dismisses this notion, peppering descriptions of her own dreams alongside Flaubert translations, letters of complaint, original short stories, and quotidian miscellanea. As 2009's Collected Stories affirmed, Davis has always been a versatile writer, and in this collection she continues to volley between minimalist and miniaturist, relating the sorrow of aging and death in a handful of sentences or devoting several pages to the daily activities of a trio of cows. From the mundane ("My tea water takes too long to boil") to the devastating ("The Seals," a longer story about the loss of two family members), Davis manages to capture the peaks, valleys, and plains of human experience with equal clarity. In the age of indiscriminate sharing, social media has made us all reporters of minutiae, and while Davis and her narrators are no different, their dispatches cut through the noise with precision, exposing the strange core of human experience. - Jess Sauer, NYLON April 2014
Lorrie Moore, the author whose work was first published at age 19 thanks to a contest in Seventeen magazine, has reached a level of belovedness in her now decades-long career that is normally bestowed upon the long gone. The name of this page, for instance, is not-so-discreetly dedicated to her first collection, Self-Help. Since that book was published in 1983, Moore has tirelessly reported on the lives of girls and women with a kind of ultra-specific insight that has acted as both something grand—"the most irresistible contemporary American writer!" said The New York Times of her—and, if you're talking to her devoted readers, incredibly intimate. Her latest collection, Bark, includes eight stories that are both serious and funny in Moore's typical fashion, but with characters that are a bit more hard-edged than readers may be used to—many of them, it seems, are somewhat less amused by their own unhappiness than the protagonists we've met before. But don't let that deter you. Moore, of course, explained this best at the New York Public Library last year. "The idea of likeability belongs in the world of entertainment, not art," she said. " ‘Like' is the wrong word. A younger generation has substituted ‘relatable,' as in ‘Is this character relatable?’ a word which makes me cringe, but may be closer to the proper concept, as it involves movement toward a person rather than passing judgment while standing apart." - Mallory Rice, NYLON March 2014
It's 1993 in the Eastern European immigrant enclave of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, where the Nasmertovs—the Ukrainian Jewish clan at the heart of Yelena Akhtiorskaya's debut novel Panic in a Suitcase—now reside. Their matriarch has been diagnosed with cancer, so her prodigal poet son Pasha, the final holdout in their native Odessa, has come to New York for an extended visit (a trip his relatives hope will finally convince him to stay for good). Comically clumsy attempts at bonding ensue, endeavors that are flawed and strange in the way only a family can make them. Meanwhile, Pasha dabbles in the expat literary scene, but still finds himself disenchanted with his kin's new home. Fast-forward to 2008: Pasha's mother has died and he remains in Odessa, now a local literary lion. His son will soon marry and his American niece Frida, in an act of identity-seeking, insists on traveling to Odessa alone for the event. The trip becomes a counterpoint to Pasha's experience of New York—weird and life-altering in ways unanticipated. Panic joins a vast canon of immigrant tales, but its prose truly sets it apart, each sentence bursting with such striking imagery, syntactic complexity, and poeticism that it would do its own protagonist proud. - Lisa Mischianti, NYLON August 2014
