Ranking Recommendations

In talking with Lewis last week, I mentioned The Printmaker's Daughter, which I'd just blogged about. He wanted to know if it was really as good as I'd written because when I'd written about When We Danced on Water earlier in the year, I'd called it "the best work of fiction I've read in nearly a year." How could I then turn around a few months later and write that Katherine Govier's historical novel was "the best book I'd come across in ten—perhaps twenty—years"? It seemed to Lewis that I tended to wax overly rhapsodic in recommending favorite reads, but really, I'm not. Let me explain my recommendation philosophy.

As somebody who writes about books for a living, and has done so for well over a decade, I read, on average, a hundred books a year. The majority of books I read are average at best. In any given year I read several that I would consider in the "B" range, and only one or two that I would grade "A." I'm not actually assigning grades to the books I recommend here, but that doesn't mean I didn't assign grades to them in my personal reading database. Most of the books that I recommend here are the best of the best, those that earned A's from me.

Consider my recommendations analogous to flood event designations. A one-year flood is not very severe; it is likely to occur perhaps annually. A five-year flood, on the other hand, is more severe and more rare; it is likely to occur only once every five years. And a hundred year flood is so rare it is expected only once a century. When I write that a book is the best I've read in a year (like When We Danced on Water or How to Talk to a Widower), it's a great read, and better than probably the 98 or 99 other books I've read in a given year, but it's not as great as a ten or twenty year "flood" read like The Printmaker's Daughter.

Now that you know about the best books I've read this year—and where they rank overall—I'd love for you to share yours with me here on the blog. If you do, please let me know if they are one-year, five year, or ten-year reads...and why.

~Laurie