Attack of the Best Lists 2023: The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List via Lit Hub

This post is part of my year end "Attack of the Best Lists" coverage. To see every post in my "Attack of the Best Lists 2023" coverage [and more backlist best of the year options] you can click here. 

The list I have been waiting for is finally here-- LitHub's aggregation of all the major best lists. From the landing page:

The Ultimate Best Books of 2023 List

Reading All the Lists So You Don’t Have To Since 2017

By Emily Temple 

December 20, 2023

The end of the year is approaching, the universe is expanding, and the internet is updating—right now, it is mostly updating its Best Of lists. Therefore, per Literary Hub tradition, I will now present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all the Best Of lists and count which books are recommended most.

This year, I sorted through 62 lists from 48 publications, which yielded a total of 1,132 books. (I can only say: yikes.) 94 of those books made it onto 5 or more lists, and I have collated these for you here, in descending order of frequency.

This is the only single list you need to look at because Temple has done the most focused work of anyone out there. And the results, are RA gold for you. The post she has created seamlessly combines adult fiction, nonfiction, and GNs into one list. Further, she not only does the compiling for you, the sources are listed and linked (!) at the bottom of the page, so you can have access to the 48 most influential publications' best lists, and the aggregation of which titles are on the most lists, with just this one click. It is crowdsourcing first, but also, a resource to dive deeper, all in one place.

But wait, there's more....

Multiple layer of backlist and indexing are happening here, meaning you can embrace "Best" across multiple years. Reminder, "Best" titles have a longer shelf life than the current year. Last year's best titles, even 5 years ago, are great suggestions for a wide swath of readers. Here's how LitHub makes it easy, all year long, with their clear, consistent, and accessible tags at the bottom of their posts:

• Click here for every Ultimate Best List going back to 2017.
• Click here for all of LitHub's Best Books 2023 coverage, which look at everything from best books to biggest news stories (the top 50) to reviews (both the best and worst), and more.
• You can scroll to the bottom of any of the posts in the "Ultimate Best List" link and click on the page for that year's full Best Books Coverage. So, when you click on "The Ultimate Best Books of 2022 List" you can scroll to the bottom of that post and then click on the tag, "Best of 2022" for full coverage from that year. This can be repeated going back to 2017.
• Also, I wanted to remind people of the extremely useful Best of the Decade lists they made in 2019. Those are also a great "best" resource, one that truly embraces the treasure trove that is the backlist.

All of these tags pull up useful information in reverse chronological order, meaning you decide how far into the backlist you want to dig.

Back tomorrow with my final column in The Lineup Weekly for this year. This one analyzes 2023's Horror Trends. But in the meantime, here is a link to all of the pieces I have written for them, including last year's Horror Trends post (speaking of the backlist).