Attack of the Best Lists 2024: NPR's Books We Love

 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 2024" coverage [and more backlist best of the year options] you can click here.

As I mentioned yesterday, it is best list catch-up week here on RA for All. Today we have one of my personal favorites...NPR's Books We Love. Why do I love it. More on that I after I explain what it is  From their about page:

What is this thing?

Books We Love is NPR’s interactive reading guide. Mix and match tags such as Book Club Ideas, Biography & Memoir or Eye-Opening Reads to filter results and find the book that’s perfect for you or someone you love.

How are the books selected?

We reached out to our staffers and trusted critics and asked them to nominate their favorite books published in 2024. They responded with hundreds of titles. Then, the editors and producers at NPR Books sat down with a huge spreadsheet of responses; we resolved duplications, noted omissions, considered the overall mix and balance of books recommended and then made assignments.

Why isn’t this just a list?

Back in 2013, the NPR Books staff was suffering from an acute case of list fatigue. So we teamed up with our friends at NPR News Apps and started to think about a site that would be more Venn diagram-y than list-y – a site that could help you seek out the best biographies that were also love stories, or the best mysteries that were also set in the past. We wholeheartedly believe that human beings are capable of absorbing new information in formats that are 1) not sequentially ordered and 2) wait … dammit! and 3) never mind.

But no, really, I just want to see a list of books

We got you. To view these books as a list of titles rather than as an array of covers, you are welcome to select the “List” option in the upper right-hand corner of the site.

So what’s the deal with these tags?

At NPR Books, we’re all about discovery: helping you find your next great read – the mystery you can’t put down, the memoir you recommend to all your friends. In 2013, we hashed out a basic taxonomy that was both functional (e.g., Biography & Memoir or Kids’ Books) and fun (e.g., It’s All Geek To Me and Let’s Talk About Sex). Over the years, we’ve refined our filters and added new tags, like The States We’re In and No Biz Like Show Biz.

The names are cute, but what do they mean?

The States We’re In is for stories of the American experience both true and fictional. It’s All Geek To Me is for deep dives on particular topics – trees, personality tests, tiny houses, you name it. In The Dark Side, you’ll find dystopias, serial killers, true crime and people behaving badly in general. Eye-Opening Reads will give you a new perspective on the topic at hand, whether it’s the state of philanthropy or a new pair of shoes.

How do the books get tagged?

Our critics and staffers make suggestions, but to ensure we are applying tags consistently, the producers and editors at NPR Books consider and discuss every tag on every book.

That must take a very long time

YUP.

Can I look under the hood?

If you want to know more about how Books We Love was designed and coded, you can read about the process here. And if you’re curious to see the code and adapt it for your own project, you can check it out here.

If I click on the links and purchase one of the books, does that purchase help NPR?

Yes. And you can read more about how that works here.

How can I stay up to date on reviews and recommendations from NPR Books?

Sign up for our newsletter! Every week we will send interviews, stories and reviews right to your inbox.

Subscribe to our podcast! NPR’s Book of the Day brings you today’s great reads in 15 minutes or less.

Have fun exploring Books We Love! We hope you find something wonderful to read today.

The 2024 Books We Love team: Andrew Limbong, Beth Novey, Dhanika Pineda and Meghan Collins Sullivan 

Back to me, Becky, talking about this resource.

I love this list for a few reasons. The first is the tags discussed above. I love that they are natural language based. While there are recognizable categories such as "Biography & Memoir," "Mysteries & Thrillers," or "Young Adult," there are also more intuitive, reader focused categories like "Eye-Opening Reads," It's All Geek To Me," and "The Dark Side," and even choices based on length, this is an excellent portal to "best" books that allows any reader [or library worker] to created highly specific and expertly tailored suggestions. 

Second, it is fun to use. The mixing a matching potential is endless because of the breadth of choices. A lot of that breadth is because of the nature of how they add titles to the list. They ask all of their NPR Books contributors to suggest titles. As a result, a huge swath of reading interests are represented in the list. Their intentional inclusion of all voices, even those who only write a few reviews a year, makes this list one of the best. You can click on as many or as few of the tags as you want to create a general or highly specific list.

Third,  every former incarnation of this list is easily accessible with a single click from the top of this year's list meaning you have nearly 4,000 customizable suggestions for literally any reader, no matter how picky, at your fingertips. 

Fourth, Books We Love is a great go-to resource all year long because of the breadth and variety of titles included and the ease of backlist access. Users get to steer the ship to find their own suggestion amongst a universe of pre-approved titles. Then they can be as picky as they want, choosing their own filters to narrow it down. And since these lists are VERY broad in terms of the types of books that are included each year, the results are very useful. And they stand up over the test of time. 

And finally, this resource works very well as a conversation starter itself. You can use it in conjunction with my Conversation Starter to Display advice any time of year. Ask people for their favorite "Eye-Opening Reads." You can fill the display with the titles from Books We Love over the years to get things started and then ask staff and patrons to help give you more. Again, the details on how to use a conversation starter question to build a display are here. You can go back to Books We Love at anytime of year for display ideas. 

Go visit the NPR Book Books We Love portal now (if you haven't already) and have fun using it for yourself or your patrons, but don't forget about it all year long. It is a wonderful  resource and, after years in existence, the compound interest of titles makes it even more useful. 

And now if you will excuse me, I am going to do my annual exercise of using Books We Love to find myself a book to read over the holidays. 

I am pretty sure it is going to be Pony Confidential but we will see.