The Top Fiction of 2022, According to 74 Lists

Happy New Year! Once again, I’ve compiled a bunch of end-of-year “Best Books” lists to see what comes up over and over again, because it’s consistently a great source for my own reading, and maybe yours too.

This year, I sourced 74 lists across the web. Here’s what bubbled to the top:

Skeptical? Don’t want your least favorite news source taking up space? You can select just the lists you want here. That link will also let you browse books beyond the Top 19.

And, as a repeat from last year, here are some musings on list accuracy:

That’s all for 2022’s Adult Fiction. I’m also compiling “Best YA of 2022” (to source books for the podcast I produce, Literary Connections), so hopefully you’ll see that here soon.

Past years:

Tools used: webscraper.io to find the books, Google Sheets to list them, and Looker Data Studio for the pretty graphs above.

No thanks this year to the Data Studio/Medium embed function, which has worked great in past years but doesn’t give me anything nice this year, and/or something has changed and I’m doing it wrong. Here’s what I’m able to embed, if you want to check out the Data Studio report directly:

Finally, the list of lists, for the curious.
Note: Count of fiction books may slightly overestimate, as I did not categorize long-tail books that were only on 1–2 lists, which let me avoid manually categorizing 650 books. So what I actually mean here is“(N books that I have not explicitly marked as nonfiction)”.

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