Speaking Of Lists

As the year draws to a close, everyone’s offering their notable books of the year. In honor of the upcoming move to Portland, here is a list of the top ten Northwest books. It’s unclear whether they mean best, or best-selling, and they mix fiction and non-fiction pell-mell. Then there’s this list of the forty notable books of the year. I liked that they included three collections of short stories (ZZ Packer, Julie Orringer, Sherman Alexie). Or there’s also this rundown of books about Asia or by Asians. It lists one of my favorites this year, Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, but misses Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, even though the novel is set in Afghanistan.