It’s time for Forum’s annual holiday books show. Whether it’s a new biography of Eleanor Roosevelt or that best-selling novel you stayed up all night finishing — what was the best book you read in 2016? We’ll also check in with Bay Area bookstores about what books to give your friends and family this year.
Michael’s Suggestions
- A Poet’s Dublin by Eavan Boland
- Altamont: The Rolling Stones, the Hells Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock’s Darkest Day by Joel Selvin
- Barkskins by Annie Proulx
- Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters by Michael S. Roth
- Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie
- Nutshell by Ian McEwan
- Swing Time by Zadie Smith
Suggestions from Karen West of Book Passage
- Commonwealth by Ann Patchett
- Moonglow by Michael Chabon
- Rain in Portugal by Billy Collins
Suggestions from Michael Barnard of Rakestraw Books
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
- News of the World: A Novel by Paulette Jiles
Suggestions from Faith Bell of Bell’s Books
- Am I Alone Here by Peter Orner
- Bear: The Life and Times of Augustus Owsley Stanley III by Robert Greenfield
- Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting by John Carter
- When Mountain Lions are Neighbors: People and Wildlife Working It Out in California by Beth Pratt-Bergstrom
Listener Recommendations Mentioned On Air
- 42 Encounters in San Francisco by Manny Kagan
- A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars by Robert Leckie
- A Life in Parts by Bryan Cranston
- And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
- The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
- Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Born With Teeth: Actress Kate Mulgrew on a Life Lived with Abandon by Kate Mulgrew
- Broken Ground by Karen Halvorsen Schreck
- Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences by Janis Bell
- De-Bug: Voices from the Underside of Silicon Valley by Raj Jayadev and Jean Melesaine
- Every Moment of a Fall: A Memoir of Recovery Through EMDR Therapy by Carol Miller
- Fenian’s Trace by Sean P. Mahoney
- Ghosts by Raina Telgemeier
- The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer
- Give Us the Ballot by Ari Berman
- The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain
- Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
- The Hot Climate of Promises and Grace by Steven Nightingale
- In Defense of a Liberal Education by Fareed Zakaria
- Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg
- A Little Life: A Novel by Hanya Yanagihara
- Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit
- Nicaragua Way: A Novel by Nina Serrano
- The Nix by Nathan Hill
- The Reflectionist by Terry Tarnoff
- Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt
- The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
- The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration in the Wonder of Consciousness by Sy Montgomery
- The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults by Frances Jensen & Amy Ellis Nutt
- The Three Corner Rustlers by K. Hamilton
- Tribe by Sebastian Junger
- The Troubleseeker by Alan Lessik
- Voices in the Night by Steven Millhauser
- When We Rise by Cleve Jones
- The Wild Trees by Richard Preston
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