The New York Times is about to release its list of the best books of 2020, so I thought I’d beat it to the punch. Here’s my list of the best 14 books published this year (in no particular order):

Fiction: 

1. Redhead by the Side of the Road, a novel by Anne Tyler.
2. The Lying Life of Adults, a novel by Elene Ferrante
3. Miss Jane, a novel by Brad Watson
4. The Nightwatchman, a novel by Louise Erdrich
5. A Long Petal of the Sea, a novel by Isabel Allende
6. Memorial, a novel by Houstonian Bryan Washington
7. A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant’s Son, short stories by El Paso native Sergio Troncoso.

Nonfiction:

1. The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio.
2. His Very Best, a Jimmy Carter biography by Jonathan Alter
3. In the Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado
4. Children of the Land, a memoir by poet Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
5. On the Plain of Snakes, a travelogue of today’s Mexico by Paul Theroux
6. Pelosi, biography by Molly Ball
7. Mad at the World, a biography of John Steinbeck by William Souder