As the end of year frenzy of shopping, celebrating, eating, drinking and mindless hedonism recedes into the mists of the past (unlike the credit card statement) and the new year begins, it’s a good time to draw breath and reflect on where we’ve been and where we might be going.

For some reason, as soon as I turned over the calendar from November to December last year, I was hit by a primal urge to reincarnate my mother’s and grandmother’s custom of going completely overboard in the kitchen. Inspired variously by visions of Henry VIII style banquets, “from the heart” home-cooked Christmas gift baskets nattily bedecked in cellophane and ribbon, Coles and Woolworths free food magazines featuring humongous glistening hams and simulated happy families ranged around groaning tables, I threw myself into a baking and entertaining extravaganza.

While far more exhausting as it turned out than fulfilling, it did prompt the reflection that I often spend my time in activities that, in terms of investment versus reward, aren’t very well thought out.

Take, for example, this time last year, when I spent considerable time researching many articles to compile a post about what you should be reading in 2023. From November onwards each year many such articles flood our inboxes, not only in regard to books, but also songs, movies, television shows, art, theatre, social media trends and more. So, why, when those far better versed in making such lists were already doing it, I thought it was a worthwhile activity for me, I don’t know.

That aside, these things can be interesting, whichever aspect of our culture they address. I’m focusing here on books, given I spend more time consuming them than anything much else (aside from the leftover fruits of the Christmas baking fest).

As well as recommending books for the coming year, the list makers take delight in ranking the books of the dying year. Presumably, given its ubiquity, there’s an audience for this information, although I find all this looking back and looking forward dizzying, not to mention questionable in terms of reliability.  

Does anyone ever revisit their lists of best books later to see how their recommendations have done? Whether they’ve sold squillions, been nominated for prestigious awards or sunk without a trace? On what criteria does your average list maker rank their choices anyway? Inclusion in best seller lists, amount of revenue generated, whether they’ve been selected as book club pick by Oprah or Reese, or something else altogether? They never say. For example, a random search for best books of 2023 returns lists from Time, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Lit Hub, Vulture, the Conversation, and many more. Mostly the articles say these selections were made by their writers, experts, staffers and so on based on what they liked. Which is fine. It provides a little light reading and if the experts’ opinions coincide with your own, it can be gratifying. But it’s hardly objective.

Some websites, such as Vogue and the New York Times, helpfully provide links to booksellers where you can buy the selections, in case you succumb to FOMO. Which raises the question of the experts’ alliances with booksellers, publishers and other vested interests.

When we turn to recommendations for the year ahead, the water gets even muddier. Not only are there no obvious selection criteria, but while the top of the pops predictors wax eloquent about what’s going to be the next big thing, they give away zilch in the way of sources from which they draw their information. At least in my aforementioned post, I did that. When you look into these articles in more detail, it becomes fairly obvious that books are chosen not on merit but on hopeful guesses about what’s going to seize the fickle market’s interest. The website Oprah Daily puts it succinctly in an article titled “The Most Anticipated Books of 2024”, subtitled “Get a jump start on the titles everyone is going to be talking about in the New Year.” If “everyone” is going to be talking about it, only some kind of misfit social media denier Luddite wouldn’t be immediately storming the bookstores for their copy.

Identifying merit, of course, is not the way the publishing industry works, or not the only way. More importantly, it’s about what will sell. Many jobs depend on predicting what’s going to capture the market. Not least those of the humble writers. It’s still somewhat of a mystery how this is done. Amidst the glut of forecasters, who are the real authorities? It’s widely agreed social media wields a lot of heft and presumably credence is proportional to the number of followers an influencer can claim. For example, the website Book Riot claims “romantasy (a mashup of romance and fantasy) is currently a hot trend on BookTok, with publishers striking while the iron’s hot”. Another book blogger quoted on the same site suggests “anxiety about global issues [such as] pandemics, wars” and so on is going to drive us to uplifting, escapist fiction for a mental health break. Does this mean we’re all going to abandon serious novels for beach reads? What happens when it’s too cold for the beach?

If you really want to know which were the best books of 2023, or any other year for that matter, it might be better to allow the test of time to sift out the truly good from the fashion of the moment. If a book has enough heft to stamp its own place in the pantheon and is still being talked about, read, reviewed and recommended in five, ten, twenty years or more, then it’s probably worth knocking on the insensible heads of those who’ve somehow missed it and saying get to it.

But that won’t cut it in today’s rapid fire media cycle where what’s happening now is of the essence. It would be nice to think those who write the articles are feverishly flying through bookshelves of books in order to make considered judgements, but I suspect that’s not the case. However so long as you don’t take their advice as gospel, it may not matter. What does however is not spending so much time checking out what you should be reading or might have missed that you don’t have time to actually read.