The Atlantic 10

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2022” coverage here.

End-of-year lists are by nature subjective, and selecting books in this way can be particularly hard. Tens of thousands of titles are published annually in the U.S., and a reader’s time is finite. We can digest only so much. Every publication, every jury making such judgments, has a filter. So this time around, we asked ourselves, as well as our colleagues: What were the books that had particular valence for us at The Atlantic? We looked for those that impressed us with their force of ideas, that drew us in not because of some platonic ideal of greatness, but because they got our brains working and presented fresh angles on the world. In a phrase, they were good to think with.

And so we arrived at The Atlantic 10.

Between the covers of these books, readers will find an enormously diverse set of subjects and an array of writerly moods, from the whimsical to the deadly serious. These are stories that plunge into the intimate world of farmworkers in Central California, the unlikely friendship between two Asian American college students, and the machinations of modern-day authoritarians. The questions these titles pose