What Gets Counted in a Year of Reading

Every December, the lists start rolling in. Best Books of the Year. Most Anticipated Reads. What Everyone Was Talking About. They show up in inboxes, on timelines, in newsletters we've subscribed to for years. And every year, I glance through them knowing what I'm going to find or more accurately, what I'm not going to find.

Which titles surface in these year-end algorithms? Whose names appear in the "most read" lists, the "trending" categories, the automated recommendations that claim to know what readers want?

It's rare to see the books I've been reading all year reflected back. The ones sitting on my nightstand. The ones my friends have been passing around. The ones that sparked actual conversation, not just marketing noise. No matter how many of us are talking about a book, no matter how celebrated the author is within our communities

, no matter how viral a title goes — it often doesn't make the cut.

Are we even checking these lists anymore? Probably not. At least not with the expectation that they'll represent us.

This isn't about individual reader taste. The biases aren't subtle. They're structural. Algorithmic visibility doesn't emerge from nowhere. It's shaped by what gets pre-selected, pre-amplified, pre-blessed by editorial attention and marketing budgets. These structures are not something we can fix from the outside. The work, the real work, has to happen in the rooms where these lists are compiled. That’s a conversation for another post, though.

With long-standing conversations about diversity in publishing, the questions remain the same. Who gets visibility? Whose work is valued? Who gets counted as “best year of the year”?

I could offer a long list of authors who deserved to be on these wrap-ups (I will, in another post). Recommendations from social media friends, from Black curators, from writers championing each other in quiet corners of the internet — most of them recommendations that appeared to trend. But right now, I'm sitting with the fact that I shouldn't have to make that list. That the work should already be seen.

Because we know the successes in our community. We know who's writing brilliantly. We know which books are being read, discussed, recommended, beloved. We celebrate each other, and that matters. But as much as I'd like to say that's enough, that our internal validation is all we need, it's not. Visibility outside our circles impacts sales, opportunities, legacy. It shapes who gets to keep writing, who gets to build a career and who gets remembered.

So this is for all the authors who identify with the Black diaspora who shined this year. The ones who made the mainstream lists and the ones who didn't. You were seen. You were read. You were counted (even when the year end book lists didn't reflect it).