In early December 1938, the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley set out to compile a form of end-of-year list for The New Republic. He and the other editors wrote to their friends seeking to compile a list of recent “Books That Changed Our Minds.” They didn’t debate what it would mean to call their choices the best. The books simply needed to have made them think in a new way.

Eighty-five years later, we’re attempting something similar with our list of books of the year. We drew this list from the books that our staff have spent this year reading, discussing, and in some cases criticizing. This is far from an exhaustive guide to the very best books that were published this year. Many are not on this list. But these 15 are some of the books that changed our minds.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $30.00

Naomi Klein’s story of being repeatedly confused with Naomi Wolf—and consequently yelled at and abused online—is gripping and revealing, both as a psychological study and for its explorations of toxic social media dynamics. But Klein uses the subject to open up a much larger set of questions: about how so many people have in recent years broken with conventional left-right political affiliations and a shared understanding of reality, and plunged into the world of vaccine denial and conspiracy theories. More than a tale of mistaken identity, Doppelgänger is a uniquely astute account of the scrambled political formations that have come out of the pandemic.

—Laura Marsh

Read our full review.

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar
Penguin Press, 368 pp., $30.00

“Whoever said life was about the journey and not the destination never had to look for a place to park,” notes urbanist Grabar. His lively examination of how the problem of car storage became the preeminent quandary of urban design—and how “solutions” have mutilated the environment, thwarted affordable housing construction, and created landscapes so ugly that no one wants to spend any actual time in them—is both dismaying and enlightening.

—Lorraine Cademartori

Read our full review.

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State by Kerry Howley
Knopf, 256 pp., $28.00

The travails of Reality Winner, aspiring whistleblower in over her head, make a fantastic story. But there is no better way to tell it than through the cracked lens of........

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