Bookmark Features New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2016

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The January Red Box, mailing to stores this week, will include a packet of 25 bookmarks featuring The New York Times Book Review’s picks for the 10 Best Books of 2016.

The “10 best” were narrowed down by the Times Book Review’s editors from an earlier list of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

A statement from the editors explains their criteria:

“This is not necessarily a list of the books that best capture the current moment or the books that contain messages we editors think are most important – though some of them certainly do. What we’re really looking for are books we think embody excellence on many fronts: the originality and scope of the author’s ambition and the author’s execution of that vision. The quality of the language and the writing on a sentence level. The sheer storytelling power. These are books that we think you’ll actually want to read rather than perch artfully on a shelf (though there’s that, too).

“We are creating these bookmarks because this list does not just end in 2016. We think these books will matter to readers for years to come, books we think people will remember long after they’ve read them, and books we think deserve to be remembered. We are reaching out to America’s best independent bookstores to help readers bear these books in mind as they try to answer that perennial question, ‘What should I read next?’

“Here are our 10 Best Books of 2016. May they last for many years in the minds of your readers, and ours.”