At the end of every year I read a lot of book lists: what’s great, what sucked, what should have been better. Sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion that everyone got together and voted on the year’s best books before anyone wrote anything, given that certain titles seem to pop up over and over and over again.

Not being a professional book critic, I don’t confine myself to primarily new books. This list, then, will contain mostly older books that I read for the first time in 2016. As well, it...