2026 Best Books Lists Released From B&N And Amazon With The Same Major Problem
Amanda Kay Oaks is a writer and lifelong book nerd. She has been writing about books on the internet for over 10 years, with prior bylines at Book Riot and ComicBook.com. Though she reads across most genres, Amanda Kay is particularly fond of romance, cozy fantasy, and books with strong female characters.
As the year winds down, readers and booksellers alike are reflecting on the best books of 2026. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble, two of the biggest booksellers around, have released their 2026 roundups of the best books. But despite having arguably some of the best access to what people are actually reading (or at least buying), their lists share the same glaring issue.
If you spend any amount of time on BookTok, Bookstagram, or the broader bookish internet, you can probably name the books that everyone was talking about this year. Dungeon Crawler Carl continues to dominate the conversation, along with romantasy hits like A Court of Splintered Harmony and Threshing Day. And of course, Yesteryear took the trad wife trend and gave it a bookish spin. But you'll only find one of those books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble's lists.
Barnes & Noble likes to name a single "Book of the Year," but also lists a handful of finalists that nearly made the cut. Meanwhile, Amazon has crowned its Top 20 books of 2026. The two lists share a few titles in common, including the aforementioned Yesteryear. Yet some of the most voracious readers, who typically consume a lot of romance, fantasy, and sci-fi fiction, likely won't spot their favorites on the list. And surely that's not because massive booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble aren't aware of just how popular genre fiction is. Yet somehow, both of these lists feel wildly out of touch with what many people are actually reading.
According to Barnes & Noble, Whale Harbor by Mary Beth Keane is the top book of the year. The, "sweeping, dramatic family story" was a national bestseller this year and was also selected as a Good Morning America book club pick. It's also a work of literary fiction, something it shares with... basically every other book on these lists. Barnes & Noble's finalists include Land by Maggie O'Farrell and Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead. Though the list does name a cookbook, memoir, and a few works of nonfiction, not a single work of straightforward genre fiction made the cut.
Question 1 of 3
When you think about your own favorite reads of 2026, which type of books dominated your list?
Mostly romance, fantasy, sci-fi, or other genre fiction
Mostly romance, fantasy, sci-fi, or other genre fiction 0%You can purchase Barnes & Noble's Best Book of the Year here.
The same pattern holds for Amazon's top 20 books of the year. It dubbed American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee as its top contender, with Land, Cool Machine, and B&N favorite Whale Harbor all making appearances as well. What's notably absent here, again, are the kinds of genre fiction that many of the most voracious readers know and love. It begs the question of what criteria these booksellers are using to crown their "best" books, because their lists almost definitely don't align with many readers' lists of favorite reads for 2026.
You can purchase Amazon's Best Book of the Year here.
Of course, that's not to say no one is reading literary fiction or that these books don't deserve to be among the best books of the year. It's just that, given the reading landscape in 2026, they shouldn't be the only books on these lists. The fact that two of the biggest booksellers haven't named a single work of genre fiction on their best books list suggests that literary snobbery about romance, fantasy, sci-fi, and mystery remains alive and well. If even retailers that arguably stand the most to gain from breakout hits like the latest ACOTAR can't acknowledge that those books are the "best" for many readers, we've got some work to do.
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