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For more than a decade, I edited the book review section of Ohio’s largest newspaper. I wrote a column about books, assigned them to freelancers, and put the best on our weekly “Recommended�� list.

But I refused to compile an annual list of the year’s “best�� books. My newspaper received more than 400 review copies a week from publishers, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

To do an annual list of the “best,�� as I saw it, I’d have to make unfair calls. Which was “better��: a brilliant first novel, a Nobel laureate’s poetry collection, or a journalist’s investigation into a drug company dumping harmful chemicals into the water supply of a small town and causing an epidemic of birth defects? Would’t that depend on how you saw the relative importance of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry?

Yet at this time of year, you see countless lists in national media that purport to have found the “best�� of the half million books a year that come from traditional publishers alone (with 2 million more from self-publishers). Some of the results are disturbing.

Eight out of 10 titles on the New York Times best-books-of-2024 come from Penguin Random House, the largest U.S-based publisher. You see nothing from Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, or small or university presses. And that’s just the beginning of the problems.

Why is this happening? What’s wrong with all of it? And why should you–the reader–be concerned about all of it?

You’ll find my answers in my latest story at my free Substack newsletter, Jansplaining, which deals with why you can’t trust the year’s “best�� lists in media like the Times: