Matt's Books and Music

One of my favourite things about my Hall of Fame project is seeing how different books jump or stumble in my estimation from year to year. Here’s a list of the five biggest rises and the five deepest falls this year.

(Note on ‘relative’ increases and decreases: The overall change is about the number in the list. The ‘relative’ change is about how it compares to other titles from the previous year’s list. So for example, if a book goes down 3 places overall, but there are 12 new titles ahead of it, that means it actually increased 9 places compared to the previous year’s list. So this is a helpful measurement for how my perceptions of a book have changed year over year.)

5 Biggest Rises

• +100+ (~200→86): Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay (2007 🇨🇦): I really loved this book, but it didn’t fare well last time I went through this exercise. But after very successfully recommending it in 2025, I was reminded by just how good it is, and so it popped all the way up into the Hall of Fame this year.
• +92 (~150→63): A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence (1966 🇨🇦): A Canadian classic that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s no wonder it keeps rising in my estimation.
• +53 relative places, +49 overall (82→33): Leaven of Malice, by Robertson Davies (1954 🇨🇦): What’s strange is not that one of my favourite books by my favourite author rose this high, but that it was down at 82 in the first place.
• +40 relative places, +36 overall (94→58): Sweet Sorrow, by David Nicholls (2018): This had been falling in my rankings for a couple years because I had a hard time believing that such a light novel could be that good. But a re-read last year reaffirmed that it actually is that good.
• +37 relative places, +33 overall (79→46): Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel (2009): I had a hard time getting into the world and writing of this one when I first read it. But the more distance I have from the reading experience, all that’s left is the genius.

5 Biggest Falls

• -29 relative places,-38 overall (51→89): Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor (2015)
• -19 relative places, -23 overall (29→52): Hotline, by Dmitri Nasrallah (2022 🇨🇦)
• -18 relative places, -27 overall (60→87): The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• -14 relative places, -27 overall (70→97): How the Light Gets In, by Louise Penny (2012 🇨🇦)
• -14 relative places, -20 overall (56-76): A Closed and Common Orbit, by Becky Chambers (2016)