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Here are the highlights of my best books of 2016 shortlist.

Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, by Norman Ohler. By 1939, Nazi Germany was full of get-up-and-go, thanks to cocaine, morphine and above all, crystal meth. It’s why their Panzers just kept roaring through. Until they didn’t, which always happens with drugs like “Pervitin,” which could be easily bought in shops. They turn on you, as they did on Hitler himself. Ohler is a novelist whose hell-bent writing has offended the house style in German history writing, which is Plodding Deutsch Gothic.

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, by Jane Mayer. This mapping of malevolent Koch money in politics is the best work of reporting out of the U.S. this year, which is saying something. I don’t have to summarize it. The subhead does it for me, a peculiar trend in publishing which thinks a title is a headline and you don’t have to read the actual book. You do. Hunted by her enemies, New Yorker writer Mayer risked her career to write this exposé. Money flows like blood.

Golden Hill, by Francis Spufford. The cleverest writer in England, Spufford plays with categories and has finally written a historical novel. I don’t like the genre, but this tale of a Briton sailing to Manhattan in 1746 with a stash for some mysterious purpose was so immersive that I felt drugged (the highest compliment a novel can be paid). New York was still tiny — think of “the immense darkness of the continent at whose edge the little city perched”— and full of brutes and snake charmers, so no change there then. Spufford takes prose to ghostly levels. I floated as I read it.

Firewater: How Alcohol is Killing My People (And Yours) by Harold R. Johnson. This is an extraordinary memoir by a Cree writer who understands the damage alcohol does when used to kill the pain caused by white Canadians stealing and torturing indigenous children throughout this nation’s history. I know many white alcoholics, but it’s always “the drunk Indian.” Why? Firewater is a great book; it burns in the hand.

The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton. In this novel/tract, the great philosopher takes an axe to romantic love, having children and basically, everything humans do. He sounds a bit like Livia Soprano — “It’s all a big nothing” — but he has his usual evenness of tone that coats the doom. Yes, love is illogical, your ambitions absurd and, in 30 years, your children might turn out to be pub bores. But “the good order and continuity of civilization depends to some tiny but vital degree on (these) quiet unnoticed labours.” So there’s that.

Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance, Strangers in their Own Land, by Arlie Russell Hochschild, White Trash, by Nancy Eisenberg. Here’s a trio of books by Americans about Americans who were so miserable at their perceived loss of status, whatever that is, that they voted for Trump. If my life’s blown up, let’s blow everything up, was the thinking. The theme studied by these three is “feeling over fact.” Vance is a wonderful memoirist, Hochschild a brilliant sociologist and Isenberg seems primed to take offence, which is how this whole thing started.

Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich. The Belarusian author won the 2015 Nobel literature prize for her oral histories of Soviet (and colonized) citizens, who may well be tied with the Chinese for the not-much-coveted People Most Abused by 20th Century Tyrants award. They’re doing well in the running for winning the 21st century too, but climate change may hand it to a drought-stricken African nation or somewhere underwater. Alexievich’s interviews are extraordinary: revolution, world war, mass slaughter, the Holodomor, death by vodka, oligarchy, etc. Spare a thought for them. They suffered and along came Putin.

You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice, by Tom Vanderbilt. “I don’t want more choice, I want nicer things,” said Edina Monsoon in Absolutely Fabulous. Well, choice is all you have, so suck it up. Vanderbilt, a meticulous investigator of the way Americans live now, explains that people are guileless and genuine choice is a fantasy.

As inequality rises, people dress more alike. It’s called wanting to look like Zuckerberg. And you do, you poor sad man. Everything is marketed: even carbonation has its own vocabulary. Netflix figures out your preferences; rarely are you flattered by their assessment. Wrote Henry James: “He guessed at intense little preferences and sharp little exclusions, a deep suspicion of the vulgar and a personal view of the right.” Still true.

In Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, Norman Ohler tells the tale of Nazi Germany’s get-up-and-go, which was thanks to cocaine, morphine and above all, crystal meth