The 11 best books we read in 2016

The Week's writers and editors reflect on the books we loved reading the most this year

Here are some of our staff's most enjoyed reads from 2016.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Amazon)

1. Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer

Rather unusually among wealthy, developed democracies, the people of the United States are almost entirely descended from immigrants, and most of them relatively recently. Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer, is a fascinating ethnographic study into the first four waves of immigration from Britain and Ireland to the United States, starting in the early 1600s. There were the Puritans who landed in New England, the Cavaliers who settled in Virginia, the Quakers who landed in the Delaware Valley, and the Borderers (often also called Scotch-Irish) who landed in Appalachia.

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