Here in the final week of 2016, the inevitable nostalgia for six to 11 months ago has reached its height in the pop-culture universe. This week, we look back on some of the best entertainment experiences we had in 2016 — the things that made our jobs and our lives worth it.

Don’t miss our previous best-ofs:

The pre-2016 entertainment that got us through 2016

The weirdest pop-culture of 2016

The worst pop-culture of 2016

Drinking the lemonade: Seeing Beyoncé live!

We almost didn’t make it to the final performance of Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour in October. A three-hour traffic jam at the Holland Tunnel stood between us and the Jersey border, and we were close to calling it quits. At some point, amid the clatter of clanging horns and supersized trunk speakers, we agreed that we felt ridiculous working this hard for a popular cultural experience. But we kept on, because we understood that skipping out on good Beyoncé tickets was a form of blasphemy. We finally pulled into the parking lot along with the last of the frenzied New York City stragglers, and to our delight, slid into our seats under the stars in the open-air stadium for the second song, “Sorry.” For the next two hours, we basked in Beyoncé — the mesmerizing choreography, the dizzying costume changes, and her never-ending stamina to carry her audience through the sensational stage show. Because she’s Beyoncé, she made sure the finale had the added pizzazz of special guests like Serena Williams, Kendrick Lamar, and her husband, Jay Z. But beyond the guests and the accolades she extended to her crew, her message of female empowerment reigned supreme. That night, maybe because it was her last show, maybe because there was still an undercurrent of optimism in the early October air, she seemed particularly focused conveying a message of strength to the women in the audience. “There’s no such thing as a weak woman. You’re born strong,” she said, and we believed her. A leader by example, she kept her act in the tightest of formations as she displayed emotional highs and lows from her Lemonade album and earlier work — beguiling, bewitching, bemused, benevolent Beyoncé. Back in the car headed for New York City, we finally caught our breath. —Tamara Warren

Ben Winters’ Underground Airlines

I read so few really great books this year, the kind that made the real world feel irrelevant while you’re reading, then much sharper and clearer after you’re done. The major exception was Ben Winters’ Underground Airlines, the kind of novel that’s hard to put down and hard to forget afterward. Set in an alternate timeline where slavery in America was never fully abolished, and still persists in a few American states, it isn’t as radical a reimagining of US slavery as Steven Barnes’ novel Lion’s Blood, or the mock-doc C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. But the relatively small-world changes in Underground Airlines help make it convincing, immersive, and relevant to states’ rights policies today. Winter is smart about subtly using slavery as a stand-in for any social issue that makes a lot of people people angry enough to be self-righteous, but not personally affected enough to fight for change. His vision of how American slavery would work in a modern setting is terrifyingly detailed and believable. And on top of all that, Underground Airlines tells a tremendously personal and suspenseful story, about a black investigator whose job is chasing down escaped slaves. His personal conflicts drive the story, which is part detective novel, part character story, and part intelligent science fiction about an alternate reality. It’s a terribly sad book, like Winters’ other fantastic trilogy, the Last Policeman novels. But it’s some of the best kind of science fiction — an illuminating window into how much people would or wouldn’t change with a minor alteration in history. —Tasha Robinson