The Washington Post named their top books of the year. (In case you’re wondering, over the past three years an average of four books from their top 10 wind up making our authoritative, aggregated Very Best of the Best Books of the Year list.) This year’s picks: Nonfiction Good and Mad, By Rebecca Traister The Library Book, By Susan Orlean The Line Becomes a River, By Francisco Cantú On Desperate Ground, By Hampton Sides One Person, No Vote, By Carol Anderson Fiction The Maze at Windermere, By Gregory Blake Smith The Overstory, By Richard Powers A Place For Us, By […]
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Westover’s Educated Tops Amazon’s Best of 2018 List
Tara Westover’s memoir Educated — which was Amazon’s favorite book halfway through the year — also tops their Best Books of 2018 list, just announced. (True to form, only six other titles from their June “best so far” picks made it to the year-end list.) Also on the list are featured Buzz Books by Ottessa Moshfegh and Leif Enger, and A.J. Finn, all excerpted and available for download in our Buzz Books 2018 collections. Amazon’s top 20, in numbered order: Educated, by Tara Westover Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan Indianapolis, by Sara Vladic Elevation, by Stephen King The Line Becomes a River, […]
Best Books of the Year So Far, So Far
It’s time for the first round of picks of some of 2018’s best books from the first five or six months of the year — in advance of Amazon’s “best so far” package across multiple categories, due later this month. Looking across the lists from iBooks, EW, Christian Lorentzen at Vulture, and Time (including nonfiction), Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry made three lists, while these titles appear on two lists: The Sparsholt Affair, by Alan Hollinghurst Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston The Recovering, by Leslie Jamison The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, by Denis Johnson An American Marriage, Tayari Jones The Mars Room, by […]
January Bookseller Picks
Amazon joins the Indie Next list and Library Reads in naming Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists as their spotlight pick for January, and Karen Cleveland’s Need to Know is their featured debut. (Benjamin’s novel and A.J. Finn’s thriller The Woman In the Window — also on Amazon’s January list — are both featured in our free Buzz Books January sampler as well.) The rest of Amazon’s top picks, presented in a new graphic format, are: The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson Here Is Real Magic, Nate Staniforth Oliver Loving, Stefan Merrill Block The Road Not Taken, Max Boot The Windows […]
The Final, Definitive, Very Best of the Best Books of 2017
With 62 votes counted we’re ready to present the final and ultimate (despite some newcomers) aggregation of selective “best of 2017” book lists from all over — including major publications of all kinds, but also retailer and library selections, award nominees, and more. (As usual, we have updated the previous post with all of our sources noted.) This year’s final list features our first-ever two-time Book of the Year honoree, George Saunders. His story collection Tenth of December tied for top honors with Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch in 2013, but both titles collected 25 votes each that year. Saunder’s new […]
Closing In On the Very Best of the Best Books of 2017 Lists
Right on schedule, we have our second update on the competition for the consensus best books of the year, and as naturally happens at this point in the aggregation, there is enough data for full “top 10” lists for both fiction and nonfiction. With 54 votes counted at this point (or 33 more than Quartz has counted so far, if we were looking for web traffic), George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is pulling away as book of the year, while David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon has a comfortable lead as nonfiction book of the year (and is […]