Google released their “trend” charts exploring the year in searches, across multiple categories. They do not seem to have tracked author searches this year, but they did list the top 10 “trending” book searches in the US: 1. Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi 2. Blood Will Out, Walter Kirn 3. Savage Harvest, Carl Hoffman 4. City of Heavenly Fire, Cassandra Clare 5. Flash Boys, Michael Lewis 6. The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd 7. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr 8. Words of Radiance, Brandon Sanderson 9. Yes Please, Amy Poehler 10. Capital in the Twenty First […]
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Doerr and Mandel Vie for Top Title In Our Updated Best of the Best Books of 2014 So Far
We’ve counted 15 more “votes” since our last tabulation of consensus “best books of the year” — including, most recently, lists from Kobo, the WSJ, the Seattle Times, the Daily Beast and People magazine. But the top of the chart remains essentially the same, with titles by Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel still vying for “Book of the Year,” though Phil Klay’s Redeployment, which beat them both at the National Book Awards, has risen the most, now tied with Marlon James in third place. This year’s contest looks very similar to a year ago, when George Saunders’ Tenth of December and […]
2014 Bestseller Lists From Amazon, Indie Booksellers
Amazon announced its Bestselling Books of 2014 package — including an overall top 20, combining print and kindle sales, along with separate top 100 lists for print books and ebooks. Remember, however, that these promoted lists are for new releases in 2014 only. To find the true “bestselling books of the year,” regardless of when published, you need to burrow into Amazon’s bestseller archives for print and ebooks: There it becomes clear that John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars was really their bestselling title of the year, claiming the No. 1 Kindle slot and No. 3 print book slot (after StrenghtsFinder 2.0 and […]
Bradley Tops January Library Reads List, and More 2014 Best Ofs
Alan Bradley’s AS CHIMNEY SWEEPERS COME TO DUST, the latest in his Flavia de Luce mystery series, is the No. 1 pick for the January Library Reads list. The rest of the list recommends: The Rosie Effect, by Graeme Simsion The Magician’s Lie, by Greer Macallister The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins Golden Son: Book II of the Red Rising Trilogy by Pierce Brown The Dress Shop of Dreams by Menna van Praag The Bishop’s Wife, by Mette Ivie Harrison Vanessa and Her Sister, by Priya Parmar First Frost by Sarah Addison Allen Full Throttle by Julie Ann […]
Doerr and Hobbs Top iBooks Lists
There was another wave of “best books of the year” lists over the weekend — from Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Guardian and others, with Apple’s iBooks Store posting their lists as well. Apple picked top 10s in ten categories, with Anthony Doerr’s All the the Light We Cannot See as their fiction favorite of the year, and Jeff Hobbs’s The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace as their favorite nonfiction book. Among their lists: Fiction All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr The Bone Clocks, David Mitchell Bark, Lorrie Moore […]
Notably, The Best of The Best Books of 2014, to Start
With a number of “best books of the year” lists landing this week, we are ready to begin our own tabulation of the consensus very best books of the year. As in the past, we aggregate a wealth of selective lists from a broad selection of sources to produce what always turns into a collection of indisputably worthy books. We have factored in 30 lists so far; going by previous results, we’ll have 50 to 60 “votes” counted by the end of the year. Our collection includes retailers (Amazon, BN, Indigo, Hudson News, Indie Next No. 1s); awards nominees; major […]