Best of

We’ll be back one more time in early 2015 once all of the final “best books of the year” lists are published (the latest is James Wood’s favorites), but as we near the end, our aggregated ranking of the best of all the “best books of 2014” has — as usual — yielded two quite solid lists of top fiction and nonfiction. Anthony Doerr’s novel remains in the lead for “book of the year” and Roz Chast’s book retains a comfortable lead among nonfiction titles: Top 10 Fiction of 2014 1. All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (20) 2. Station […]

The Guardian has their annual feature in which they survey top UK editors, asking about their “books that deserved to do better” and the books they wish they had published. Or rather, they survey 11 men and 2 women — so Virago associate publisher Ursula Doyle has mobilized a broader look from female editors under the #hitsandmisses hashtag on Twitter. Robin Robertson at Jonathan Cape goes above and beyond in listing 3 books that deserved bigger audiences in “a grim year for literary publishing”: Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth, Elizabeth McCracken’s Thunderstruck, and “the one that really got away,” Other People’s Countries […]

The New York Times’ daily critics Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin, and Dwight Garner each chose their 10 favorite books of 2014. As usual, there is little intersection between these 30 titles and the NYT Book Review’s official “10 Best” list. Also as is often the case, Kakutani picks are the most aligned with that 10 Best: She concurs on Klay, Chast, and Kolbert (and Garner is in sync on Lee): Kakutani Redeployment, Phil Klay Little Failure, Gary Shteyngart A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast Duty, Robert M. Gates The […]

As we’re well on our way to anointing the “Best of the Best Books of 2014” (Anthony Doerr and Emily St. John Mandel continue to pull away from the crowd), here is Publishers Lunch news editor Sarah Weinman’s addition to the seasonal recommendations. In her case, these ten favorite fiction and nonfiction books published during 2014 come from a reading pace of a little over one book a day.  (With one overlapping exception, she will issue a separate crime fiction list elsewhere later this week.) Fiction Molly Antopol, THE UNAMERICANS (Norton) This debut short story collection is uncommonly worldly, wise, and heartfelt about […]

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 […]

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 […]