With picks aggregated from a total of 58 sources in all, the clear consensus for the 2013 “book of the year” has ended in…a tie. George Saunders’ TENTH OF DECEMBER and Donna Tartt’s THE GOLDFINCH stood well above all others in the final count, each garnering 25 picks. (That ties them with the votes for Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a year ago, but leaves them short of the 2012 book of the year, Katherine Boo’s Behind The Beautiful Forevers, which made 29 different lists.) Not only did those two works of fiction tie for the top honors, but […]
Best of
The Updated Top 10 Books of the Year
Usually we don’t consider our tabulation of the year’s best books over until the beginning of January since the lists keep coming until then. But here is our latest weekly update of the Best of the Best of 2013, to fuel some final holiday shopping ideas. As often happens, the list continues to clarify itself, with George Saunders and Donna Tartt pulling away from the pack — still in a tie for “book of the year” honors. (Sheri Fink, George Packer and Jesmyn Ward are still in close competition for the top nonfiction book of the year.) This count includes […]
More Bests
The latest best books lists come from the three critics at the New York Times, Dwight Garner, Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin — who writes, “Let us be the first to tell you: These are quirky lists. They’re supposed to be. These are our favorite books of the year, so please don’t confuse them with 10 Bests, because we can’t make lists like those.” Three of Kakutani’s picks (Alan Blinder, George Saunders and Donna Tartt) also made the official NYT 10 best list. Other recently-published lists include People Magazine’s top 10 books and BuzzFeed’s 17 books they loved. FSG‘s favorites […]
Apple’s Top Picks and Bestsellers, Google’s Lists, and Kobo’s Favorites
Apple has named a short group of “best books” for the year, picking George Saunders‘ Tenth of December as their best work of fiction; Bill Bryson‘s One Summer as best nonfiction; Brandon Sanderson‘s The Rithmatist as best YA; and Breaking Bad as the best “made for iBooks” title. The iBookstore has more top 10 lists, across about 20 categories. In general fiction and literature, Apple’s top 10 is: Tenth of December, George Saunders The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt Someone, Alice McDermott Enon, Paul Harding Dissident Gardens, Jonathan Lethem How to Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, Mohsin Hamid All That Is, […]
Amazon’s Many Bestseller Lists
As usual, Amazon has released a wealth of bestseller lists for the year. On their site they break out Top 100 lists of print books and ebooks for both adult titles as well as books for kids & teens. (The success of new adult and crossover YA makes that an increasingly hard distinction to draw.) Plus they announced top 20 lists that combine print and ebook sales. (Note that in all cases, Amazon counts only books newly-published in 2013 for these year-end lists.) Their top 20 adult books are: 1. Inferno by Dan Brown 2. And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini […]
Favorite Books of 2013, From the News Editor
So many best-of lists, many carefully aggregated on an ongoing basis for our consensus “Best of the Best” collection, but there is always room for one more. My reading year of 2013 gravitated mostly to my usual categories – literary fiction, crime fiction, memoir, and a smattering of biography – with a strong dose of mid-century suspense novels by women (I had good reason). So keep that in mind while examining my list of favorite books published this year: Consensus lists being what they are, several titles on the “Best of the Best” have my enthusiastic endorsement as well. The […]