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 […]
Best of
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 […]
The Latest of The Best of The Best of 2013
We’ve logged another dozen lists on our aggregated Best of the Best of 2013 lists — most recently the Wall Street Journal’s favorite fiction and nonfiction; and picks from Lucas Wittmann and the annual can’t-miss from our own very well read Sarah Weinman. In fiction, the favorites continue to pull away from the rest, but the competition remains very tight — with an unprecedented five titles all among the top selections of the year. (Usually by this time a particular book — Bring Up the Bodies, The Tiger’s Wife, or Freedom — has pulled away from the pack.) Best of the […]
2013: The Year We Gaveled On
We don’t usually play the game of making broad simplistic declarations about players of the year, but in our newsroom 2013 was truly the “Year of the Gavel.” New York Southern District Court Judge Denise Cote — recently the focus of a scathing editorial in the WSJ calling her “a disgrace to the judiciary” — was the dominant Publishing Person of the Year, and no matter what the OED claims, the “word of the year” was certainly not “selfie.” It was “spiderweb,” a term that speaks volumes about the DOJ’s winning trial against Apple on ebook price-fixing charges that was the […]