Best of

The Best of 2012 lists continue to stream in (which means we’ll have another update to our “best of the best” master list very soon.) Entertainment Weekly offered its 10 best fiction and nonfiction lists: Fiction Hilary Mantel, BRING UP THE BODIES Adam Johnson, THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON Jess Walter, BEAUTIFUL RUINS Maria Semple, WHERE’D YOU GO, BERNADETTE Ben Fountain, BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK Nell Freudenberger, THE NEWLYWEDS John Green, THE FAULT IN OUR STARS Gillian Flynn, GONE GIRL Chris Ware, BUILDING STORIES Junot Diaz, THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER Nonfiction Katherine Boo, BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS Cheryl […]

The latest set of top 10 lists comes from Time magazine, which names John Green’s YA novel their No. 1 work of fiction and joins GoodReads as the first critics list to rank JK Rowling’s novel for adults among the year’s best: Fiction 1. The Fault in Our Stars, John Green 2. Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel 3. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain 4. At Last, Edward St. Aubyn 5. The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There, Catherynne Valente 6. The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling 7. Building Stories, Chris Ware 8. NW, Zadie […]

GoodReads announced the winners of their contest asking readers to vote for their favorite titles of the year across 20 categories. If you just look at the topline results, JK Rowling’s THE CASUAL VACANCY actually came out on top in the fiction category, well ahead of runner up, Emily Giffin’s WHERE WE BELONG. But we pulled up the actual votes within each of those 20 categories instead of just copying over the winners list. The single-largest vote recipient was YA winner John Green’s THE FAULT IN OUR STARS, with almost 37,500 votes, more than three times Rowling’s total. Mystery/thriller winner […]

The season for selecting the best books of the year has begun in earnest–with a number of new lists in recent days (noted below)–and will continue through New Year’s. For the fourth year, Publishers Lunch will be following and aggregating those lists from all over to form our can’t-miss consensus lists of The Best of the Best of 2012. With about 20 lists logged so far, there is already a clear pattern to this year’s competition, with Booker winner Hilary Mantel and National Book Award winner Katherine Boo the clear favorites in fiction and nonfiction respectively. Here is our first […]

The New York Times Book Review named their annual 100 Notable Books in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction (which will run in this Sunday’s print edition) with their 10 Best list to follow next week. Slate compiled their best books of 2012 list by polling their staff (including their human resources director, who chose Esi Edugyan’s HALF BLOOD BLUES.) The most popular choice was Katherine Boo’s BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS. From earlier this week, Canada’s Quill & Quire chose their top 5 fiction and nonfiction choices: Fiction Tamara Faith Berger, MAIDENHEAD Tamas Dobozy, SIEGE 13 Alice Munro, DEAR LIFE Alix Ohlin, […]

The Washington Post published their “best of 2012” lists, with their Top 10 list mixing consensus favorites with a few new contenders (Marigold is published by Stanford’s Woodrow Wilson Center). NONFICTION Behind The Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo House of Stone, Anthony Shadid Iron Curtain, Anne Applebaum Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam, James G. Hershberg Why Nations Fail, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson FICTION Arcadia, Lauren Groff Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Ben Fountain Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel Broken Harbor, Tana French Canada, Richard Ford As usual, the paper also recommends 50 notable works of […]