Best of

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 […]

Barnes & Noble also posted their lists of favorite books of the year, highlighting 146 books in all across four categories (they just haven’t sent out a press release about it yet, so they have gotten less attention for their lists than Amazon). To be roughly equal with our Amazon list, here are their first 15 picks for both fiction and nonfiction: Fiction Winter of the World, Ken Follett Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn The Light Between Oceans, M.L. Stedman Shadow of Night, Deborah Harkness Defending Jacob, William Landay This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz The Wind through the […]

Amazon has posted their “best books of the year store,” with lists of favorite titles across 23 categories–plus they have named their Top 100 editors’ picks for 2012, selecting Louise Erdrich’s The Round House as their “book of the year.” (The top 100 lists are their editorial selections; the category-based lists blend editors’ favorites and sales history). Here are their editors’ top 25 books: 1. The Round House, by Louise Erdrich 2. The Yellow Birds: A Novel, by Kevin Powers 3. Gone Girl: A Novel, by Gillian Flynn 4. The End of Your Life Book Club, by Will Schwalbe 5. […]