Steve Coll has won the FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for PRIVATE EMPIRE: Exxon Mobil and American Power (Penguin Press). Publishers Weekly announced their picks for the 100 best books adult books (and 40 top children’s books) of 2012. Here is their top 10 list: Building Stories, by Chris Ware (Pantheon) Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel (Holt) The Round House, by Louise Erdrich (Harper) Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain, by Lucia Perillo (Norton) The Devil in Silver, by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau) Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an […]
Best of
AJ Jacobs’ DROP DEAD HEALTHY Tops Hudson Booksellers Best Books of the Year Picks
Hudson Booksellers picked AJ Jacobs’ DROP DEAD HEALTHY (Simon & Schuster) as its Book of the Year, selecting an additional ten best in fiction, non fiction, business, and YA/children’s as follows: Fiction Justin Cronin, The Twelve Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend Jonathan Evison, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl Peter Heller, The Dog Stars Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds ML Stedman, The Light Between Oceans Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins G Willow Wilson, Alif the Unseen Nonfiction Mark Bowden, The Finish Christopher Hitchens, Mortality AJ Jacobs, Drop Dead Healthy Jenny Lawson, Let’s […]
Remembering 2011
2011 was a lively, fascinating unpredictable year, and we’re expecting more of the same for 2012. Before we can make a fully fresh start, though, there are some things we need to let go of from 2011. The obvious “big stories” have been rehashed amply over the past few weeks, and every year we try to do something different with our year-end wrap-up. Therefore, we present: 2011: The Things We Need to Get Straight Edition * Major book publishers did not raise ebook prices in 2011. Or 2010. They actually lowered them. * Mill River Recluse was not the bestselling […]
The Final Lists: The Best of the Best Books of 2011
The votes are all in, this year drawing on 47 sources in all, and we’re ready to declare our consensus Best of the Best Books of 2011 lists. Fiction dominates the overall top 10 this year, with novels claiming the first four spots, and Tea Obreht’s THE TIGER’S WIFE as the clear “book of the year.” As we did last year, we’ve listed the editors and agents involved in the books that made the final list. This time around, no editor was responsible for more than a single title, though two agents–Amanda Urban and Lynn Nesbit–represented two finalists each. It’s […]
Many More “Best of 2011” Selections
Recent days have brought many more Best Books lists from major newspapers and magazines. Among those that we are adding to our aggregated Best of the Best of 2011 tabulation are lists from: Chicago Sun-Times critics Houston Chronicle Men’s Journal Miami Herald New York Daily News Pittsburgh Post-Gazette San Francisco Chronicle (top 10) San Francisco Chronicle (top 100)
Favorite Books of 2011, From the News Editor
This year I made a conscious effort to read fewer books while also reading more widely, succeeding in both instances (bearing in mind that my definition of “fewer” is at least three standard deviations higher than normal. For what it’s worth, I’ve read about 320 books with ten more days to go in 2011.) The list of ten books – six fiction, four non-fiction – appear below, in alphabetical order, mostly because it was hard to pick a flat-out favorite book. (For brevity’s sake, my favorite crime novels appear elsewhere.) Fiction Alan Hollinghurst, THE STRANGER’S CHILD (Knopf) — not for […]