Yesterday afternoon my copy of Publisher’s Weekly arrived and highlighted on the cover: their annual 100 Best Books of the Year. As a well read member of the book community I always look forward to this issue and inevitably feel bad after reading it-this year was no different. There has been a lot of discussion about the sheer number of books being published today, and I will site that as my excuse, because once again I have read less than 10% of the Best of list.
My PW break down: Of the 100 listed, I have read three children’s books- gifts for my godson, one graphic novel- picked up at BEA because I felt I should be better educated about the genre, and three YA novels- I am finding some of my favorite new reads have ended up in YA , that is a grand total of seven titles. I think I should be able to go with eight for my final count as one of the fiction titles listed is sitting on my bookshelf unread, but I digress.
Last year was not much better, and I have to wonder- why is that? With a variety of titles vying for my attention (in addition to those I am looking at in-house) am I picking poorly? (NO! I love the books I’ve read this year). In hope of finding some vindication I turned to the Amazon Top 100, kindly cited for me on PW.com.
My Amazon break down: Two of the three YA novels also listed in PW, six fiction listings now listed in PW, two of which I would not have put on a top 100 list, for a grand total of eight titles. Boo.
What the ‘Best of” craze breaks down to for me every year is, I am sure, its intended goal: a pre holiday shopping list. Amazon brilliantly links their list to BUY NOW buttons title by title. So for my contribution to this end of the year push, included below are the combined titles from both PW and Amazon’s Best of 2009 that I have read and agree should have made the cut. Happy shopping readers. Thanks to PW and Amazon for the frustration and motivation to pick up a few new titles, I hope my sort list may inspire some of you to do the same.
Catching Fire
Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press)
The Curious Garden
Peter Brown (Little, Brown)
Duck! Rabbit!
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illus. by Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle)
Fire
Kristin Cashore (Dial)
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
The Help
Kathryn Stockett (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)
The Lion & the Mouse
Jerry Pinkney (Little, Brown)
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou with art by Alecos Papdatos and Annie Di Donna (Bloomsbury)
This Is Where I Leave You
Jonathan Tropper (Dutton Adult)
The Unit
Ninni Holmqvist (Other Press)