Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Aggregate list of best books

Yesterday, I wrote about overlooked books in the top lists of 2012. I also mentioned the usual suspects that seemed to be on everyone's list. Flavorwire took that one step further, actually documenting the books that appeared in several top lists of 2012. The lists they chose are as follows:

Publisher’s Weekly
Slate
TIME (Fiction)
TIME (Nonfiction)
Vogue
The Washington Post
Book Riot
Amazon
The Atlantic
Esquire
The Huffington Post
The New York Times
The Daily Beast
Newsday
Christian Science Monitor (Fiction)
Christian Science Monitor (Nonfiction)

This looks to be a fairly representative collection of American publications, spanning a wide range of reading interests, from commercial (Amazon) to industry (Publisher's Weekly), critical (New York Times, Washington Post) and general (Vogue, Esquire). It even polls a couple of blogs for good measure (Book Riot, The Daily Beast). The results aren't too surprising: Hilary Mantel's Bring Up The Bodies was the most listed book, appearing on 9 of 14 fiction lists. Other titles mentioned several times were Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (7), Gone Girl (6), This is How You Lose Her (5), and Arcadia (4). It looks like I agree so far with several of these choices, though I have yet to read Mantel. 

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