Yesterday, Kim and I both listed some of the books that we wished we had gotten around to reading this year.
Now we want to hear from you:
What came out this year that you haven’t yet read?
Why haven’t you read it yet?
Are you going to, or do you think it’s going to turn into one of those “I always meant to read it” titles that haunts you every time you see it in the bookstore?
I once heard that there are only two real aphrodisiacs: variety and exercise. Variety to, you know, keep it exciting, and exercise for the endorphins and “use it or lose it” factor. Because books are the lens through which I interpret my world, I have, of course, tested this hypothesis in my reading life. And it totally works! It takes a mix of genres, formats, and writing styles to keep me interested, and I need to make reading time a regular part of my day so I don’t feel mentally out of shape. Eclecticism is what makes my reading life spicy, so here’s a buffet of my Best of 2011 reads.
2012 quickly approaches, so Book Riot contributors are sharing some of the best books they read in 2011. Check out the previous entries.
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I know, I know: You want these lists to stop. You’ve had enough of Best of and in a few cases even Worst of…however, I come neither to praise nor blame any books, but to highlight a few that have struck me as “all that and a bag of chips” in some way. Think of this list as a senior-year Wall of Fame: A mention doesn’t guarantee anything except joy in the moment.
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2012 quickly approaches, so Book Riot contributors are sharing some of the best books they read in 2011. Check out the previous entries.
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I try to avoid being one of those people who recommends everything they read, see, eat, visit, or buy. I read a lot and like most of it, so for my friends and family who don’t read as much as I do, I can easily become a recommendation firehose. So, I came up with a simple rule for myself: I only recommend 10% of what I read. When someone asks for a recommendation, I go back over the last 10 things I’ve read and pick one.
On my first pass through the 104 books I’ve read this year to come up with some “Best Of” lists, I came up with a “short list” of more than 25 books that I loved. Over the last week I’ve been whittling that list down to try and come up with five nonfiction and five fiction favorites. It’s been a struggle. (I know, #firstworldproblems.)
But I decided to go even further with these Book Riot picks and try to come up with two favorites from the entire year, the two books that I’ve been shoving at as many people as I can saying, “You really HAVE to read this book!”
You’re tired of end-of-the-year Top 10 lists already? I don’t blame you. But it’s okay. Here’s a different take on the Top 10 list — five Top 2 lists! Enjoy this review of the literary year that was, in short, attention-span-friendly groups of two:
My Favorite Non-Fiction
1. In The Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson — I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but this tale of Berlin in the ’30s told through the eyes of the American ambassador and his daughter might actually be better than The Devil In the White City — and that’s coming from a Chicagoan.
In the literary world, a book has to have it all in order to win an award. With television and movies, they break the art form down and give awards to pieces of the work as well as the work as a whole. Why don’t we do that? Why are there not awards for characters, plot, author, genre of the year, etc.? Why must writers create an entire package of “perfection” to be awarded? What if we had an Oscars type of award for books? If you were part of the Academy, which would you nominate for 2011? Let’s pretend there are these awards, and you (the readers) are the Academy… make your nominations below:
I love this time of year. Not just for the holiday festivities, but for all the year-end “Best of…” lists. Last year, I was pretty disappointed with my low book count and vowed to read at least 50 books this year so that I would at least feel qualified to rate my top five. Considering I’m reading my 50th book as we speak, I’m pretty happy with my book count this year.
I have been blogging for almost a year, and in that time, I have written a lot of “5 Best Books” lists. As the end draws near, however, I am finding it difficult to identify the books that I consider the “best” of the year. This is partly because I know that I’m about to settle in to two weeks of some serious reading, and I just know that I’ll find something in those two weeks that should have been on the list. That happened in June, when I posted a “5 Best Books of 2011….so far” list. Within weeks, I had read a stack of new books that bumped some of my original choices right off the list. Now, I’m taking the easy way out. Instead of making a proper list, I’m going to hand out a few awards to books for doing things that caught my attention.
2012 quickly approaches, so we’ve asked Book Riot contributors to share some of the best books they read in 2011. First up, Liberty Hardy.
Holy cats – it’s already the end of 2011! Let me be another one of those people to say “Where does the time go???” A lot of great things have happened for me in 2011: I started writing for Book Riot, got a kick-ass Clash tattoo, had dinner with amazing authors, successfully remained out of jail (at the time of this post), and read almost 200 books, most of which rocked. In fact, this was my best reading year ever, in terms of books I read and really enjoyed. A large part of that is thanks to Twitter – it’s so great getting recommendations from fellow booksellers and bibliophiles. Here’s a few of the books I read this year that really made my amygdala purr:
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