The Best Books of the Year So Far

Every summer about this time we Amazon books editors get together and look back at the books from the first six months of the year and choose our favorites for our Best of the Year ... So Far lists. With the glut of year-end best-of lists these days (we're guilty too!), I'm surprised more folks haven't followed our lead, but it seems like we still have the midyear field to ourselves.

This year we've chosen ten overall favorites, as well as four more lists of ten in Fiction, Nonfiction, Young Readers, and the always-hazy catchall category we call "Hidden Gems" (which includes both lesser-known picks and one-of-a-kind books that don't easily fit our other categories). Given the provisional nature of the lists, and the summer-vacation timing, we don't rank the lists the way we do at the end of the year. If you're a regular Omni or Amazon reader you'll recognize a number of these choices from our Best of the Month picks, but this is a way of highlighting the books that have stuck with us the most during the year, as well as those that we may have overlooked in the monthly frenzy.

You can read short reviews of all of these on our BOTYSF pages, and on the right side of each of the category lists you can find a guide to some of the books we're most looking forward to in the next six months of the year.

Overall Top 10:

• Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
• Fordlandia by Greg Grandin
• The Lost City of Z by David Grann
• Let the Great World Spin by Colin McCann
• The City & The City by China Mieville
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollestad
• The Gamble by Thomas E. Ricks
• Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
• Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead

Fiction:

• The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley
• Everything Matters! by Ron Currie Jr.
• Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• The Vagrants by Yiyun Li
• Border Songs by Jim Lynch
• Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Lowboy by John Wray

Nonfiction:

• Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
• Nine Lives by Dan Baum
• Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford
• Columbine by Dave Cullen
• Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman
• How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy
• A Strange Eventful History by Michael Holroyd
• The Unforgiving Minute by Craig Mullaney
• Ratio by Michael Ruhlman
• When Skateboards Will Be Free by Said Sayrafiezadeh

Young Readers:

• The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
• Toby Alone by Timothee de Fombelle
• Scat by Carl Hiaasen
• Down, Down, Down by Steve Jenkins
• The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly
• The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
• Little Oink by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Jen Corace
• All in a Day by Cynthia Rylant and Nikki McClure
• Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy by David Soman and Jacky Davis

Hidden Gems:

• Genesis by Bernard Beckett
• The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
• The Photographer by Emmanuel Guibert
• Sir John Hargrave's Mischief Maker's Manual by Sir John Hargraves
• The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen
• The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh
• Poems 1959-2009 by Frederick Seidel
• George Sprott: 1894-1975 by Seth
• Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton
• Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

--Tom

Comments

[Regan Taylor on July 07, 2009 at 08:11 PM]

You missed Deanna Raybourn's Lady Julia Grey series in fiction! Her books appeal to all ages from young adult through senior citizens and men and women alike.

[Joe b on July 08, 2009 at 01:58 PM]

No love for Gerald Martin's García Márquez bio?

[Reginald Power on July 08, 2009 at 05:39 PM]

Why isn't Mark Levin's "Liberty and Tyranny" not listed under the
Nonfiction category?

[Celia Hayes on July 08, 2009 at 05:56 PM]

Nothing for me - historical novel trilogy with strong regional appeal and strong on-line presence among the book-blogs and independent authors?

Ah well ... nothing to see here but the usual mainstream published books. I swear, unless you're already in the club, or have recently been notorious or ****ed someone famous, you are so out of luck...

[Jerri Patton on July 08, 2009 at 08:42 PM]

I loved 'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society'.

[MG (ret) Frank Schober on July 08, 2009 at 10:12 PM]

Wow!
You missed the greatest military history book I have ever read;
"Horse Soldiers" by a superb writer, interviewer and author,Doug Stanton.