My Lost Ritual: Amazon's Best Books of 2011

This is the first year in the last eight when I haven't organized--or at least had a say in--Amazon's editors' picks for the top books of the year, which came out yesterday. The beginning of November was one of the two poles of my editorial year (along with my author-interview frenzy at BookExpo in the spring): the other Books editors and I spent the year reading with our year-end list in mind, and October especially was a blur of reading and recommending and rereading, and meeting after meeting that sometimes gave me headaches but were always fascinating and spirited discussions among book lovers (who just sometimes didn't agree on which books were most lovable).

I mostly loved the process, and the results. At its most basic level, we were doing what booksellers most like to do--put books in the hands of readers we know will enjoy them--and we also knew the list would help authors we admired sell a few more of their books. Plus I'm a dork for lists, and for year-end ceremonial hoo-ha. But this year I got out of the new-releases game early in the year and watched October go by with other stressful things to focus on, doing a smidge of lobbying from afar for a favorite book or two but otherwise out of the process. I just haven't read enough new books this year to have a strong opinion on the best, and so I find myself approaching the list (and all the other top 10 category lists on the page) not as a bookseller or a critic, but as a reader who is looking for a few recommendations.

You can see the Top 100 for yourself, but here's the top 20:

1. The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes (his second straight year at #3)
4. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larsen
5. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
6. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
7. Before I Go to Sleep by S.J. Watson
8. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
9. Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zukoff
10. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
12. Bossypants by Tina Fey
13. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
14. We the Animals by Justin Torres
15. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
16. The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan
17. The Greater Journey by David McCullough
18. Lost Memory of Skin by Russell Banks
19. Maphead by Ken Jennings
20. The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

There are a lot of the most talked-about books of the year on the list (this year's PW top 10, the other big one announced this early in the season, is a little more eclectic), and I've actually read five of them (1, 4, 12, 15, 19), all of which I enjoyed, although I wasn't swept away by The Art of Fielding the way many good readers I know were. In my limited 2011 reading my clear favorite was Andre Dubus III's Townie, which I've raved about here in passing before, which made the list at #27. And I was also glad to see Malcolm X, The Empty Family, Fire Season, Hark! A Vagrant, and Pulphead on the list, and especially Orientation, my old friend Dan Orozco's long-awaited first book. No to mention not one but two former Jeopardy! champs, Arthur Phillips as well as Mr. Jennings, which encourages me that there may be a life after hanging up the signaling device.

If I was still in the meetings there are a few more from early in the year I would have plumped for: Edward Hoagland's Sex and the River Styx, Teju Cole's Open City, Ben Katchor's Cardboard Valise. I'm a third of the way through Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and it certainly seems like top 100 material so far. And there are some others that would have been high on my must-check-out-before-we-decide list, like Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods, Hector Tobar's Barbarian Nurseries, Charles Mann's 1493, 2008 #1 pick Philip Hensher's King of the Badgers, and Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence.

But I must remember, I'm skimming the lists as a prospective reader now, and there are plenty of books, both on the main list and the category ones, that I've bookmarked for my to-read list (which seems to have only grown longer now that I don't have to stick to a 90% new-releases diet). The Marriage Plot, Habibi, and Blue Nights are already on the short stack at my elbow, and The Sisters Brothers and Mr. Fox have been waiting patiently there too. And now I'm adding a few more to them: We the Animals, Ondaatje's Cat's Table, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, Donald Ray Pollock's The Devil All the Time (I still have to catch up with Knockemstiff), Diane Keaton's Then Again, Anders Nilsen's Big Questions, and the nonfiction comic book, The Green River Killer. But the ones I will likely read first are the ones I bought just now, two books in the Kindle Singles top 10, The Saint and Let the Great Axe Fall. I'm still not much of a Kindle reader, but the Singles seem perfect uses for the medium. (I guess the Singles list was limited to pieces in that Amazon-published program, but it would have been a great place to include Keith Gessen's How a Book Is Born, the ideal back-story companion to the #1 pick on the main list, The Art of Fielding--it's the reason I finally read the book in the first place.)

And then there's Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan's new essay collection that I have a sneaking suspicion will be one of my favorite books of the year once I get my hands on it. Having already marveled at some of its varied contents online--on living with the last Fugitive, Andrew Lytle, on smoking pot at Disneyworld, on Axl Rose and Michael Jackson--I've been thrilled to see the Sullivan fans come out of the woodwork when the book came out this month. He really is one of the most thrillingly talented writers working these days.

Comments

[Janet Murie]

Great list, Tom. You make we want to read every book you talk about. I've got The Sister's Brothers waiting for me to read over Christmas, so looking forward to it. Something so wonderful about the Canadian westerns.