UPDATED: Wrapping Up Best Books ’10
UPDATE: We overlooked the Kirkus adult selections, which appeared this week.
Those titles have now been added to the collated adult list and the figures below have been updated.
So, NOW, we’re ready to declare it a wrap for Best Books 2010. A few new lists appeared this week; Time‘s choices of the Ten Best Fiction and Ten Best Nonfiction are in the current issue (along with many other Top Ten lists, like the Top 10 iPhone Apps — iBooks is one of them) and the Washington Post published their lists on Sunday. The final lists will be Booklist‘s and Horn Book‘s, at the beginning of the year.
We’ve put together the Links to the Major Lists, but if you want an exhaustive (and exhausitng) compilation, go to LargeHeartedBoy.com.
We’ve also updated our collated list of all the titles from the major sources.
What can we conclude? There’s not a lot of concensus (perhaps inevitable, give the number of books published every year) and if the critics were on the National Book Awards committees, the outcomes would have been very different. In fact, the winner in the Young Readers category, Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine, did not appear on any of the critics’ lists.
Below are the links to the spreadsheets of the adult and children’s titles, with the top titles by number of picks. If you have any trouble downloading either list, or have any suggestions for making them more useful, please email me).
Adult Titles, Collated (Downloadable Spreadsheet); UPDATED Version 4
Top Titles:
Skloot, Rebecca, The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, Crown; Seven of eight
Wilkerson, Isabel, The Warmth Of Other Suns: The Epic Story Of America’s Great Migration, Random House; Seven of eight
Smith, Patti, Just Kids, Knopf; Six of eight
Egan, Jennifer, A Visit From The Goon Squad, Knopf; Six of eight
Schiff, Stacy, Cleopatra: A Life, Little, Brown; Six of eight
Franzen, Jonathan, Freedom, FSG; Five of eight
Grossman, David, To The End Of The Land, Knopf; Five of eight
Mukherjee, Siddhartha, The Emperor Of All Maladies: A Biography Of Cancer, Scribner; Five of eight
Mitchell, David, The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet, Random House; Six of eight
Richards, Keith, with James Fox, Life; Five of eight
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Childrens Titles, Collated (Downloadable Spreadsheet) UPDATED Version 3
Top Titles:
Williams-Garcia, Rita, One Crazy Summer, HarperCollins/Amistad; Seven of ten
Sidman, Joyce, illus. by Beckie Prange, Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Five of ten
Wiesner, David, Art & Max, Clarion; Five of ten
Burningham, John, illus. by Helen Oxenbury, There’s Going To Be A Baby, Candlewick; Four of Ten
Greenberg, Jan & Sandra Jordan, illus. by Brian Floca, Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring Roaring Brook/Neal Porter; Four of ten
DiCamillo, Kate and Alison McGhee, illus by Tony Fucile, Bink and Gollie Candlewick; Four of ten
Lin, Grace, Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same!, Little, Brown; Four of ten
Stead, Philip C., illus. by Erin E. Stead, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, Roaring Brook/Neal Porter; Four of ten
Kerley, Barbara, illus. by Edwin Fotheringham, The Extraordinary Mark Twain, (According to Susy) Picture Bk. Scholastic; Four of ten
Underwood, Deborah, illus. by Renata Liwska, The Quiet Book Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Four of ten
Collins, Suzanne, Mockingjay, Scholastic; Four of ten