Best of the year lists must be good for book sales. After doing a single annual list for many years, the Amazon Editors added a second, mid-year review of “Best Books so Far” a few years ago. As the Seattle Times writes in a a story about the Amazon Book Review and its editors, “The ultimate aim [of the best books lists], after all, is to sell books.” While the article also claims that the impact of the picks is hard to measure, there is at least one yardstick, whether the books rise on Amazon’s sales rankings (not to mention the multitude of metrics that Amazon’s tech gurus do not make public. You can’t help but feel the editors are very aware of how well their choices do).

The top title on this year’s midyear list, Top 20 Picks of the Best Books of the Year So Far, did indeed move up Amazon’s sales rankings. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren was in the 600’s, after hitting a high of #13 when it was released in April. The Amazon pick brought it back up in to the 200’s.

This year, several other publications, those with a less vested interest, have followed the trend of mid-year reviews, including Entertainment Weekly (best fiction and nonfiction, ranked lists of ten titles each), New York Magazine (ten titles) and Time (eighteen titles).

Many of these titles became best sellers, but the lists are helpful for discovering overlooked gems that could use a circulation boost.

Across the four lists, 51 separate titles got nods. No title made all four.

    

Three books are the clear consensus winners, selected by three of the four list makers:

• Lab Girl, Hope Jahren (PRH/Knopf; BOT; OverDrive Sample) (Amazon’s #1 pick, Entertainment Weekly, Time)

• The Gene: An Intimate History, Siddhartha Mukherjee (S&S/Scribner; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample) (Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Time)

• The Girls by Emma Cline (PRH/Random House; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample). (Amazon, Entertainment Weekly’s #1 fiction pick, NY Magazine)

Eleven other titles made two of the four lists.

Amazon and Entertainment Weekly selected:

   

• Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Matthew Desmond (PRH/Crown; BOT; OverDrive Sample)
• Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, Mary Roach (Norton; Brilliance Audio; OverDrive Sample)
• LaRose, Louise Erdrich (HC/Harper; Harper Audio; OverDrive Sample)
• When Breath Becomes Air, (PRH/Random House; BOT; OverDrive Sample) (Entertainment Weekly’s #1 nonfiction pick)

Amazon and Time selected:

  

• The Fireman by Joe Hill (HC/William Morrow; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample)
• Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul, James McBride (PRH/Spiegel & Grau; RH Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample)

Entertainment Weekly and Time selected:

  

• Sweetbitter (PRH/Knopf; Random House Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample)
• The Vegetarian (PRH/Hogarth; BOT; OverDrive Sample)

NY Magazine and Time selected:

  

• The Association of Small Bombs, Karan Mahajan (PRH/Viking; Blackstone Audio; OverDrive Sample)
• What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours (PRH/Riverhead; Recorded Books; OverDrive Sample)

Many of these titles received media attention when they hit shelves and in the months following. For example, Lab Girl got a rave review from NYT‘s Michiko Kakutani and was the focus of a Slate “Audio Book Club” feature; The Girls was a #1 Indie Next selection and a top summer reading pick and is currently a best seller; and The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International award.

See our catalog for a running list of all mid-year picks. Links to each of the round-ups are in the column to the right (replacing the Summer Preview links).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2016 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Best Books 2016. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.