It takes a lot these days for a what-my-untrainable-dog-taught-me memoir to rise to the top of the category. Christian Science Monitor‘s book editor, Marjorie Kehe, dog lover herself, has seen them all, and, despite her vow to not be sucked in by another one, says that Martin Kihn’s Bad Dog (Pantheon/Knopf Doubleday, April) is just “too good to miss.”  The Book Beast lists it as one of this week’s “Hot Reads”.

But what convinced us is a ringing endorsement by EarlyWord Kids contributor, Lisa Von Drasek,

On the surface this is a twelve step recovery memoir with a nod to Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story. In the dog book category, it is less Marley and more Knapp’s Pack of Two. But really, this story of a man who sobered up, fell in love with his exuberant Bernese Mountain dog, and worked really hard to win back the human love of his life, deserves its own category. Told with humor and humility, Marty relates his dog training struggles while referencing the famous and disparate schools of thought on the subject. Readers will be rooting for him. (Spoiler — the dog doesn’t die; phew!)

Kihn’s first memoir, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, (Business Plus/Grand Central) has been adapted for a half-hour comedy series, starring Kristen Bell and Don Cheadle. It’s set to air on Showtime and may debut this fall.

Bad Dog: A Love Story Martin Kihn Retail Price: $23.95 Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: Pantheon – (2011-04-05) ISBN / EAN: 0307379159 / 9780307379153

OverDrive, ebook.

Holy Appeal Factors; USA Today offers a rundown of new and forthcoming books to read if your interest in Nordic noir has been “stoked by Stieg.” (Click on titles above for full biblio. info.)

Each annotation includes the “Stieg factor,” such as this one for Hennig Mankell’s latest (and final) in his Kurt Wallander series, The Troubled Man, “The brooding Wallander makes Salander’s black moods feel like a sunny day in Miami.”

In a companion story, Dierdre Donahue looks at this spring’s Scandinavian invasion of authors on book tour in the US.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the responses to our Favorite 2010 Books to Recommend challenge. We asked you to give us your own passionate book recommendations (not reviews, but an expressions of true love) and you came through. It’s like eavesdropping at the new book shelves.

We want more! Please add to the list (click here and add to the comments).

Here’s a few that sold me:

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love Kristin Kimball Retail Price: $25.00 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: Scribner – (2010-10-12) ISBN / EAN: 1416551603 / 9781416551607

Corinne Chronopoulos: The Dirty Life tells the true story of a NYC journalist who falls for an organic farmer while writing a story about him. This may sound like a cliche story line – city girl goes to the country – but it is actually a story about where our food comes from and the choices we make when we eat. Kimball is a fantastic writer and I really loved hearing about how two people struggled to bring a piece of land alive and produce food for themselves and their community. This book made we want to be a farmer and changed the way I consume.

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An Irish Country Courtship: A Novel (Irish Country Books) Patrick Taylor Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 464 pages Publisher: Forge Books – (2010-09-28) ISBN / EAN: 0765321742 / 9780765321749

Linda: I loved An Irish Country Courtship by Patrick Taylor. This series is one of my favorites for escapist reading. The author evokes life in a Northern Irish village in the mid-1960′s with wonderful characters and an exceptional ear for dialogue. There’s even a glossary at the end clarifying unfamiliar local expressions.

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Turtle in Paradise Jennifer L. Holm Retail Price: $16.99 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 0375836888 / 9780375836886

Susan: I like books that make the reader want to do further research into a specific time or event. This semi-autobiographical novel about a young girl who is shipped off to her mother’s family in Key West during the Great Depression has a wonderful cast of characters, real buried treasure, and an ending that will knock your socks off.

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Boneshaker (Sci Fi Essential Books) Cherie Priest Retail Price: $15.99 Paperback: 416 pages Publisher: Tor Books – (2009-09-29) ISBN / EAN: 0765318415 / 9780765318411

Debbi: Steampunk, zombies, airships & pirates, Seattle a long time ago, crazy inventors, single mother wanting only the best for her teenage son and highly poisonous materials floating around… completely unlike anything I’ve read before, quite outside my usual interests and I LOVED it.

We challenged you to tell us about your favorite 2010 books to recommend, along with your own passionate annotations, and you came through, making every one sound irresistible.

Please, check out the suggestions and add your own.

Below are the covers of some of the titles:

On NPR’s Morning Edition today, Nancy Pearl recommended several memoirs. She says that The Hare with Amber Eyes is the best work of nonfiction she read this year.

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss Edmund de Waal Retail Price: $26.00 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0374105979 / 9780374105976

Best books lists can be stuffy, requiring all that dispassionate justification of “quality.” It’s often more fun to hear what people simply loved.

The UK’s Guardian asked various writers and other public figures to recommend their favorites of 2010. Their responses are strikingly different from the often dry annotations on best books lists. For instance, a book that has received plenty of admiring attention breathes new life from this passionate recommendation,

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell is as enjoyable as a Patrick O’Brian novel and much better written. It’s a brilliantly imagined journey through 17th-century Japan and Holland which is moving, thoughtful and unexpectedly funny.

Curtis Sittenfeld (author of American Wife) recommends Stiltsville, an EarlyWord favorite. Now that she’s won us over with that example of impeccible taste, we’re ready to give her second recommendation a try.

I fell in love with two American first novels. Stiltsville by Susanna Daniel (Harper) is the gorgeously written story of a marriage over several decades, and it takes place in Miami, Florida, a place so vividly depicted you feel like you’ve travelled there while reading. If You Follow Me by Malena Watrous (HarperPerennial) is about a college graduate who goes to teach English in Japan, thinking she’ll end up in Tokyo and instead landing in a rural nuclear power plant town. It’s funny in a sharp, dark, painfully true way.

So, please, help us create a “Librarian’s Favorites” list; tell us what you loved this year, complete with your heartfelt recommendation.

For the legions who like memoirs and are still intrigued by the sixties, you can suggest Catherine Gildiner’s new book, After the Falls, coming out tomorrow.

Today’s Wall Street Journal review calls it a worthy follow up to the author’s 1999 best seller, Too Close to the Falls, which was,

…about an exuberant only child raised by eccentric parents in the 1950s, a decade that was anything but sterile or conformist for those in Cathy’s orbit. It was a wise and funny book, populated with memorable characters…Mrs. Gildiner, it was clear, had the rare skill of being able to present a child’s worldview in an adult’s voice, overlaid with an adult’s knowledge and judgment.

The new memoir picks up where the previous one left off, when the author was twelve years old, and continues through her college years during the ’60’s. Gildiner’s “gifts shine again” says the reviewer.

Independent booksellers also select it as a favorite title for November; it’s #6 on the Indie Next list.

After the Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties Catherine Gildiner Retail Price: $25.95 Hardcover: 368 pages Publisher: Viking Adult – (2010-10-28) ISBN / EAN: 0670022055 / 9780670022052

Judging a book by its editor is more productive than going by the famously unreliable cover. That’s why we’re pleased that HarperCollins has added a new feature to their Buzz section on EarlyWord, The Editor’s Buzz.

First up is David Highfill, who edited one of our favorites of the season, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter.

We are not the only fans of Crooked Letter; one of our favorite reviewers, Sarah Weinman, says this about it in the L.A. Times last week,

There is no greater joy than when an author whom you’ve long admired produces his or her best work to date…. I’ve sung the praises of Don Winslow for Savages, his literary approximation of a narcotic jolt, and of Emily St. John Mandel for training an astute eye on contemporary anxiety among emerging adults with The Singer’s Gun. Now I’m back in that state of wondrous reading pleasure thanks to a new, years-in-the-making novel by Tom Franklin.

Even if you’ve read Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, you will gain new insight from Highfill. Based on a shared love of that book, we’re willing to follow him to his next obsession, the bio he recently edited about Joan Crawford (clearly, he’s a man of range).

More interviews with editors will be coming up throughout the fall, so keep your eyes on the HarperCollins Editor’s Buzz page.

Possessed: The Life of Joan Crawford Donald Spoto Retail Price: $25.99 Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-11-01) ISBN / EAN: 0061856002 / 9780061856006

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Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter Tom Franklin Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 288 pages Publisher: William Morrow – (2010-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 0060594667 / 9780060594664

On NPR’s Morning Edition, Nancy Pearl mentioned Jim Malusa’s Into Thick Air and the graphic novel, Berlin: City Of Stones sending them both up Amazon’s sales rankings.

All the books she discussed (follow this link to listen to the show) are featured in her new book, Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers.

Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers Nancy Pearl Retail Price: $16.95 Paperback: 288 pages Publisher: Sasquatch Books – (2010-10-01) ISBN / EAN: 1570616507 / 9781570616501

This just in from Cuyahoga P.L; they are planning on to ramp up their order for Brock Clarke’s Exley, based on the word of mouth from CCPL staff who have read the ARC.

Recent consumer reviews have focused on the book’s “hall of mirrors” construction, making it sound like a post-modern novel that could put off general readers, but Collection Development Manager Wendy Bartlett says that readers are taken with the 9-year-old protagonist. “People seem to like young narrators, as witnessed by the popularity of Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, and Room.” She notes, however that “a precocious narrator (as opposed to an innocent one) can be risky.” Indeed both Janet Maslin in the NYT and Wendy Smith in the Washington Post found the narrator too precocious for belief, but Cuyahoga’s readers don’t agree and love the book for being “quirky, imaginative and thought provoking.”

We’d love to know what titles you are ramping up, based on word of mouth. You can comment below, or drop us an email.

Exley Brock Clarke Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Algonquin Books – (2010-10-05) ISBN / EAN: 1565126084 / 9781565126084

Reviewers generally don’t step from behind the journalist curtain to reveal their personal enthusiasm for a book. In the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, reviewer Pam Abrams begins her review of Darin Strauss’s Half a Life this way,

I recently went on a trip with a couple of friends, one of whom brought along Half a Life. The book’s slender enough that the three of us devoured it in three days — and beautifully written enough that we spent the rest of the trip discussing it.

Strauss, author of several well-received novels, including Chang and Eng, (Dutton, 2000) and The Real McCoy, (Dutton, 2002) writes in this, his first memoir, about a car accident that killed one of his high school classmates and scarred him for life.

Strauss also appeared on This American Life (359: Life After Death — Act 1, “Guilty as Not Charged,” beginning at 9:40) this week.

Libraries showing holds of 5:1 on light ordering

Half a Life Darin Strauss Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 204 pages Publisher: McSweeney’s – (2010-09-15) ISBN / EAN: 1934781703 / 9781934781708

When Washington Post Carolyn See critic loves a book, she doesn’t hide it. Her review for the debut novel The Doctor and The Diva, begins, “Some novels just naturally enslave you, and this is one of them.” Set in Boston in the early 1900’s, it’s about a woman caught in a conflict between her love for her husband, her desire to become an opera singer and her desire for another man.

The novel is based on a true story that the author researched in depth. Writes See,

The details of the novel — such as the long coach rides down a Trinidad beach where the sands are firm as pavement — gets its richness from diaries, clippings and letters. The effectiveness of the narrative comes from the novelist’s striking skill. From the very first pages, we are utterly engaged in what’s going to happen to these three people — they become as close to us as family friends.

It ‘s published under a new Viking Penguin imprint, Pamela Dorman Books. Dorman is known for acquiring and editing The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter by Kim Edwards, Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding and The Deep End Of The Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard.  When she was at Hyperion, she was responsible for The Physick Book Of Deliverance Dane by Katherine Howe, The Monsters Of Templeton by Lauren Groff,  as well as the memoirs The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan, and Perfection by Julie Metz.

The Doctor and the Diva: A Novel Adrienne McDonnell Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 432 pages Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books – (2010-07-22) ISBN / EAN: 0670021881 / 9780670021888

Large Print, Thorndike Press, 9781410428554; October 2010

NPR posts the list of Top 100 Killer Thrillers, as selected by 100,000 listeners. Critic Maureen Corrigan, noted that many of the choices are dark; “Even the [Agatha] Christie pick, And Then There Were None, is one of her creepier novels.” (Looking ahead, our own maven of all things creepy, Macmillan library marketing head, Talia Sherer has posted her picks of the upcoming fall and winter titles).

Below are the top ten:

1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
7. The Shining, by Stephen King
8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
9. The Hunt tor Red October, by Tom Clancy
10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday, Nancy Pearl recommended several titles, sending all of them up the Amazon sales rankings.

Nancy brought a stack of books, but was only able to talk about four — the full list, with Nancy’s written commentary on each title, is at the NPR Web site, where you can also listen to the segment. Below are the titles she discussed on air, by Amazon sales rankings.

#163 from #40,504 yesterday

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli —  Nancy says two great Vietnam novels published this Spring; this one and Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (Atlantic Monthly Press, 3/23).

The Lotus Eaters: A Novel Tatjana Soli Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 400 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-03-30) ISBN / EAN: 0312611579 / 9780312611576

Blackstone Audio

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# 166 from 45,829 yesterday

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel — Nancy found a great way to avoid relying on plot when she described both this and the author’s new title, The Singer’s Gun; “Reading them is like looking through the viewfinder of a camera. At first, it’s a real tight closeup. As the pages turn, the viewfinder gets bigger and bigger until you see where all the characters belong and what their back stories are.”

By the way, if you are not familiar with the independent publisher of these titles, Unbridled Books, they are worth getting to know. They’ve just celebrated their fifth anniversary, focusing on quality fiction; quite an accomplishment in today’s climate.

Last Night in Montreal Emily St. John Mandel Retail Price: $24.96 Hardcover: 256 pages Publisher: Unbridled Books – (2009-6-2) ISBN / EAN: 1932961682 / 9781932961683

Also in trade pbk; ISBN-13: 9781936071609; 04/06/2010; $14.95
Audio; Recorded Books

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#196 from 21,608 yesterday

Miss Hargreaves by Frank Baker — Nancy describes this as “Wodehousian fantasy with a little bit of Mary Poppins.”

Miss Hargreaves: A Novel Frank Baker Retail Price: $14.00 Paperback: 336 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury USA – (2009-12-22) ISBN / EAN: 160819051X / 9781608190515

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#271 from 7,739 yesterday

Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay — Nancy says it’s one of her life’s missions is to make Guy Gavriel Kay a best seller in the U.S. (he already is in Canada). This is “historical fiction mixed with a little bit of fantasy, so, sadly, it ends up being categorized in fantasy where all those people who love historical fiction will not find it.”

Under Heaven Guy Gavrile Key Retail Price: $28.96 Hardcover: 592 pages Publisher: Roc/Penguin – (2010-4-27) ISBN / EAN: 0451463307 / 9780451463302

I have a problem with Gail Caldwell’s wonderful memoir, Let’s Take The Long Way Home, coming next week. I love it, but how do you recommend a book about a friendship that ends with one of the friends dying (as well as the author’s beloved dog)?

Laura Miller at Salon has found the key;

The losing isn’t the exceptional part of this story; everyone loses something, sooner or later. The wonder lies in finding it in the first place.

Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship Gail Caldwell Retail Price: $23.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Random House – (2010-08-10) ISBN / EAN: 1400067383 / 9781400067381

Tantor Audio; UNABR; Read by Joyce Bean; Simultaneous

Trade 9781400115600 6 Audio CDs $29.99
Library 9781400145607 6 Audio CDs $59.99
MP3 9781400165605 1 MP3-CD $19.99