One “best-of” list that I look forward to every year is Amazon.com’s Best 100 Books of the Year list, which is selected by a panel of editors at the giant online book retailer. “It's not easy putting together a list of the year's best books, but we've held many meetings and votes, we’ve pored over the books and occasionally poured our hearts out to get you this final Top 100,” the compilers of the list said. “For every book on the list, there has been an impassioned plea and an argument made so don't just look at the Top 10 or 20. There are great books all up and down the Top 100 list. One of them might be the perfect read for you.”
Amazon’s editors picked “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach as the Best Book of the Year, describing it as "the veritable baseball book that's actually about much more than baseball ... a debut so confident, intimate, unpredictable and wholly memorable."
Without further ado, here’s the complete list of books that made Amazon’s “Best Books of 2011” list:
1. The Art of Fielding: A Novel by Chad Harbach
2. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
3. What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
4. In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson
5. The Marriage Plot: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides
6. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
7. Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel by S. J. Watson
8. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
9. Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff
10. The Tiger's Wife: A Novel by Téa Obreht
11. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
12. Bossypants by Tina Fey
13. Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
14. We the Animals: A novel by Justin Torres
15. Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
16. The Lover's Dictionary: A Novel by David Levithan
17. The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David G. McCullough
18. Lost Memory of Skin: A Novel by Russell Banks
19. Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks by Ken Jennings
20. The Sisters Brothers: A Novel by Patrick deWitt
21. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
22. A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
23. Habibi by Craig Thompson
24. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable
25. The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
26. Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin
27. Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III
28. The Oxford Companion to Beer by Horst Dornbusch
29. Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
30. West of Here by Jonathan Evison
31. The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
32. The Forgotten Waltz by Anne Enright
33. The Submission: A Novel by Amy Waldman
34. Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by Roy F. Baumeister
35. Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield
36. The Empty Family: Stories by Colm Toibin
37. Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi
38. Rules of Civility: A Novel by Amor Towles
39. The Magician King: A Novel by Lev Grossman
40. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
41. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty by Andrew Bolton
42. The Tragedy of Arthur: A Novel by Arthur Phillips
43. The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean by David Abulafia
44. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
45. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs
46. Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science by Marjorie Caroline Malley
47. Orientation: And Other Stories by Daniel Orozco
48. Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN by James A. Miller
49. My Korean Deli: Risking It All for a Convenience Store by Ben Ryder Howe
50. Jacqueline Kennedy by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
51. Reamde: A Novel by Neal Stephenson
52. Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard
53. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
54. Nightwoods: A Novel by Charles Frazier
55. Cain by Jose Saramago
56. Inheritance by Christopher Paolini
57. Ten Thousand Saints: A Novel by Eleanor Henderson
58. Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
59. The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
60. Carry Yourself Back to Me by Deborah Reed
61. The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson
62. 22 Britannia Road: A Novel by Amanda Hodgkinson
63. Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach
64. Mister Wonderful: A Love Story by Daniel Clowes
65. In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy
66. Galore by Michael Crummey
67. The Longest War by Peter L. Bergen
68. Caleb's Crossing: A Novel by Geraldine Brooks
69. The Family Fang: A Novel by Kevin Wilson
70. River of Smoke: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh
71. Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
72. Onward by Howard Schultz
73. The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta
74. The Dovekeepers: A Novel by Alice Hoffman
75. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker
76. Blue Nights by Joan Didion
77. The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
78. A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five by George R.R. Martin
79. Endgame by Frank Brady
80. Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku
81. Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout by Philip Connors
82. Inside Scientology by Janet Reitman
83. The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka
84. Then Again by Diane Keaton
85. Feast Day of Fools: A Novel by James Lee Burke
86. State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
87. Embassytown by China Mieville
88. I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive by Steve Earle
89. The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock
90. Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness by Alexandra Fuller
91. This Burns My Heart: A Novel by Samuel Park
92. The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene
93. 11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King
94. Confidence Men by Ron Suskind
95. Sister: A Novel by Rosamund Lupton
96. Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
97. The Paris Wife: A Novel by Paula McLain
98. Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan
99. The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Rita Dove
100. Delirium: The Special Edition by Lauren Oliver
In the end, how many of these books have you had a chance to read? Which did you like or dislike and why? Which of these books would you have selected as the “Best Book of the Year”? Let us know in the comments section below.
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