SATURDAY December 29th, will be a special edition of the Saturday Review of Books especially for booklists. You can link to a list of your favorite books read in 2012, a list of all the books you read in 2012, a list of the books you plan to read in 2013, or any other end of the year or beginning of the year list of books. Whatever your list, it’s time for book lists. So come back on Saturday the 29th to link to yours, especially if I missed it and it’s not already here.
However, I’ve spent the past couple of weeks gathering up all the lists I could find and linking to them here. I’ll be posting each day this week, leading up to Saturday the 29th, a selection of end-of-the-year lists with my own comments. I’m also trying my hand at (unsolicited) book advisory by suggesting some possibilities for 2013 reading for each blogger whose list I link. I did this last year, and I don’t really know if anyone paid attention or not. I do know that I enjoyed exercising my book-recommending brain.
If I didn’t get your list linked ahead of time and if you leave your list in the linky on Saturday, December 29th, I’ll try to advise you, too, in a separate post.
Book Chase: The Best Books of 2012. For Sam again just like last year, my picks are River of Doubt by Candice Millard and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. And I want to read several of his favorites from 2012, including Holy Ghost Girl, Wild, The End of Your Life Book Club, The Solitary House, and Malena.
Sandy at You’ve Gotta Read This! divides her list into three parts: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Audio. I can’t recommend audiobooks because I don’t have a very good auditory attention span unless I’m trapped in a car. But for reading, I’ll suggest one fiction and one nonfiction: One Amazing Thing by Chitra Divakaruni and For the Thrill of It: Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago by Simon Baatz.
Chrisbookarama: A Bookish Look Back at 2012.Chris read Les Miserables in 2012, and it seems to have been a favorite and also a monumental task. (I’m re-reading Les Miz now, and it is more of a task than I remember, but very rewarding.) Chris said last December that she hasn’t read any P.D. James. James’ mysteries would be a welcome contrast to Les Miserables, and Chris should try one, perhaps starting with the first one Cover her Face. For a Daphne Du Maurier fan, Anna’s Book by Barbara Vine might be a good fit.
Bookhooked Blog has several lists also: Best Fantasy and Speculative Fiction, Best Audiobooks, Best Adult Nonfiction, Best Adult Fiction, Best Faith-Related Literature. Julie makes me want to read almost every book on her multiple lists, and it easy to give her a couple of recommendations based on her choices: Walking from East to West by Ravi Zacharias and Have You Found Her by Janice Erlbaum, a memoir about a mentally ill teenager and the volunteer who tries to help her become stable and healthy.
Amanda at Dead White Guys, Etc. has a list of the finalists for the Morning News Tournament of Books, and she says she’s going to read every book on the list except the ONE I’ve already read (John Green’s The Fault in our Stars). Oh, well, looking at the list there’s at least one I would skip myself if I were going to read them all, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. I tried Wolf Hall, and I hated it. Amanda’s going to be busy, so I won’t suggest any more reading for her. But I’ve heard really good things about at least one of the books on the list, HHhH by Laurent Binet.
The Book Lady’s 10 Best Books of 2012. Rebecca Schinsky reads “literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, and some memoirs.” At the risk of aggravating Amanda (see above), but since Rebecca says she only read one YA novel this past year, I’ll suggest two YA novels from 2012: The Fault in our Stars by John Green and the one I just finished, Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow.
Justin Buzzard: Best Books of 2012. Mr. BUzzard is a pastor and an author, and his reading reflects those callings. I wonder, has he read A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins, an old favorite of mine, and Culture Making by Andy Crouch, a new favorite?
Readerbuzz: Best of 2012. Deb Nance, as one commenter said, reads a lot of books. And she reminisces about a lot of good reading from 2012. For Deb I suggest two books from my Cybils reading of Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy: Deadly Pink by Vivian Vande Velde and The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde.
YA Librarian Tales: Sarah’s Favorite Books of 2012. For Sarah I’ll suggest The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman and Where I Belong by Gillian Cross.
Mental Multivitamin: Books Read in 2012. Madame MM-V, my blogging twin since we began blogging about the same time about nine years ago, read 136 works of literature in 2012. I’ll try to pick something that Ms. MM-V hasn’t already read, thought about and learned from to commend to her: perhaps a play, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, for fiction, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, and for nonfiction, The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang and something by or about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, either his Cost of Discipleship or Eric Metaxis’ biography of Bonhoeffer.
That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow and the rest of the week for more links to book lists and more reader’s advisory from Semicolon.
