The 2011 Cybils Finalists

–Anne Levy

This was the year the Kindle caught Fire, the Nook fought for its niche, Borders went belly up and ebooks overtook their dead tree cousins for good. But for us here at Cybils, it was another year of reading, blogging and more reading. Whether on paper or in pixels, we found plenty of stories worth sharing with the world.

By now, you’re probably inundated with “best books of the year” list. Well, here’s ours. Kid friendly, blogger approved. Out of 1,289 nominated books, the ones in the links below rose to the top after fierce discussions and numerous rounds of vote-taking and yet more debate.

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11 Best Books Of 2011

We admit, it’s difficult to pick the best books of the year, particularly this year, during which it seems there were so many stellar books. However, do it we must. Our list was compiled by the three people on our Books team. Just so you know what we are looking for in a “best book,” here’s what each of us enjoys reading:

Andrew Losowsky, Books Editor: I like all books that reveal amazing, strange things about familiar places and familiar things about strange places (including my own head).

Zoë Triska, Associate Books Editor: I used to primarily stick to classic literature with a dash of non-fiction from time to time. I’ve expanded my horizon to contemporary fiction, but I’m just easing into it. I also enjoy YA novels (“Harry Potter” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events”). In addition to this, I love re-designed classics and pretty book design.

Madeleine Crum, Assistant Books Editor: According to Flavorpill, I’m totally twee. This isn’t to say that I’m a fan of overly precious plots, but I tend to pick up small, unique stories with authentic characters rather than sprawling sagas. And beautiful language is, of course, key.

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LitReactor Staff Picks: The Best Books of 2011

Column by Joshua Chaplinsky

We may have only gone live in October, but the staff here at LitReactor are a bunch of voracious bilbliophagists who have been steady readin’ all year long. So we figured engaging in a some year-ending listrionics would be a great way to play catch up, and would give you a better idea of who we are as readers. Who knows, we might even turn you on to something new. Hope you enjoy.

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Review of the Year: Brilliant books of 2011

The best fiction proved that, when it comes to capturing the way in which time toys with us, there’s no greater form than the novel say Gaby Wood.

This time last year, one of my favourite American authors had a book due out in the UK from a relatively small publisher. I wondered why she was not better known here – her novels had been highly praised and widely sold in the US, and this new one had had a sweeping success there.

Well, it didn’t take long for Britain to be crowded with converts. Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad became possibly the most talked-about novel of the year. Quite apart from the critical plaudits and mentions on the reading lists of luminaries it received, I heard more people bring it up in conversation than I saw pulling David Nicholls’s One Day out of their handbags on the train. Egan’s new fans will be delighted to hear that Corsair have plans to publish her backlist in 2012.

Ostensibly set in and on the fringes of the music business, Goon Squad uses pop music, with its fast fading fashions, as a way of showing the effects of time. Characters look at themselves, and each other, and wonder how they got “from A to B”. In fact, one dying musician wants to call his last album A to B: “That’s the question I want to hit head-on,” he explains. “How did I go from being a rock star to being a fat f–k no one cares about?” A 13 year-old boy is obsessed with timing the pauses in pop songs, and when his exasperated father eventually shouts at him about it, his mother explains on the boy’s behalf: “The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and That. Time. The. End. Is. For. Real.”

Over the course of the novel, we witness a drowning, kleptomania-in-progress, addiction recovery, betrayal, anger, regret, desire, and the violence of all these things. There is a virtuosic formal inventiveness to Goon Squad – it is composed of interlocking stories with segues embedded in them like small shiny coins – and there’s a playfulness in the voices that at first suggests an ironic view of the world. Yet this is combined with a breathtaking range of empathetic gifts on Egan’s part.

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Publishers pick their wishes and misses of 2012

The Good Muslim

|The Bookseller Staff

The Good Muslim, The Marriage Plot and Go the F**k to Sleep are among the books literary publishing directors wish they had published themselves this year, with Other People’s Money, What I Did and The Dovekeepers among those they had thought would make a bigger impact.

In a Guardian round-up of “Wishes and Misses”, publishers including Jamie Byng, Suzanne Baboneau and Alexandra Pringle selected the titles they wish they had published, and those they did that they had higher hopes for. Among the reasons for books not catching a wider readership, the editors suggested variously a lack of support from booksellers, and the challenge of “pushing a backlist”.

Pringle, editor-in-chief at Bloomsbury, selected Other People’s Money by Justin Cartwright as her book which deserved better, saying: “It received outstanding reviews—the best, probably, he has every received—and it sold well. Yet not only was it not shortlisted for the Man Booker or Costa; it was not once mentioned in the press as one that should have been nominated.” She selected Tahmina Anam’s The Good Muslim (Canongate) and Louisa Young’s My Dear I Wanted to Tell You (HarperCollins) as books she was “especially sad” not to get, having offered on them.

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The Most Beautiful Books of 2011

Matt Kish

BY Alexander Nazaryan

A recent New York Times article described the effort of publishers to make printed books more handsome, in an attempt to pry readers’ hands off their Kindles (good luck with that). One publisher was quoted as saying, “If we believe that convenience reading is moving at light speed over to e, then we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading.’ We realized what we wanted to create was a value package that would last.”

I am not exactly sure what a “value package” is, but I’d like to think I know a beautiful book when I see it. Here are two that resist the diminishment of the printed page. And both are extremely clever riffs on classics, artfully approaching canonical fiction with a curious design sense that never diminishes the original work itself.

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The 11 Best Photography Books of 2011

By Maria Popova

What the world’s last living nomads have to do with Victorian strongwomen, tweed, and the unseen Beatles.

After the year’s best illustrated books for (eternal) kids and finest art, design, and creativity books, my best-of series continues with a look at the best photography books of 2011 — visual treasure troves that tell an important story, reveal a fascinating piece of history, or just deeply delight with a fresh perspective on a familiar subject.

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Writers choose their favorite books of 2011

The critics had their say. Now Jeffrey Eugenides, Ann Patchett and 50 more authors share their top reads with Salon.

By Emma Mustich

All month, the critics will have their say on 2011′s best books. Our Laura Miller selected her top fiction and nonfiction earlier this week.

But every year we also poll some of our favorite writers of the year and ask them to play critic. They have to answer the simple but agonizing question: What was the best book published this year?

The more than 50 responses we received — from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners as well as big-time bestsellers — chronicle a thriving, eventful year in the life of the literary culture, and will likely point you toward more than a few titles you haven’t read (or maybe haven’t even heard of). Some of the most popular selections on our list haven’t shown up on many others, including Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” and Alan Heathcock’s story collection “Volt.” (Another book popular with critics, Chad Harbach’s “The Art of Fielding,” was surprising in its absence here.)

But whether it’s the reissue of an obscure Hungarian tale (recommended by Arthur Phillips) or one of the year’s major, blockbuster releases (e.g., George R.R. Martin’s “A Dance With Dragons”), we hope you’ll find something here to enjoy over the holidays and through the coming year.

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The Most Criminally Overlooked Books of 2011

  By  Emily Temple

Unfortunately, hundreds of great books come out every year to little or no critical attention, a fate that is perhaps unavoidable given just how many books are published all over the world (hundreds of bad books come out to no acclaim either, but no one really minds about them). Perhaps at the crucial moment, a critic finds himself too busy with the most recent Franzen behemoth or the latest posthumous sensation to notice a little book that flits across his desk, or perhaps (and we know this to be the case) there’s simply not enough space or time for her to talk about every book she’d like to. Of course, for any one person, the amount of hype a book gets is, to a certain extent, subjective — that is, it depends on which media outlets you pay attention to. So in an effort to draw your attention to a few books that we felt didn’t get quite enough hype in the last twelve months.

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The best nonfiction of 2011

Our favorite nonfiction spanned centuries and the world, and told stories of writers, princesses and great thinkers.

By Laura Miller

The book business may be undergoing tectonic changes brought on by the booming popularity of e-books, the consolidating power of Amazon.com and the wobbly state of bricks-and-mortar bookstores, but books themselves are better than ever.

The 10 best books of 2011 (five fiction, five nonfiction) feature characters ranging from empresses to impostors, settings as far flung as Amazonian jungles and secret Antarctic cities, themes as compelling as love, race, class, art, revolution and the very nature of communication itself. (We revealed the top fiction titles yesterday.) At at time when the economic horizon often seems to be contracting, the curiosity and imagination of authors know no bounds. It’s amazing how far you can travel and how much you can discover, all for the modest price of a book.

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