I’ve written about the most mentioned books on Twitter in 2014. I’ve written about the bestselling print books of the year. And now I’m writing about the best books according to everyone. Now I’m sure you’re wondering who the heck is everyone. Slow down, I’m getting there.
As you well know, major publications and groups release “best of” lists at the end of every year. Well the folks over at Wired created the ultimate best books of 2014 list by aggregating other lists. They used Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Goodreads, The National Book Awards, and some others to create their list. And points were given to books that appeared on any of the lists they included. For instance, if a book appeared on a top 100 list, then it received one point. But if a book appeared on a top 10 list, then it was assigned ten points. After examining the major “best books of 2014” lists, they were able to determine these books to be the top ten of the year.
Note that these are 2014 releases.
1. All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
3. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
4. Redeployment by Phil Klay
5. The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
6. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
7. The Empathy Exams: Essays by Leslie Jamison
8. Lila by Marilynne Robinson
9. Big Little Liars by Liane Moriarty
10. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
Of course, I haven’t read or even heard of any of these books until now. Whoops. Which also means that I have no little tidbits for any of them. My one little fun fact is that All The Light We Cannot See was the top selling book in the United States the first week of 2015. So there’s that.
Have you read any of these books? Thoughts?
You can read the original Wired article here.
Johnny Reads 
Do you know what kind of fiction they are? Some of them sound futuristic or fantasy.
They don’t all sound like traditional literary fiction.
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I don’t think they’re all fiction. I think there’s one or two that aren’t. The Wired article talks about each one. And every title links to the Amazon page.
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Bone Clocks and Lila are on my ‘to read’ list. I loved Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas so high hopes for Bone Clocks. And I’ve read earlier books by Liane Moriarty so will take a look at this new one. Thanks for posting the list. Always helps to fet suggestions to bother the local library with 🙂
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Let me know when you read them! Maybe I’ll have to pick them up
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I read The Bone Clocks and We Were Liars. I liked both of them, but neither completely lived up to the hype for me. I’ll have to look up the others.
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Hm. There is no hype for me. I’ve never even heard of them.
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I’m surprised “The Martian” didn’t make it on here. That was a pretty big book in 2014. As it goes, I’ve only heard of “Station Eleven” off this list.
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That would be another book I don’t know.
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