PEOPLE Does Best Books

People magazine cut back their review coverage this year, so we wondered if they were going to do a best books list this year.

Those fears were unfounded. This week’s year-end roundup includes People’s picks of the Top Ten Books. This late in the game, most of the titles have already received multiple best books nods, but with a few differences.

Roz Chast gets her first #1 pick for her National Book Award finalist, the graphic novel, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

9780374280444_2ea69At number two is a book of essays that has been on only one other list, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, by Meghan Daum. Published in mid-November, it has received significant but belated attention this week . It is reviewed in Wednesday’s New York Times, and in the upcoming NYT Book Review. It is #10 on  Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Nonfiction list. The reviews universally praise Daum’s lead essay on her mother’s death, “Matricide.” An edited version is available in The Guardian.

The full list:

1)   Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Roz Chast(Macmillan/Bloomsbury)

2)  The Unspeakable : And Other Subjects of Discussion, Meghan Daum, (Macmillan/FSG; Dreamscape Audio)

3) Not That Kind of GirlA Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”, Lena Dunham, (Random House; RH Audio)

4) Redeployment, Phil  Klay, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio)

5)  Love, NinaA Nanny Writes Home, Nina Stibbe (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio) — a LibraryReads pick, it did not appear on other  best books lists

6)  All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (S&S/Scribner, May 2014; Audio exclusive from Midwest Tape)

7)  The Paying Guests, Sarah Waters, (Penguin/Riverhead; BOT, read by Juliet Stevenson)

8)  What if? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Question , Randall  Munroe, (HMH; Blackstone Audio)

9)  Nora Webster, Colm Toibin, (S&S/Scribner)

10)  Big Little Lies, (Penguin/Putnam/Einhorn; Penguin Audio; Recorded Books; Thorndike)

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