Let the world know which books were your favorites this year via #libfaves13, organized by Stephanie Chase (BiblioCommons) and Robin Beerbower (Salem P.L).

The countdown began on Sunday, Dec. 1, but don’t worry if you haven’t joined in yet, you’re welcome to jump in at any time. Just tweet your top ten, one per tweet. If you can, encapsulate why you love your choice; it’s great stuff for readers advisors to crib. Our favorite from today:

TILTED WORLD by Tom Franklin & Beth Ann Fennelly. Love this gritty tale of revenuers, bootleggers, crazy weather. Day 8

#libfaves13

— Janet Lockhart (@HartGami) December 3, 2013

 

The top titles yesterday, according to #libfaves13 list keeper Linda Johns are The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion (S&S), The Human Division by John Scalzi (Macmillan/Tor), Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley (Macmillan/First Second). The title with the most nominations is Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell (Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin; Listening Library; Thorndike).

What will be librarians’ top favorite of the year? In 2011, it was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (RH/Crown). Last year, the top two titles were Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (RH/Crown; RH Audio; Thorndike) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, (Penguin/Dutton; Brilliance Audio; Thorndike), followed by Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan, (Macmillan/FSG; Macmillan Audio).

This year, the library marketers, incited by Talia Sherer at Macmillan, have joined in, starting their own hashtag, #LibMKTGfaves13.

The author of The Good Lord Bird, (Penguin/Riverhead; Dreamscape Audio; Thorndike), James McBride,  winner of the National Book Award in fiction, appeared on PBS News Hour last night. He talks about why he wanted to write a funny book about John Brown, a man who had “no sense of humor at all,” but a man he grew to love.

The interview continues here.

It was a love fest on the Today Show yesterday as Hoda and Kathie Lee hosted one of their “favorite people in the world,” author Adriana Trigiani, whose latest book, The Supreme Macaroni Company (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe), the final in her series featuring Valentine Roncalli, came out last week.

In addition to her new book, she also talked about directing her first feature film, Big Stone Gap, starring Ashley Judd, based on the first novel in her other series, featuring her home town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Currently in the editing process, it is expected to be released a year from now. For more on the shoot, read the account in the local newspaper, The Richmond Times Dispatch.

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The film adaptation of This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper, (Penguin/Dutton, 2009) is now set for release on Sept. 12 of next year (via Deadline)

The movie stars Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Adam Driver, Jane Fonda, Rose Byrne and Kathryn Hahn and is directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum; Date Night). Tropper is the screenwriter.

The novel, Tropper’s fifth, topped many 2009 best books lists and was a NYT best seller. About a family coming together reluctantly to sit shiva for their father, Carolyn See praised it in the Washington Post, “This is a beautiful novel about men — their lust and rage and sweetness. Read it — or take it as a gift — when you next go on a dreaded family holiday.”

Tropper’s most recent novel, One Last Thing Before I Go, (Penguin/Dutton, 2012), was acquired by Paramount, to be produced by J. J. Abrams. In April, Mike Nichols was reportedly in talks to direct it (via The Hollywood Reporter).

Below is the first full-length trailer for the adaptation of Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters, the first in the series by Richelle Mead (Penguin/Razorbill). It comes with a terrific tagline, “They Suck at School.”

Given the tone, it’s no surprise that it’s directed by Mark Waters, who also directed Mean Girls. Adding to the darkly comic sensibility, the screenplay is by Daniel Waters, who also wrote Heathers).

Vampire Academy arrives in theaters on Valentine’s Day, 2014.

The tie-in (Penguin/Razorbill) arrives Dec. 31.

Best Books lists offer an opportunity to argue with the critics and to remind ourselves of the books we’d still like to read. To make this easier, and to aid in your end-of-year ordering and readers advisory, we’ve collated the major lists into download spreadsheets.

Several new lists are now available and we’ve update our adult fiction and nonfiction lists, resulting in a total of over 250 fiction titles and 150 nonfiction (we will update the children’s spreadsheet, after Kirkus releases their teen list next week). This year, we’re also including titles selected by the LibraryReads program, which began in September.

2013 — Adult Fiction — Downloadable Spreadsheet, V. 2

2013 — Adult Nonfiction — Downloadble Spreadsheet, V. 2

As we’ve learned to expect, there is not much consensus. In fiction, just 17 titles are picked by 4 or more of the 9 sources. Tied with six each are Anthony Marra’s debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, (RH/Hogarth) and James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird, (Penguin/Riverhead; Dreamscape Audio; Thorndike), which, because one of those picks is a major one, the National Book Award in Fiction, can be declared #1.

With continuing talk about ebook originals, it’s notable that they haven’t made many inroads onto best lists. Although Library Journal selects the 10 best ebook romances, no ebooks are included in any of their other lists. Kirkus lists one “E-riginal,” (originally published as ebook, later released in pbk), from Open Road Media for their top 100 fiction, The Salinger Contract by Adam Langer (with a compelling description). Publishers Weekly includes one in the romance category, Brothers of the Wild North Sea by Harper Fox (Samhain; later released in pbk).

Paperback originals make a stronger, but still limited showing. A total of 54 were picked in fiction. The top two, with two picks each, are also best sellers, the Silent Wife  by A. S. A. Harrison, (Penguin; Blackstone Audio; Large Print Press) and Stephen King’s Joyland, (Hardcase Crime). The format makes its strongest showing on LibraryReads, which, in just four months, has picked 8 paperback originals out of 40 titles, one of which, the mass market original, No Good Duke Goes Unpunished by Sarah MacLean (HarperCollins/Avon; Brilliance Audio) is the #1 pick for December.

Tell us what you think. Which books got overlooked? Which “best books” are you adding to your TBR piles?

Attention Ransom Riggs’ fans, the followup to the surprise 2011 best seller, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Chidlren is a reality. A photo of the first copies of Hollow City, (Quirk Books, Jan. 13) arriving in the Quirk offices was tweeted a couple of hours ago.

Even better,  a chapter is now available online (via Random House Library Marketing’s Web site). We’re told there will be no ARC’s. either  print or digital.

Entertainment Weekly‘s “Inside Movies” blog offers an enticing headline today, “Ben Affleck on what to expect from David Fincher’s Gone Girl — EXCLUSIVE.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Affleck, who stars in the movie, is not particularly forthcoming, saying he doesn’t want to give away too much, “But I will say that Gillian [Flynn] adapted it and I think it’s very, very faithful to her book. If you read the book and liked it, you will definitely like the movie.”

The article adds that filming, which is currently under way, will wrap in February (the movie is scheduled for release on Oct. 3 next year).

A film based on an earlier title by Flynn, Dark Places, starring Charlize Theron, wrapped earlier this month and may make it into theaters first. IMDB lists its release date as Sept. 1 next year.

Adding to the 2013 kids best books lists, SLJ has just published their picks (with cool cover by Melissa Sweet):

Fiction
Picture Books
Nonfiction

We’ll add these titles to our Childrens Best Books spreadsheet (see links to downloadable spreadsheets at the right) and post the update early next week.

In the latest in her series, Nancy Pearl interviews two-time U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins. Because people often think of poetry as “the spinach of literature,” he created the Poetry 180 program, to encourage high school students to discover the pleasure in  poetry.

Collins’ latest collection, his first in twelve years, is Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, (Random House, 10/22/13). Collins reads the poems for the audio edition.
 

New releases are understandably light next week as stores gear up for Black Friday, traditionally the big post-Thanksgiving gift-shopping day, clearing the way for Adriana Trigiani’s The Supreme Macaroni Company (Harper; HarperAudio; HarperLuxe), the final in her series featuring Valentine Roncalli.

Her previous title, The Shoemaker’s Wife, a standalone historical novel, was a departure and her biggest seller to date. The Supreme Macaroni Company, although a contemporary story, has a similar appeal in that it features a big, bickering, loving Italian family. A favorite of the morning TV shows, expect to see Trigiani on at least one next week.

A title to watch is City of Lost Dreams, Magnus Flyte (Penguin Books; Thorndike), the continuation of the story that began with the trade paperback original, City of Dark Magic, (see our Penguin First Flights feature). The new title is called by Kirkus “another lively, amusing romantic mystery …  Sensual, witty and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, set forth in sparkling prose and inhabited by characters well-worth getting to know. Wunderbar!”

Today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Among the many TV shows covering the event is a 2-hour NBC documentary that looks at how individual Americans responded on that day, Where Were You: The Day JFK Died, hosted by Tom Brokaw.

A companion book is also being published, Where Were You?: America Remembers the JFK Assassination, edited by Gus Russo, and Harry Moses, with a foreword by Tom Brokaw, (Lyons Press, 9780762794560).

Brokaw spoke about the documentary on The Daily Show:
 

Two heavily heralded movie adaptations open this Friday. Getting the most press, of course, is the second Hunger Games movie, Catching Fire. People magazine not only calls it “richer and deeper than last year’s The Hunger Games,” but also has the effrontery to claim it’s better than the book, “adding heft to a story that felt on the page like it was biding its time before the finale.”

Opening in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run (to expand in January) is Philomena, based on The Lost Child of Philomena Lee, by U.K. journalist Martin Sixsmith which recounts the author’s efforts to help the title character, played by Judi Dench, find the son she had been forced to give up fifty years earlier. The book was published here for the first time as a tie-in. Reviews have been stellar (a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), with Dench considered an Oscar nomination shoe-in.

Two  tie-ins arrive next week.

It was touch and go as to whether Martin Scorsese‘s The Wolf of Wall Street could be pared down from its 3-hour first cut in time to hit theaters on Christmas Day, but it looks like the editing process is now complete. Based on the memoir by Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort,  and called “the most audacious movie about Wall Street ever made” by the Wall Street Journal, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin and the Absolutely Fabulous Joanna Lumley.

The trade paperback tie-in (RH/Bantam) arrives next week; an audio read by Boardwalk Empire‘s Bobby Cannavale, (RH Audio) is listed for release on  Dec 17.

Homefront Movie Tie-in Edition, Chuck Logan, (Harper Paperbacks; trade pbk and mass market editions)

Easily confused with the  TV show Homeland, the movie Homefront is based on the novel by Chuck Logan, adapted by Sylvester Stallone, starring Jason Statham, and releases Nov. 27. The Hollywood Reporter calls the script “ham-fisted” but says the movie is “sufficiently silly and low-down to be entertaining on a certain marginal level.”  Hogan’s earlier movel, Prince of Thieves was adapted as The Town by Ben Affleck.

First it was bed bugs in library books. Now it’s something weirder, but fortunately it may not require nuking.

In Belgium, researchers from the Catholic University of Leuven found that library copies of Fifty Shades of Grey tested positive for herpes and cocaine. Jan Tytgat, a professor of toxicology, told the The International Business Times that “the deposit on the books was too low to pose a threat to readers when leafing through the pages.”

No news on why, but for some reason the university tested books in the Antwerp Library, finding that heavily-borrowed books contain “25-40% more microbes on them than less-borrowed ones.”

The New York Times declares James McBride the “surprise winner” of the National Book Award in fiction, announced last night. NPR calls him “the clear underdog.”

Both designations reveal more about the competition than they do about McBride, who has already published a major best seller, 1996’s The Color of Water, (which was on the NYT best seller list for over 2 years). His first novel,  Miracle at St. Anna, was made into a movie by Spike Lee and The Good Lord Bird (Penguin/Riverhead; Dreamscape Audio; Thorndike), his third novel and NBA winner, has already appeared on a number of the year’s best books lists.

As the NYT also notes, “While the National Book Awards tend to be criticized for their selections of little-known or obscure books, few were complaining about the finalists this year. Rachel Kushner, Jhumpa Lahiri and George Saunders, nominees in fiction, were critical darlings.”

There was at least one complaint. Eric Obenauf in the Los Angeles Review of Books, expressed disappointment that the fiction long list, introduced this year, didn’t expand opportunities for lesser knowns, but was “dominated by already brand writers.” He calls 2010, the year that true underdogs, Paul Harding’s debut novel Tinkers, (from “teeny ” Bellevue Literary Press) won the Pulitzer Prize and The Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (from the even smaller McPherson & Company), won the National Book Award for Fiction, “a watershed moment in contemporary publishing.”

If you’re surprised to hear McBride called an “underdog,” remember the term is relative.

DISPLAY NOTE: This is a good time to pull previous winners and put them on display — the National Book Awards site lists past winners, with links to comments that put them into a contemporary context.