EarlyWord

From The Lose You Belly Diet to Zero Sugar, the war on fat begins next week. Explaining why we continue to make bestsellers of these book, The Secret Life of Fat, explores why the body is so intent on hanging on to what everyone seems to want to lose.

The titles covered in this column, and several other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar Week of Dec. 26, 2016.

Peer Picks

One peer pick arrivesthis week and it is both a LibraryReads and an Indie Next selection, Books for Living, Will Schwalbe (PRH/Knopf; RH Audio/BOT).

“Every book changes your life. So I like to ask: How is this book changing mine?’ Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club, focuses on a personal collection of books that changed his life. Each book he selects provides a lesson, a reminder as to how to live his life. Readers will remember favorite books, find new books to try, and lessons to think about. Schwalbe’s book is warm, charming, and very personal. It’s a book for all avid readers.” — Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library, Evansville, IN

Additional Buzz: Publishers Weekly and Booklist give it starred reviews. Reviewed in this week’s this week’s NYT BR, it is on  a number of best of the month lists including those by BookRiot, Bustle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Real Simple. Vanity Fair lists it as one of their “Must-Read Books of the Holiday Season” and Signature writes it is “A delicious indulgence to anyone who loves talking about books and listening to others talk about them.” 

Tie-ins

There are tie-ins this week for three films, The LEGO Batman Movie, Live by Night , and the adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.

The LEGO film opens February 10, 2017 and stars Will Arnett as Batman as well as Michael Cera (Robin), Zach Galifianakis (The Joker), Rosario Dawson (Batgirl), and Ralph Fiennes (Alfred). The film is a spin-off of the highly successful The LEGO Movie in which Batman almost stole the show.

Tie-ins include:

Junior Novel (The LEGO Batman Movie), Jeanette Lane (Scholastic; OverDrive Sample)

The LEGO® Batman Movie: The Essential Guide, DK (PRH/DK Children)

Batman’s Guide to Being Cool (The LEGO Batman Movie), Howie Dewin (Scholastic; OverDrive Sample)

Three leveled readers are also being released:

DK Readers L1: THE LEGO® BATMAN MOVIE Team Batman, DK, Beth Davies (PRH/DK Children, also in trade pbk.)

DK Readers L2: THE LEGO® BATMAN MOVIE Rise of the Rogues, DK, Beth Davies (PRH/DK Children, also in trade pbk.)

Robin to the Rescue! (The LEGO Batman Movie: Reader), Tracey West (Scholastic; OverDrive Sample)

Based on the best seller by Dennis Lehane, Live by Night opens on December 25, followed by a national release on January 13, 2017. It is Ben Affleck’s first time in the director’s chair since his award-winning Argo.

Tie-ins have come out through the month of December. The trade paperback came out on Dec. 6. and the mass market comes out this week (both HarperCollins/Morrow).

Variety reports that Affleck told reporters at an early screening that his goal is to  blend “a throwback vibe with modern energy. And that’s fitting: In Lehane’s novel, Affleck has found a gangster yarn akin to the ’30s and ’40s genre pictures that inspired him, but one with a fresh face.”

Live by Night follows The Given Day, which was the author’s first departure into historical crime. A third book in the series, World Gone By, was published last year.

Even though Sony has just delayed The Dark Tower, moving it from its expected Feb. 17 release date to July 28, 2017, the three mass market tie-ins arrive this week:

The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three, Stephen King (S&S/Pocket Books; OverDrive Sample)

The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands, Stephen King (S&S/Pocket Books; OverDrive Sample)

The Dark Tower IV: Wizard and Glass, Stephen King (S&S/Pocket Books; OverDrive Sample)

Entertainment Weekly says the delay is due to “needing deadline extensions on the visual effects, as well as more lead-up to promote the film.”

Reflecting the delays, there is no trailer as of yet for the film.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

The Librarians Have Spoken—or Tweeted #libfaves16.

NOTE: Six years ago, our GalleyChatter columnist, Robin Beerbower along with Stephanie Chase and Linda Johns, began the annual #LibFaves project, an opportunity for librarians to tweet their favorite titles of the year. Since then, it has grown by leaps and bounds. Below is Robin’s roundup of the year’s titles.

Thanks also to the those who helped with the vote counting, Janet Lockhart, Vicki Nesting, Gregg Winsor, Robin Nesbitt, Andrienne Cruz, Jane Jorgenson, Lucy Lockley, Kristi Chadwick, Janet Schneider and Joe Jones.
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For the past ten days, librarians have been doing their own year-end roundup of the best books by tweeting their favorites. The votes have now been tallied and EarlyWord can exclusively announce the results (eat your heart out, Entertainment Weekly!).

There were over 1,400 total votes (300 more than last year!) for over 750 titles (100 more!), just another indicator of how widely librarians read.

Top Three Titles

The top title most loved by librarians and library staff is one that has had scant attention from other best books lists, Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter (PRH/Crown). Librarians have been particular champions of this mind-bending SF title, heralded by GalleyChatters last May and a number one LibraryReads pick. Hollywood may bring it new attention. Sony is currently developing it for the big screen. Perhaps it will have a similar trajectory to one of the top #libfave14 titles, The Martian.

Coming in second is a title on everyone’s list, Colson Whitehead’s National Book Award winner and Oprah Choice, The Underground Railroad (PRH/Doubleday). Gregg Winsor tweeted “Timely, literary, emotional, raw, and important.”

Coming in a very close third is Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample), a multi-generational examination of the legacy of slavery.

The real fun of exploring this list is the amazing range of titles in a variety of genres. Download the full list here, libfaves16 and test yourself on how many you’ve even heard of, yet alone read.

To round out the top books receiving lots of librarian love, the next 7 titles on the list are :

4. News of the World by Paulette Jiles (HC/William Morrow)

5 & 6. (tie) Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld (RH) and Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond (PRH/Broadway)

7. The Mothers by Brit Bennett (PRH/Riverhead)

8, 9 & 10. (three-way tie) The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman (PRH/Roc), The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater (Scholastic Press), and The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon (PRH/Delacorte)

 

Calling the book a “sensation,” Deadline Hollywood reports that film rights were just acquired to Kill The Next One, a psychological thriller by Argentinian-born Federico Axat (Hachette/Mulholland Books; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample). Published in Spanish “to acclaim,” rights were also sold for translation into 30 other languages.

Released here earlier this month, it received a good, but not sensational, review in the most recent NYT BR crime column: “mind-bending … Truth, illusion and downright deceit keep crossing invisible lines in this hallucinatory plot.” However, the review continues, “it becomes easy to lose focus on who’s who and what’s what. The shape-shifting characters and fantastic events keep sending [the main character] to his therapist (and us to ours) for clarification … Axat is the kind of hypnotic writer you love to read but can never entirely trust.”

Other coverage to date, while decent, does not indicate a “sensation”:

USA Today includes it on a recent list of new and noteworthy books, quoting the Booklist review that also calls it “mind-bending” as well as “intriguing.”

PW gave it a star, writing “Axat fuses weird fiction with psychological suspense in his stunning U.S. debut.” 

Bustle counts it as one of “The 8 Best Fiction Books Coming Out This December That Are Perfect For Holiday Snuggles,” writing “Like a chilling, murder-y version of Pay It Forward, this thriller unfolds as a man seeking to end his life is given the opportunity to kill two other people and then be killed.”

Canadian librarians picked it as a November Loan Stars title.

Holds are commensurate with cautious ordering in American libraries we checked, but Hollywood’s excitement may foretell growing interest.

Today is the last day of #libfaves16. As the countdown continues, we’ve been enjoying the pithy descriptions. Below are a few we selected from the last few days (title links are to Edelweiss listings):

THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES by Peter Wohlleben. A rare book that brings more magic to its subject through science. — Velocipedia@Grammarnatrix

My #libfaves16 Non-Fiction title for the year is ATLAS OBSCURA by Joshua Foer, et. al. It’s like porn for information junkies! Check it out! — Kelly Moore@ktmoore69

#libfaves16 Day 9: when you’re having so much fun you barely notice how much smarter you feel? AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFE @Sarah_Bakewell — David Wright @guybrarian

My #2 for #libfaves16 is PAPER AND FIRE by Rachel Caine  – I’ve called this series librarian catnip but it’s pure adrenaline for any reader. — Nicole Scherer@girlplusbooks

Today’s #libfaves16 is @mstiefvater’s finale THE RAVEN KING. Raven Cycle is one series you’ll love to pick apart & reread. Brilliant stuff. — Becky‏@beckiejean

UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Colson Whitehead – believe the hype. Timely, literary, emotional, raw, and important. Go get it.–  greggwinsor‏@greggwinsor

1) #libfaves16 MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by Elizabeth Strout – this book will dole out stuff that will slay you. This book has a sequel… — Marie Andrienne ‏@deienara

My final #libfaves16 is MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON by @LizStrout. What a quietly powerful book. Still thinking about it months after reading! — Inkywhisk‏@inkywhisk

It’s not too late to join in. Please type TITLES in all caps, to make it easier for those doing the final wrap-up (which we will publish).

Check out what others are posting by following the Twitter timeline widget to the right of the screen.

Already looking forward to the film adaptation of her debut novel, Everything, Everything, YA author Nicola Yoon is two for two as her second novel, The Sun Is Also a Star (PRH/Delacorte Press; Listening Library; OverDrive Sample), is also headed to the silver screen, reports Deadline Hollywood.

Warner Bros and MGM have teamed up to make the 2016 novel about a teen girl who falls in love as her family faces deportation.

A critical as well as commercial hit, it was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award and is on many best book lists, including those compiled by Entertainment Weekly, Horn Book, the LA Times, and the NYT.

Everything, Everything is set to release on May 19, 2017. On her web site, Yoon has been tracking the progress.

The New York Times book editors released their picks of the top books of the year in Friday’s issue, a total of forty titles from the four critics.

At this point, after so many best books list have been published, many of the titles are expected, but there are a few surprises.

Jennifer Senior picks the most overlooked title of them all, Grace by Natashia Deón (Counterpoint Press), calling it a “dazzling, underappreciated debut novel about a runaway slave, the daughter she never gets to hold, and the saintly man who raises the child instead.” 

Michiko Kakutani gives further support to a novel that has been a favorite of her colleagues on the Book Review, but hasn’t been recognized by many other best books lists, The North Water by Ian McGuire (Macmillan/Holt; OverDrive Sample). Kakutani says, “This novel about a 19th-century whaling expedition is as gory as Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd … a gripping and original act of bravura storytelling that immerses us in a Darwinian world that is as unforgiving as it is bloody.”

In addition to listing the title as one of their top ten, the NYT BR featured the author on the “Inside the NYT Book Review” podcast, and Book Review Editor Pamela Paul gave it her personal recommendation in a Reddit discussion last week, 

“a fantastic literary thriller that … would appeal to anyone. Well, anyone who is OK with blood and gore. (It’s very, very dark.) But it’s essentially a gritty, plot-driven story with a very, very bad guy as its villain and a flawed hero at its center. The story takes place on a whaling ship headed to the Arctic in the 19th century, and things go very wrong.”

In nonfiction, Kakutani selects The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar (PRH/Random House; OverDrive Sample), also a NYT BR top ten title and a  particular favorite of editor Greg Cowles, who says on the podcast that he’s been “pushing it into peoples’ hands all year.” The author, a novelist, writes about trying to find his father, who was kidnapped in Libya by Qaddafi. Says Kakutani, “In this beautifully chiseled book, the younger Mr. Matar chronicles his Telemachus-like search for his missing father, whose absence has haunted him for decades. It’s a detective story of sorts, with Mr. Matar trying to piece together what happened to his father after his arrest.”

As an end-of-the-year gift, we’ve put together the various book critics’s picks into downloadable spreadsheets, for your use in last-minute ordering, or for discovering titles you may have overlooked (also available in the links at the right of the screen, under “Best Books, 2016”).

Best Books 2016, Childrens and YA

Best Books 2016 Adult Nonfiction

Best Books 2016 Adult Fiction and Poetry

Library staff have been tweeting their ten favorite titles of the year, one per day since Dec. 12th, using the hashtag #libfaves2016.

Two very different novels now top the list, the SF title Dark Matter by Blake Crouch (PRH/Crown; BOT; Overdrive Sample) and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (RH/Knopf; RH Audio; BOT; OverDrive Sample), a multi-generational examination of the legacy of slavery.

Libfaves participant Carrie Shaurette says that Dark Matter is a “Mind-bending thriller that will make you reflect on the life choices you’ve made.” Greg Winsor says it is an “emotional thriller about alternate universes and going home” and suggests, “Hollywood take notice.” One day later, another libfaves tweet noted that Hollywood had done just that, linking to a Deadline story that director Roland Emmerich is “orbiting” the project.

Janet Snyder describes Homegoing as “graceful, powerful & packed w book club potential. Tragedy & legacy of slavery over 8 generations,” while another tweet simply quotes from the book, “Strength is knowing that everyone belongs to themselves.”

Many of the tweets are admirable 140 character readers’ advisory examples. Just a few that caught our eye (links are to the titles):

JANE STEELE by Lyndsay Faye. Murderous heroine delivered in delicious prose… A gorgeous literary feat! –Annette Jones@ZenLibrarian

JANE STEELE by Lyndsay Faye – excellent re-imagining of Jane Eyre if Jane killed off all the people who deserved it. — Jane Jorgenson@madpoptart

 

INVISIBLE LIBRARY by GenevieveCogman. You had me at cyborg alligators. Best new series I read this year —  Joe_Jones@Joe_Jones

LAB GIRL by Hope Jahren. Curiosity-driven science gets its due & it’s messy, funny, glorious. — Stephen Sposato@stephensposato

Therese Oneill, UNMENTIONABLE, b/c it’s freakin’ hilarious, informative, & meticulously researched w/ OMG! moments. — Robin B@robinsbooks

THE GENE: AN INTIMATE HISTORY by Mukherjee. Tracing the history of genetics, this reads like a mystery novel. — Matthew Noe@NoetheMatt

It’s not too late to join in. The rules are simple. Tweet your ten favorite titles of the year, one per day. If you’re late to the party, no worries. Just play catchup by posting the ones you missed.

Please type TITLES in all caps, to make it easier for those doing the final wrap-up (which we will publish).

Check out what others are posting by following the Twitter timeline widget to the right of the screen.

The upcoming holiday weekend is generally a big one for movie openings, but there is a complication this year. Christmas Day falls at the end of the weekend, so there will be less time for families to search out entertainment to round out their festivities. In addition, studios are not willing to schedule films to go up against the second week of Rogue One, which proved expectations with a “massive” debut this week.

But studios need to get movies in to theater to qualify for the Oscars, so several will open in limited runs in the upcoming week.

Bucking the trend, one adaptation debuts across the country on Christmas Day, Fences, Denzel Washington’s film version of August Wilson’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize and Tony winning play. Washington directs and co-stars with Viola Davis, reprising their roles from a Broadway revival of the play six years ago, for which both won Tony Awards.

The Guardian writes “This film is conceived as a showcase for its performers, and, as that, it is immaculate … Would Wilson be pleased? A black director, extraordinary performances, as faithful an adaptation as you can imagine. He’d be ecstatic.”

Vanity Fair offers an alternative title for the film: “Please Hurry Up and Give Viola Davis an Oscar.”

A tie-in came out on Dec. 6, Fences (Movie tie-in), August Wilson (PRH/Plume).

Six other film adaptations open in limited release this week:

Patriots Day, the drama recounting the Boston Marathon bombing. Directed by Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Lone Survivor) it stars Mark Wahlberg, J. K. Simmons, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon and Michelle Monaghan.

It is based on the nonfiction title, Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph over Tragedy by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge (UP New England/ForeEdge), which traces the events of the bombing and the citywide manhunt to find the terrorists.

The Hollywood Reporter says the film is “Kinetic, well cast and technically impressive — but not as stirring as it might have been.”

Variety calls it “An intense, jittery re-creation … [a] genuinely exciting megaplex entertainment, informed by extensive research, featuring bona fide movie stars, and staged with equal degrees of professionalism and respect.”

The film opens in limited release on December 21 with a wide release on January 13, 2017. There is no tie-in.

A Monster Calls was originally scheduled for release on October 21, but the the film adaptation of the children’s fantasy by Patrick Ness moved to a holiday opening due to what Deadline called “a complete nightmare in regards to competition … the pic’s new date gives it ample time to breathe and spur word-of-mouth during the year-end holidays and into 2017.”

Thus far, reviews are mixed for this fantasy-reality drama about a boy coping with his mother’s illness and his own troubles. The Hollywood Reporter calls it a “sensitive and beautifully made lesson in the limits and power of storytelling … The fact that not every terrible thing can be remedied or appropriately punished is a tough lesson even for adults to learn, but A Monster Calls helps find the sense in it.”

Variety, however, was less impressed, calling it “an incredibly small and intimate gothic fable … [that is] all bark and no bite.”

There are two tie-ins:

A Monster Calls: Special Collectors’ Edition (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay, (Candlewick, October 4, 2016).

A Monster Calls: A Novel (Movie Tie-in): Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd, Patrick Ness, Jim Kay (Candlewick, August 2, 2016, Trade Paperback).

The film opens on December 23, followed by a wide release on January 6.

Silence opens on Dec. 23, with a wide release coming later in January (the specific date has yet to be announced).

Directed by Martin Scorsese, it is an adaptation of the novel by Shusaku Endo,  first published in 1966. It is a book that Scorsese writes in the introduction to the tie-in,  Silence, (Peter Owen Publishers, Dec. 1; trade paperback, Macmillan/Picador Modern Classics), he has “reread countless times,” one that has given him “a kind of sustenance” that he has “found in only a very few works of art.”

Starring Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver, it is set in about a Portuguese Jesuit priest who persecuted along with other Christians in Japan in the 17th C.

Variety says it is a “challenging, yet beautiful spiritual journey.” While they also call it a “a remarkable achievement,” they warn “Though undeniably gorgeous, it is punishingly long, frequently boring, and woefully unengaging at some of its most critical moments. It is too subdued for Scorsese-philes, too violent for the most devout, and too abstruse for the great many moviegoers who such an expensive undertaking hopes to attract.”

SlashFilm has a round-up of additional reviews.

Hidden Figures opens on Christmas Day in some theaters, with a nationwide release on Jan. 6.

It is one of the hot films of the season, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as a group of African American women who worked at NASA on the mission that sent John Glenn into space in 1962. Director Theodore Melfi (St. Vincent) was so taken with the script that he dropped out of the running to direct a Spiderman movie in favor of this one.

Variety says it is a “thoroughly satisfying … Feel-good drama” that is “As brash, bright, and broad as Hollywood studio movies come.”

Tie-in: Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race, Margot Lee Shetterly (HC/William Morrow Paperbacks; HarperAudio; OverDrive Sample).

Live by Night opens on December 25, followed by a national release on January 13, 2017 and is Ben Affleck’s first time in the director’s chair since his award-winning Argo. Not only does he direct and star, he wrote the screenplay, an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Live by Night (Harper/ Morrow; Harperluxe; HarperAudio).

Zoe Saldana, Sienna Miller, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Messina and Elle Fanning also feature in this period gangster film set during the Prohibition era.

Variety reports that Affleck told reporters at an early screening “that the idea for him was blending a throwback vibe with modern energy. And that’s fitting: In Lehane’s novel, Affleck has found a gangster yarn akin to the ’30s and ’40s genre pictures that inspired him, but one with a fresh face.”

Live by Night follows The Given Day, which was the author’s first departure into historical crime. A third book in the series, World Gone By, was published last year.

There are multiple tie-ins: The mass market will arrive on Dec. 27, while the trade paperback (both HarperCollins/Morrow) came out on Dec. 6.

The Spanish language film Julieta is based on three linked short stories from Alice Munro’s collection Runaway (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”). It opens in limited release on Dec. 21st.

Written and directed by Academy Award-winner Pedro Almodóvar, it stars Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte along with Daniel Grao, Inma Cuesta, Darío Grandinetti, Michelle Jenner, and Rossy de Palma.

The Guardian gave it five stars, calling it “Almodóvar’s best film in a decade” and describing it as “a sumptuous and heartbreaking study of the viral nature of guilt, the mystery of memory and the often unendurable power of love.”

American critics were less impressed. The Hollywood Reporter calls it “A tie-me-downer of a pastiche” while Variety says it is “far from this reformed renegade’s strongest or most entertaining work.”

Tie-in: Julieta (Movie Tie-in Edition): Three Stories That Inspired the Movie, Alice Munro (PRH/Vintage; OverDrive Sample).

Hitting the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list at #2 this week is Michael Lewis’s newest The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (Norton; S&S Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Libraries are showing holds as high as 17:1, and generally well above a 3:1 standard.

The book explores the work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and the question, as the NYT frames it, of “Why do most people, from sports managers to bankers, so often overlook the data and make colossal errors based on gut instinct?”

The two found, “In study after study,” the review goes on, “that when it comes to making decisions, humans are predisposed to irrationality. Their surprising findings have had profound implications for everything from behavioral economics and politics, to advanced medicine and sports.”

Indeed, as Lewis wrote in Vanity Fair, their work, although he did not know it at the time, is behind the ideas explored in Moneyball.

But the reason that people are enthusiastic about Lewis’s book may be due to his ability to bring the emotional to what may seem like a dry subject. Jennifer Senior writes in her NYT review, “During its final pages, I was blinking back tears, hardly your typical reaction to a book about a pair of academic psychologists. The reason is simple. Mr. Lewis has written one hell of a love story, and a tragic one at that. The book is particularly good at capturing the agony of the one who loves the more ”

Readers may know one of the subjects of the book, Nobel prize-winner Kahneman for his own bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Lewis has made many appearances for the book, including the following on CSB This Morning earlier in the month:

Soup for Syria: Recipes to Celebrate Our Shared Humanity, collected and photographed by Barbara Abdeni Massed, published last year by indie press, Interlink, is soaring on Amazon’s sales rankings. The jump, from #7,866 to a well-placed #45, coincides with a feature on NPR’s All Things Considered.

An effort by celebrity chefs to help relieve some of the Syrian refugee’s suffering, it’s a foodie version of Live Aid.

Barbara Massaad, a cookbook writer living in Beirut, visited one of the refugee camps and decided she had to help. Along with a friend who runs a farmers market, they started making soups to give away to those in need. “Soup is universal comfort food,” says Massad, “It’s special, soup.”

Deciding to take the project further, she reached out to colleagues around the world, asking for recipes for a fundraiser. Alice Waters sent in one for carrot soup. Anthony Bourdain offers soup au pistou, “with white beans, leeks, fennel and zucchini.” The team behind the popular Jerusalem cookbook, Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, submitted one as well. Claudia Rodan and Mark Bittman also pitched in.

In addition to the recipes, the book is full of photos of the Syrians living in the camps.

The collection has raised more than $300,000 for food relief programs, “with very little attention or publicity.”

The lack of PR seems to have changed now that NPR has spread the word. The book is temporarily out of stock on Amazon and B&N and is on back order through wholesalers. It is currently shown as available for purchase directly from publisher Interlink.

Libraries have generally bought few, if any copies. Those that did are showing a mix of available copies and moderate holds.

On downhill side of #libfaves16. A few winners are starting to emerge with two duking it out for the top spot. 4 more days, so keep voting!

— Robin B (@robinsbooks) December 18, 2016

LibFave rules are simple — tweet your ten favorite titles of the year, one per day. If you’re late to the party, no worries. Just play catchup by posting the ones you missed.

Please type TITLES in all caps, to make it easier for those doing the final wrap-up (which we will publish).

Check out what others are posting by following the Twitter timeline widget to the right of the screen.

Very few new titles arrive in the upcoming week and none of them have significant holds. 

We’re unable to check on one title, however, because most libraries have not yet ordered it. Batman Vol. 10, (DC Comics) collects the final issues in what Entertainment Weekly describes as “writer Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo’s … landmark run on DC’s Batman  … [which] introduced daring new concepts to the Batman mythology, including a bold and colorful new take on his origin story.”

The titles covered here, and other notable titles arriving next week, are listed with ordering information and alternate formats, on our downloadable spreadsheet, EarlyWord New Title Radar, Week of Dec. 19 2016

Consumer Media Picks

People magazine this week picks two titles from Bloomsbury USA, published earlier this month.

The “Book of the Week” is The Private Life of Mrs Sharma by Ratika Kapur, (Macmillan/Bloomsbury, 12/3; OverDrive Sample). About a “simple woman from a good family” in Delhi who uncharacteristically embarks on an affair, this novel is described as a “delightfully funny novel [that] delivers a serious message about what happens when our responsibilities push us to the breaking point.” It received a starred review from Kirkus. UPDATE: In the Wall Street Journal  Sam Sacks gives it a particularly intriguing review, ending with “In Mrs. Sharma, Ms. Kapur has fashioned a memorably double-sided character for a novel that, like a gathering storm, changes before your eyes from soft light to enveloping darkness.”

On a weightier note, People also picks They Are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill (Macmillan/ Bloomsbury, 12/6; OverDrive Sample), writing, “The Bosnian war and Thailand’s ’04 tsunami come chillingly to life in this novel, which intertwines the stories of four people … In lean, piercing prose, Savill brings the narrative to a surprising climax.”

Rounding out the picks is a bio of the man who created the Star Wars series,  George Lucas: A Life by Jay Jones (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio, 12/6; OverDrive Sample). Although Lucas is not involved with the new film Rogue One, opening this weekend (see below), it may raise interest in this book, which People says is  “packed with fun insider info.” It is also one of Kirkus‘s best books of the year.

Peer Picks

There are no peer picks arriving this week.

Tie-ins

Only one tie-in hits shelves but it is a big one, the novelization of the newest Star Wars film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Alexander Freed (PRH/Del Rey; RH Audio/BOT).

The novel, which according to the publisher includes “new scenes and expanded material” beyond the film, follows the story of how the Rebellion steals the plans for the Death Star, thus setting up the action in the 1977 film, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.

The New York Times rounds up critics’ reactions to the movie, saying that thus far it is “mostly positive, but there were several notable exceptions.”

One of those was the NYT‘s own critic A.O. Scott, who calls the film “thoroughly mediocre.”

RollingStone disagrees, giving it 3.5 stars out of 4 and headlining the review with “The Force Is Definitely With This Amazing ‘Star Wars’ Spinoff.”

The movie opens Dec. 16. The tie-in hits shelves soon after, on Dec. 20.

For our full list of upcoming adaptations, download our Books to Movies and TV and link to our listing of tie-ins.

Julia Roberts is returning to the small screen (after HBO’s The Normal Heart) and will star as Eleanor Flood in a limited series adapting Maria Semple’s Today Will Be Different (Hachette/Little, Brown; Hachette Audio; OverDrive Sample).

Semple, no stranger to TV herself (she worked on Beverly Hills, 90210, Mad About You, Suddenly Susan, and Arrested Development), will write the script for the adaptation, says The Hollywood Reporter.

“I’m giddy that Eleanor Flood will be brought to life by Julia Roberts … This will be a fun ride!” says Semple.

This is not Semple’s only project, she is also adapting Where’d You Go Bernadette for the big screen, with Cate Blanchett attached to star.

No news at this point on when either project will debut.

The 2012 NYT Bestseller, Steve Coll’s Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (PRH/Penguin; Penguin Audio/BOT; OverDrive Sample) is earning a second readership now that Donald Trump has nominated the CEO of that global company, Rex Tillerson, to be Secretary of State.

The book is moving up Amazon’s charts, to land just outside the Top 100 (it is currently #107, up from #2,064) and is temporarily out of stock in paperback at Amazon. The hardcover is selling for almost a hundred dollars a copy, used.

Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker, is the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist. His book received favorable reviews when it debuted.

In his review in the NYBR, Adam Hochschild compared Exxon to the East India Company, and wrote Coll’s book provides:

“a picture of a corporation so large and powerful — operating in some 200 nations and territories — that it really has its own foreign policy … Exxon Mobil has its own armies — and, in these days of outsourcing, also hires those of others … the book assuredly does what it sets out to do: show the inner workings of one of the Western world’s most significant concentrations of unelected power.”

Coll is currently in the news again. He published a story in The New Yorker, and has recently been on PBS’s Newshour and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Holds are strong in a few libraries, steady in others.