Amazon, Publishers Weekly name their ‘best books’ of 2014

With Halloween and Election Day in the rearview mirror, it’s time for at least two things that seem to arrive earlier every year: Christmas music and year-end best-books lists.

Two major players in the book world have already posted their lists: online retail giant Amazon, which named 100 books, and trade magazine Publishers Weekly, whose editors selected their top 10 after reviewing close to 9,000 books during the year.

The No. 1 pick from Amazon is Celeste Ng’s debut novel “Everything I Never Told You,” about a Chinese American family in Ohio dealing with the death of their oldest daughter. It’s followed by Anthony Doerr’s novel “All the Light We Cannot See,” a National Book Award finalist, and Hampton Sides’ history, “In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette.”

Amazon’s list is notably thin in titles from Hachette, the publisher with whom the retailer has been in a public dispute since May. As the website Publishers Lunch notes, only four Hachette books made the 100-book list, the highest-ranked being Michael Koryta’s thriller “Those Who Wish Me Dead” at No. 29.

Publishers Weekly’s list includes Lorrie Moore’s short story collection “Bark” published by Knopf, two books from Minnesota-based independent press Graywolf, Eula Biss’ ”On Immunity” and Leslie Jamison’s essay collection “The Empathy Exams,” and the novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings” published by Riverhead, whose author is Marlon James. No books published by Hachette made Publishers Weekly top 10 list.

There are many, many best-books-of-the-year lists. On the blog Largehearted Boy, David Gutowski keeps a running list with links to year-end book feature stories.