Best book you read all year?

[Joyce Valenza]

This may be the first summer in a long time I can read just for fun. I thought it would be cool to plan our summer reading lists here. But let's really be selective. Choose one, just one, book in each category and share it here. Feel free to attach links to reviews or include delicious covers!

Best children's
Best YA
Best graphic novel/memoir, etc.
Best adult fiction
Best adult nonfiction
Best guilty pleasure(!)

[Mary Woodard]

I forgot to add Best Picture Book - Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor

[Mary J. Johnson]

For best adult fiction, try Suite Française, by Irene Nemirovsky. Buy it in its translation from French (same title). It has won prestigious awards in France, and it is now in U.S. bookstores and libraries. Nemirovsky died in Auschwitz, and this newly-published book was kept by her surviving daughters all these years in notes that they originally carried in a suitcase as they were shuttled from one protected place to another in France during WWII. It is a story of France under the German occupation (not a holocaust story).

[Jenn the Librarian]

Best YA - I really enjoyed 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson - When seventeen-year-old Ginny receives a packet of mysterious envelopes from her favorite aunt, she leaves New Jersey to criss-cross Europe on a sort of scavenger hunt that transforms her life. I love to travel so this really appealed to me.

Best Adult Fiction - I have been on an India chick lit kick and I really like the books by Amulya Malladi - Song of the Cuckoo Bird, The Mango Season, Serving Crazy with Curry and A Breath of Fresh Air, all dealing with Indian families in the US or India. http://www.amulyamalladi.com/

I also love The Eight by Katherine Neville, it is an older book but lots of fun to read. http://www.katherineneville.com/

Best Mystery Book - I like Sujata Massey who writes the Rei Shimura series - starting with The Salaryman's Wife http://www.interbridge.com/sujata/


Best Adult Nonfiction - Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert http://www.elizabethgilbert.com/

Best Guilty Pleasure - I have to agree Outlander is a great read and one of my favorite books/series.
http://www.cco.caltech.edu/~gatti/gabaldon/

[Deborah Stafford]

Adult fiction, and oldie but one I read this year Caravans by Michner. I had read Kite Runner and while I liked it, I felt that I needed to know more. Caravans really filled it in, in fact I liked it betterthan Kite Runner.

Builty pleasure -- Dona Leon's murder mysteries set in Venice

[Jeri Hurd]

Best Children's: Out of the Dust
Best YA: I'm torn here. Either Chris Crutcher's Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes or Scott Westerfield's Pretties series.

Best Graphic novel: American Born Chinese

Best Adult Fiction: Secret Life of Bees

Best Adult Nonfiction: Linked

Guilty Pleasure: My Sister's Keeper

[ejdw13]

I haven't treated myself to any adult books in awhile.

My YA book of the year was Sold by Patricia McCormick and my favorite graphic novel was American Born Chinese.

I too have found LibraryThing a helpful tool for tracking what YA books I've been reading.

Erin

[edi campbell]

yes! Sold would be my best YA also! What a powerful story!

[Caroline Roche]

Best adult fiction? 'We need to talk about Kevin' by Lionel Shreve. It made me think about what it means to be a parent - or educator - and how much influence we have on the growing child. I would recommend it to anyone involved with children.

[Mary Ann Harlan]

Hmmmm..


Kiki Strike - Best Children's, although that may be cheating because it real is middle grade
Best YA - The Book Thief is obvious so I am going with Dairy Queen
Best Adult Fiction - The Hummingbird's Daughter
Best graphic novel - Fables, although it could also be considered a guilty pleasure
Best Guilty Pleasure - rereading - Boyfriend List in particular

[Cathy Horn]

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem was the best adult fiction that I read this year. It is a murder-mystery but so much more. The narrator, Lionel Essrog (who has Tourette's syndrome), was "rescued" from an orphanage as a teen by the local tough guy/ganster Frank Minna. Lionel and fellow orphans work for Frank's "detective" agency (a front for mob related activities). Frank eventually ends up dead and Lionel is forced to be a real detective to try to solve his murder. The book is hilarious in parts, makes you want to cry in other parts. I can see this book as a movie with Danny Devito playing Frank.

[June Keuhn]

Best YA/Adult Fiction:
The Secret Life of Bees...of course, I didn't "read" it, I listened to it on CD. What a great reader they had.

Best guilty pleasure-the latest Stephanie Plum novel, Twelve Sharp

Adult Non-Fiction: The World is Flat

[Jacquie Henry]

Best adult fiction

The birth of Venus By Sarah Dunant

Summary
From the Inside Flap
Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen (when) her parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola.... Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola's reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra's married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to (a) young painter and his art.

To see a list of tites recently posted to LM_NET - follow this link:
http://nlcommunities.com/communities/wanderings/articles/135648.aspx