The Next Best Book Club discussion

Hey TNBBCer's.

Let's compile your "Best of 2012" lists here.

(1) Which 2012 releases knocked your socks off?

(2) What did you read this year, regardless of release date, that tops your list?

(1) didn't read any new releases

(2) A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias
The Shadow of the Wind
Rebecca
A Thousand Splendid Suns

I don't read heaps of new releases, but I do have one in each category. Historical fiction because I did concentrate on that this year.

(1)Port Royal

(2)A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury

I could easily make that 2nd category twenty books of course. But I had these selected as my picks of the year, a month back. I see them as similar to each other, so they must be what I was on the look-out for, consciously or not. I'm sure I read others as fantastic, and indeed both of these had faults for me. Nevertheless, they seem to have fulfilled a quest.

Forgotten Country

We the Animals

were the two best I read. though not the only great ones.

(1) Defending Jacob by William Landay AND Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

(2) A lot - of course. maybe just first that came on mind - Mice by Gordon Reece from modern and Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson books from classic

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window and Disappeared by Johnas Jonasson. One of the funniest quirkiest book I've ever read.

Best of 2012:

Code Name Verity
Say You're Sorry
Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
The Watch: A Novel

Best non-2012 reads:
Bleed for Me
How I Became a Famous Novelist

Code Name Verity is just a special book that's going to be with me for a long long time.

Let's Pretend this Never Happened, and How I Became a Famous Novelist are two of the funniest books I've ever read and literally had me laughing out loud.

Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

The Man Who Loved Children (Currently reading, but there's no doubt it makes the list.)

A Greater Monster -a very quirky book. Not for everyone, but I love it.

My best reads for 2012 were:

Defending Jacob
Doomsday Book
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black
In the Company of the Courtesan
A Reliable Wife

Unfortunately, I'm so far behind on my TBR list that I didn't get many 2012 releases read!

The Book of night women by Marlon James,
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick de Witt
Anna Karinina by Leo Tolstoy

I'm also too far behind on my TBR list to read any 2012 releases, but some of my favorite reads for the year were:

On the Island - Tracey Garvis Graves
11/22/63 - Stephen King
Sing You Home - Jodi Picoult

There were lots more but those are the ones off the top of my head!

My favorite books from 2012 were:

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. That man has such a gift for lyricism and such a talent for accurately depicting complex relationships between people. I thought his depiction of manic depression was spot on.

April 1865: The Month That Saved America by Jay Winik. An exhaustive and entertaining view of the final month of the American Civil War. I thought that Winik did a good job of creating a complete story out of the facts.

American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center by William Langewiesche. This is the story of the cleaning up of the debris at the World Trade Center after the attack of September 11th. It's probably one of the most engrossing books I've ever read.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood. Atwood's ability to show her readers another time and place is incredible. A plot synopsis wouldn't do this justice, you have to experience her books to get a sense of what they're about.

Acquainted with the Night by Christopher Dewdney. I always find myself comparing him to Annie Dillard. Both have a deep lyricism with a uncanny relationship to nature. This is a book divided up into hours of the night and focused on aspects of the night from nightmares to deep sea creatures to pagan night festivals.

Bruce Springsteen and Philosophy: Darkness on the Edge of Truth. If you've never read a Blackwell series book from their ...and Philosophy Series, you are missing out. The books are essays pairing pop culture (music, tv shows, movies) and philosophy in engaging ways. When I picked up this book, I was not a fan of Bruce Springsteen, but this book introduced me to his better works.

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. Vowell has an odd and snarky affection for American history, as well as an exhaustive knowledge of it. In this book, she recounts the steps of the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley with her quirky and dry wit.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz. Horwitz travels around the South and analyzes the relationship of the area to the American Civil War. Informative and interesting.

The Best American History Essays on Lincoln. There are wonderful essays about every aspect of Abraham Lincoln from personal to public topics and from small incidents to big overviews. My two favorites were an analysis of the choices facing Republicans over the reaction to secession and the essay about the writing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays by Zadie Smith. This is the first book of Smith's that I've read. Wonderful and Engaging writing.

American Nerd: The Story of My People by Benjamin Nugent. This is a series of essays about the American nerd. Nugent comes at the subject from about four different directions. There's the historical part (about how the different aspects of nerd-dom formed into the common stereotype), the psychological analysis (an excellent chapter on Asperberger's Syndrome), personal, autobiographical section (about his friends and his growing up), and the anthropological section (going to a debate meet, attending a multi-generational science fiction book club). It's a thorough look at the subject.

Losing My Cool: How a Father's Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture by Thomas Chatterton Williams. This book is a well-spoken account of an African American male's journey through childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. It discusses the pitfalls and defenses involved in being black and acting black in the United States.

Sorry this is so long! This is actually the abridged version.

IMO, the best book of 2012 is Amped by Daniel H. Wilson.
This dystopian novel made me angry, and that's a good thing. It made me angry because it was so believable. This book is about a world where a treatment/cure for conditions like epilepsy, ADHD, autism, blindness, missing limbs, etc. has been created. This treatment/cure is a computer chip that is put into the patient's brain. But this chip not only makes the patient better, it makes them BETTER. By this I mean they can now do things normal humans cannot, they are super-human, they are amplified humans, they are amped. They are smarter, faster, and stronger. And this scares the normal humans. And fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering. And the normal humans, Regs, start to treat the amplified people, known as Amps, as not just sub-human but non-human. The Amps lose all their rights and privileges as citizens of the United States because they are no longer citizens, they are nothing. They are forced to leave their homes and move into internment camps to keep them contained, just like Japanese-Americans were made to do during World War II. Politics lead to more violence and violence leads to more politics. I don't want to say more for fear of ruining the rest of the story, but this is a must read dystopia, one of the best I have read. Read it to find out how things end up for the Amps. And if you like this one, check out When She Woke by Hillary Jordan and Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, two other great dystopians published recently.