Each winter, the public submits suggestions for next year’s book. In January, a panel of community members reviews the suggestions, narrowing that list down to 10 titles, and then chooses two or three books to present for a public vote.
Final 10 Selections
- The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears
Dinaw Mengestu - The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
Atul Gawande - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran-Foer - The Good Son: A Novel
Michael Gruber - The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Anne Shaffer
- The Help
Kathryn Stockett - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot - The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
Nicholas G. Carr - Stealing Buddha’s Dinner
Bich Minh Nguyen - Up From Thunder
Susan Salzer
Other Suggested Titles
- The 19th Wife
David Ebershoff - The Adoration of Jenna Fox
Mary Pearson - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain - The Alchemist
Paul Coelho - Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
Kevin Boyle - Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks and Big Pharma Flacks
Ben Goldacre - The Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver - Before I Forget
Leonard Pitts, Jr. - Bleed
Laurie Faria Stolarz - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Malcolm Gladwell - Blood and Chocolate
Annette Curtis Klause - Blue Highways: A Journey into America
William Least Heat Moon - Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
Christopher McDougall - The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba - The Boys From Little Mexico: A Season Chasing the American Dream
Steve Wilson - A Brave Vessel: The True Tale of the Castaways Who Rescued Jamestown and Inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest
Hobson Woodward - Catching Fire
Suzanne Collins - A Charmed Life: Growing Up in MacBeth’s Castle
Liza Campbell - Citizens Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944-May 7, 1945
Stephen E. Ambrose - The City & the City
China Mieville - The City of Ember
Jeanne DuPrau - Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond - Day After Night
Anita Diamant - Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories
Sandra McDonald - The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love
Kristin Kimball - Driftless
David Rhodes - Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia
Elizabeth Gilbert - Emperor of All Maladies, The: A Biography of Cancer
Sidhartha Mukharjee - Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family
Condolezza Rice - Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
Leslie T. Chang - Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr
Nancy Isenberg - Finder’s Keepers: A Tale of Archaelogical Plunder and Obsession
Craig Childs - The Forgotten Garden
Kate Morton - A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore - The General in His Labyrinth
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places…
Eric Weiner - The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America
Andrew McCarthy - The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald - Half-Broke Horses
Jeanette Walls - Hamlet’s Blackberry
William Powers - Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou - The Imperfectionists: A Novel
Tom Rachman - In a Strange Room
Damon Galgut - Incognito: An American Odyssey of Race and Self-Discovery
Michael Fosberg - Interred With Their Bones
Jennifer Lee Carrell - It’s the Little Things: An Appreciation of Life’s Simple Pleasures
Craig Wilson - Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refuge Boy
Carlos Eire - Leviathan
Scott Westerfeld - The Life of Pi
Yann Martel - Little Heathens
Mildred Kalish - Lord of the Rings
J. R.R. Tolkien - Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy
Victor Frankl - Meaning of the 21st Century, The: A Vital Blueprint…
James Martin - Moloka’i
Alan Brennert - Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer…
Tracy Kidder - My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story
Carolyn Haines - Near Andersonville
Peter Wood - Never Let Me Go
Ishiguro Kazuo - No Impact Man
Colin Beavan - Notes From Breakfast Creek
Cathy Salter - Nothing but the Truth
Avi - Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
Barbara Demick - Of Mice and Men
John Steinbeck - One Foot in the Grave
Jeaniene Frost - Orphans of Chaos
John C. Wright - The Outlander
Gil Adamson - Outliers
Malcolm Gladwell - The Passage
Justin Cronin - People of the Book
Geraldine Brooks - The Power
Rhonda Byrne - Race Beat, The: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of A Nation
Gene Roberts & H. Klibanoff - Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro - Remarkable Creatures
Tracy Chevalier - Room
Emma Donoghue - Rose in a Storm
Jon Katz - Saints at the River
Ron Rash - Same Kind of Different as Me
Ron Hall - The Scottish Chiefs
Jane Porter - The Sharing Knife: Beguilement
Lois Mcmaster Bujold - Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford - A Single Pebble
John Hersey - So Much for That
Lionel Shriver - Solar
Ian McEwan - Soulmate (Night World Series)
L.J. Smith - The Space Between Us
Thrity Umrigar - The Stand
Stephen King - Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Steven Leavitt - A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be A Woman
Lisa Shannon - The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell - Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
Sue Monk Kidd - Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption
Laura Hillenbrand - Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies in the Black Hawk War
John Hall - Vampire Academy
Richelle Mead - Walden
Michael Dolan - Wench
Dolen Perkins-Valdez - What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures
Malcolm Gladwell - Why We Make Mistakes
Joseph Hallinan - The Wife’s Tale
Lori Lansens - Winter’s Bone
Daniel Woodrell - World Without End
Ken Follett - You Were Wrong
Matthew Sharpe - Zeitoun
Dave Eggers