I love book lists, especially annotated ones, and I suspect I’m hardly the only one who does. Reading them is like browsing the shelves of a well-stocked library. Whether they’re relatively brief, such as Anthony Burgess’s 99 Novels: The Best in English Literature since 1939 (a partial inspiration for this book) or massive volumes, such as Jacque Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, they’re catnip to me.
Choosing the books to include in this book was—to fearlessly employ a cliché—like a treasure hunt. I started by revisiting the adult books I had reviewed since 1994 when I began reviewing for Booklist. I then combed through the files I had assembled during my two terms on the Alex Award committee; I went on to search back issues of the three major youth review media, Booklist, School Library Journal, and VOYA. I consulted other book lists and readers’ guides and surveyed lists of award-winning books; I browsed in bookstores, got lost in the maze that is Amazon.com, and finally came up with a list of twice as many books as I could use. Then came the process of some more reading, reading, and reading followed by winnowing and discarding, until I had assembled the list of two hundred fiction and nonfiction titles you’ll find here.
Then came the writing, writing, writing of annotations that contain both descriptive and critical content. Somewhere in this process it occurred to me that it might be useful to include a note as to which genre (or, more likely, genres) the titles might fall into.
Here’s the list of categories I came up with:
ADV = adventure and exploration
ALEX = Alex Award winner
B/M = biography and memoir
GF = general fiction
GN = graphic novel
GNF = general nonfiction
HIST = history and historical fiction
HOR = horror
LOI = literature of inclusion
M/S = mystery/suspense
P = poetry
ROM = romance
SCI = science and nature
SPEC = speculative fiction
SPO = sports
TECH = technology
As you can see, I decided, in the interest of economy, to use “symbols” to include with the annotations rather than spelling out the words, especially since many of the annotations include more than one category. We live in an era so notable for its genre bending and blending that it’s difficult to assign a title to only one category and consider the case closed. Trust me, it’s not.
There are two categories that I decided not to use, thinking they didn’t fit the logic of my list. They were “Something Entirely Different” and “Not to Be Missed.” Since I couldn’t bear to let go of these two altogether, you’ll find my lists of them in the appendixes. “Something Entirely Different” is a salute to originality (which becomes increasingly important to me after some sixty-plus years of reading what has come to seem like the same book over and over) and “Not to Be Missed” is, well, a salute to overall excellence. As you might expect, these categories also bend and blend, so some entries appear on both lists.
What more is to be said? Nothing—except that I hope you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as I did writing it, and further, that you’ll also find it useful!