What Do The Best Books of 2011 List for Amazon and Publishers Weekly Have in Common?

The Top 10 Best Books of 2011 List at Amazon.com and the Top 20 List for Publishers Weekly - 2 of the early "best of lists" (put out mid-November) - both have just ONE book in common.

Eugenides describes a year or so in the lives of 3 college seniors at Brown in the early 80s. There is Madeleine, a self-described "incurable romantic" who is slightly embarrassed at being so normal. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - who suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Have you read it yet? I haven't - but I most certainly will!

FICTION

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living-and whom he does it for.

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern
"Opens at Nightfall; Closes at Dawn." The Le Cirque des Rêves is a circus unlike any other. "The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. At the center of The Night Circus spectacle are two specially gifted young magicians, Celia and Marco, pitted against each other in professional competition, drawn towards one another in love.

The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht.
In a Balkan country mending from years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, arrives on a mission of mercy at an orphanage by the sea. By the time she and her lifelong friend Zóra begin to inoculate the children there, she feels age-old superstitions and secrets gathering everywhere around her. Secrets her outwardly cheerful hosts have chosen not to tell her. Secrets involving the strange family digging for something in the surrounding vineyards. Secrets hidden in the landscape itself.

Side note: I read The Tiger's Wife - see Favorite Reads of Summer 2011 (plus the Books That Let Me Down) - and it was one of the books I considered a let down. While The Night Circus - I read and loved (it was one of the 10 Books Published in 2011 That Invoked Strong Emotions in Me).

MYSTERY/ THRILLER

A Trick of Light, Louise Penny.
"Hearts are broken," Lillian Dyson carefully underlined in a book. "Sweet relationships are dead." But now Lillian herself is dead. Found among the bleeding hearts and lilacs of Clara Morrow's garden in Three Pines, shattering the celebrations of Clara's solo show at the famed Musée in Montreal. Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of homicide at the Sûreté du Québec, is called to the tiny Quebec village and there he finds the art world gathered, and with it a world of shading and nuance, a world of shadow and light. Where nothing is as it seems. Behind every smile there lurks a sneer. Inside every sweet relationship there hides a broken heart. And even when facts are slowly exposed, it is no longer clear to Gamache and his team if what they've found is the truth, or simply a trick of the light.

The Most Dangerous Thing, Laura Lippman
Years ago, they were all the best of friends. But as time passed and circumstances changed, they grew apart, became adults with families of their own, and began to forget about the past--and the terrible lie they all shared. But now Gordon, the youngest and wildest of the five, has died and the others are thrown together for the first time in years. And then the revelations start. Could their long-ago lie be the reason for their troubles today? Each one of these old friends has to wonder if their secret has been discovered--and if someone within the circle is out to destroy them.

NON-FICTION

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, James Gleick
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information ... And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin, Erik Larson
The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America's first ambassador to Hitler's Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance - and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler's true character and ruthless ambition.

The other 2 categories in common to both Amazon & Publishers Weekly lists are Sci-Fi/ Fantasy and Romance - but there are no books that appear on both lists.

Have you read any of the books that are on both lists - do you plan to?!