While everyone is focused in on its upcoming Black Friday 2018 offers, we now have the Amazon Best Books of 2018 List. Back in June, the major online retailer dropped a a list of the tentative best books of the year(so far), but now we have the official collection of the top reads on Amazon for 2018.
As usual, every year Amazon drops its list of the best selling and most compelling books available on its service. Back in June, the list was headed by The Woman in the Window and Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone: A Novel, but both of those titles have been bumped from the top 10 in the Amazon Best Books of 2018 list.
This year’s list brings together the top 100 books on the service while also offering up the top 20 in various categories. Those include biography, literary fiction, mystery, children’s books, and young adult. Hand-selected by Amazon’s in-house editors, these lists are collated all year long on a month-by-month basis and offer some great insight for gifts over the holidays or just new content to dive into for yourself.
Amazon Best Books of 2018:
The 2018 top 100 highlights Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover as the top book of the year. The biography follows the story of Tara’s “survivalist upbringing” right through to her PhD ceremony at Cambridge University. Number two is Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, which follows the story of an 11-year-old slave on a sci-fi-like adventure “on a par with the novels of Jules Verne.”
Some other notables at the top of the list include Stephen King’s Elevation, The Line Becomes a River from Francisco Cantú, and what probably could have won an award for the longest book title of the year, Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Man by Lynn Vincent & Sara Vladic. You’ll find more details on those down below.
It is easy to see these lists as your basic marketing campaign for Amazon’s book services and reader hardware. But as we mentioned above, they can also offer up some great ideas for gifts over the holidays.
If you haven’t checked out Amazon Prime Book Box, now’s a good time to do so. The new service is great for avid readers and provides a selection of books to your front door every month. You’ll find all the important details on that right here.
Top 5 from the Amazon Best Books of 2018:
1. Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover:
Tara Westover didn’t see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen, and it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life. This extraordinary memoirchronicles how she survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge University. Rather than a story about the making of a scholar, Educated is about the making of a person.
2. Washington Black: A Novel by Esi Edugyan:
When an 11-year-old slave named Wash is picked to serve his master’s brother, he is terrified to leave the Barbados plantation where he lives. But what follows is adventure and scientific exploration on a par with the novels of Jules Verne. Esi Edugyan’s superb writing and inventive story telling drive this thoughtful, entertaining page-turner.
3. Indianapolis: The True Story of the Worst Sea Disaster in U.S. Naval History and the Fifty-Year Fight to Exonerate an Innocent Manby Lynn Vincent and Sara Vladic:
While readers will be riveted by the four days the Indianapolis crew spent adrift in the shark-infested Pacific, the rest of the Indianapolis‘s story is equally as tense. Vincent and Vladic include not only the expected tales of heroism under duress but the just-as-human stories of willpower bending and sanity breaking. This is history writing at its finest: shining a spotlight on a wartime tragedy that still echoes within the survivors and the Navy today.
4. Elevation: A Novel by Stephen King:
Here is a short, heart-lifting parable by a master storyteller. When we first meet Scott Carey, he is aware that he is losing weight every day, even if he does not look any different than he did a year ago. Set in the iconic but fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine, his slow disappearance may somehow be the thing that brings the town together.
5. The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú:
The son of a park ranger, Cantú grew up in the southwest. When he joined the Border Patrol, he witnessed the complex realities of illegal immigration, and the obligations of his job weighed heavy against his sense of humanity. With its direct, stoic prose, The Line Becomes a River is a weighty and timely document on one of our most divisive arguments.
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