From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2012

Continuing my look back at my old top 10 lists, today I'm going to re-visit my ten favorite books of 2012.  If you haven't followed all of my other posts, for many years I've been making lists at the end of each year of the ten favorite books I read that year - not necessarily published that year - and sharing them with my friends.  Since I started the blog, I've been periodically looking back at my old top 10 lists and seeing what I think of them today!

Here's my list from 2012, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

The Twelve - Justin Cronin
Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
The Kitchen House - Kathleen Grissom
When She Woke - Hilary Jordan
The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern
What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty
State of Wonder - Ann Patchett
The Lost Wife - Alyson Richman
Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walters


For more about these books, read on!

How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?

The closer we get to the present day, the more I remember the books on my old lists, so the better these lists seem to be getting!  I definitely remember all these books vividly, and loved all of them. The only one I was slightly surprised to see on the list was Gone Girl, which I loved but didn't remember that I had actually made it a top 10 selection.  As I rated books on Goodreads as I read them back in 2012, I gave 5 of these books 5 stars - The Twelve, The Fault in Our Stars, When She Woke, The Night Circus, and State of Wonder.  It's hard to pick a favorite - maybe The Fault in Our Stars or The Night Circus.  I wouldn't say The Twelve because even though it was a 5 star book, it was probably my least favorite of The Passage Trilogy.  What Alice Forgot was only a 4.5 star book, but yet might be the book that I've recommended most often to others through the years.

Genres

This is a pretty diverse list - we've got two historical novels (The Lost Wife and The Kitchen House - maybe 3 if you count the historical parts of Beautiful Ruins), two dystopian thrillers (The Twelve and When She Woke), a mystery/thriller (Gone Girl), a fantasy novel (The Night Circus), a young adult novel (The Fault in Our Stars), a contemporary women's fiction (What Alice Forgot), and two literary fiction (State of Wonder and Beautiful Ruins).

Popularity

This was not one of my lists filled with obscure books, as a lot of these books were bestsellers and I'm guessing most of you are familiar with a lot of these books or authors.  The Fault In Our Stars is by far the most read of these books on Goodreads, with more than 3 million ratings.  Gone Girl also had a ton of ratings, more than 1.9 million.  The least read of these books was When She Woke, which still has more than 24,000 ratings.

Other Random Stuff

So interesting to me how often the highest and lowest ratings on Goodreads match up with the most/least read - The Fault in Our Stars is the highested rated with an average rating of 4.24, while When She Woke is the (comparatively) lowest rated with a 3.67 average rating.

This list marked Justin Cronin's 4th time on my top 10 list, following 2003, 2007, and 2011.  It was Gillian Flynn's second time one of my lists, following Sharp Objects in 2007.  It was also the second time around for Ann Patchett, after Bel Canto in 2002.

I read three of these books with my book club - Gone Girl, The Kitchen House, and The Lost Wife.

None of these books won any major prizes, but The Twelve, Gone Girl, The Fault in Our Stars were all Goodreads Choice winners for various categories, and many of the others were Goodreads Choice nominees.

Compared to my 2011 list, where I had recently gotten a kindle but all my top 10 selections I had read in paperback, in 2012, I read eight of the ten on my kindle (many borrowed from the library), and only two in paperback.  And not unrelated - since I used to read books not til they came out in paperback - reading on kindle meant that 4 of these books were actually published in 2012.  (Plus 5 published in 2011 and 1 published in 2010.)

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Note that I'll give all these posts the tag "Top 10," so you should be able to click on the label  "Top 10" at the bottom of the post and see all my other Top 10 posts.  And if you just want to see all my old Top 10 lists now without waiting, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.