After a year of blockbuster books on politics and current events in 2004, 2005 turned out--for us at least--to be a year of great memoirs, none more so than the top choice on our list of the 50 best books of 2005: Joan Didion's witheringly exact story of a daughter's illness, a husband's sudden death, and a wife and mother's bewildering grief, The Year of Magical Thinking. Browse further in our list of the year's best, on which Didion is followed by these favorites:
What were our bestselling books of 2005? Three guesses--and the first two don't count--for the book at the top of the list: the penultimate volume in J.K. Rowling's phenomenal series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, in which Rowling's amazing imagination once again met almost unimaginable expectations. The rest of the year's bestsellers included both the familiar and the unexpected, including contrarian social science from Malcolm Gladwell, a debut Dracula epic, a Princeton professor's little essay on a well-known barnyard epithet, and these books, which follow Harry Potter at the top of the list:
If Tom Friedman can call his latest book a "Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," we thought we could take a more modest look back and make some early choices for the best books of the decade so far. Yes, you'll find The World Is Flat there, along with dozens more of our editors' picks and customers' favorites since 2000, including list-toppers like Life of Pi and Random Family. See our choices and your bestselling favorites:
Dr. Christiane Northrup's Mother-Daughter Wisdom blends expert clinical research with personal stories to illuminate one of the central relationships in human life. It's a source of both practical resources and inspiring revelations, and it made a strong enough impression on us that it topped our best-of-the-year lists in both Health, Mind & Body and Parenting & Families. Among the books that joined it on the former list:
Robert Sabuda has single-handedly reinvented the possibilities of pop-up books, and each year he stuns us again with new advances in his one-of-a-kind art. This year, in his collaboration with Matthew Reinhart, Encyclopedia Prehistorica: Dinosaurs, he makes everyone's favorite extinct monsters come alive in spectacular three dimensions. (Just take a look at our interior image of T. rex snarling out from the page and try not to scream.) Our choices for the top 10 children's picture and pop-up books of 2005 also include these picks:
