2008 Best Books Lists

Looking for gifts of the literary kind? Check out these best books lists.

School Library Journal's best books for children/young adults. If you're shopping for an older teen who doesn't read YA, check out their Best Adult Books for High School Students.

The Horn Book presents its annual Fanfare (all children's literature).

Library Journal's Best Books 2008 list.

You can download the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 2008 Holiday Gift Guide here.


Washington Post's Best Books of 2008. The Washington Post is one of the few newspapers that regularly covers children's books. The list is helpfully divided into children, pre-teens, and teens.

Publishers Weekly's best books list. Children's/YA books are at the end of the list.

The New York Times's annual holiday gift guide. Includes children's/YA literature.

Entertainment Weekly is my pop culture magazine of choice, and is the pop culture magazine that pays serious attention to book news and reviews. Includes a list for children's/YA literature. Also check out EW's book database.

Paste Magazine primarily focuses on alternative/folk/independent music, but they also cover movies, television, books, etc. They asked a bunch of authors to name their picks.

The Los Angeles Times has many lists, which you can find here.

NPR (National Public Radio) selects its favorite reads of the year.


New York Magazine has several lists: Top 10, Top 10 Graphic Novels, and The Year in Superlatives.

The Christian Science Monitor, which will become an online-only newspaper in 2009, selects the best novels of 2008.

The New York Daily News asked authors to pick their favorite Latino books of 2008.

The Economist picked the best reads of 2008 (heavy on nonfiction, unsurprisingly).

The Millions blog features its contributors' best reads of 2008.

Surely you'll find something here, no?

Happy reading to everyone!

If you're in the library, pick up our own holiday gift guide ideas. Stop by the adult and/or children's reference desks for the lists. We have separate lists for children, teens, and adults.

(Thanks to the Readerville Forum for many of these links).