Picks: Oprah's Return, Barnes & Noble's 2013 Favorites, and More

Publishers Lunch

Oprah's Semi-Annual Book Club 2.0[.3] will promote Sue Monk Kidd's Indie Next No. 1 pick THE INVENTION OF WINGS, set for publication on January 7. She says in the announcement, "These strong female characters represent the women that have shaped our history and, through Sue’s  imaginative storytelling, give us a new perspective on slavery, injustice and the search for freedom."

Winfrey's last selection was The Twelve Tribes of Hattie a year ago, and her post-broadcast book club started with Cheryl Strayed's WILD in June 2012. (Prior to that, her last selection while her syndicated talk show aired was Charles Dickens' GREAT EXPECTATIONS and A TALE OF TWO CITIES.

Target's January Book Club Pick is CALLING ME HOME by Julie Kibler.

The Grammy nominations for best spoken word audio feature titles by Carol Burnett, Stephen Colbert, Billy Crystal, David Sedaris and Pete Seeger.

USA Today's critics picked their top 10 books, ratifying our consensus top novelists from yesterday's updated aggregation: Kate Atkinson, Jhumpa Lahiri, Philipp Meyer, and Donna Tartt.

Atkinson, Lahiri, and Tartt also featured in Barnes & Noble's Best New Books of 2013 list for fiction, while consensus nonfiction front-runners David Finkel and George Packer made it onto the bookseller's nonfiction list. Those full lists are:

Fiction
And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini
Bleeding Edge, Thomas Pynchon
The Circle, Dave Eggers
The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt
The Good Lord Bird, James McBride
How the Light Gets In (Armand Gamache Series #9), Louise Penny
Inferno, Dan Brown
The Interestings, Meg Wolitzer
Life After Life, Kate Atkinson
The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman
The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert
Someone, Alice McDermott
TransAtlantic, Colum McCann

Nonfiction
Book of Ages, Jill Lepore
The Bully Pulpit, Doris Kearns Goodwin
Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings
David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell
Days of Fire, Peter Baker
Empress Dowager Cixi, Jung Chang
Empty Mansions, Bill Dedman
The Guns at Last Light, Rick Atkinson
Hyperbole and a Half, Allie Brosh
Lawrence in Arabia, Scott Anderson
Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg
The Reason I Jump, Naoki Higashida
Thank You for Your Service, David Finkel
The Unwinding, George Packer
Zealot, Reza Aslan

BN also provided best of lists for children and for teens.