The Best Books of 2022, According to Barnes & Noble Booksellers

Don’t check that calendar: it is only October, not the end of the year. Regardless, many outlets seem to be racing to see who can release their best of the year lists fastest. Barnes and Noble already posted their Best Books of the Year list earlier this month, but they have just posted a separate list of 11 titles that were selected by their booksellers.

Booksellers nominated the “books they have felt the most pride in recommending to readers of all interests through the year.” B&N booksellers will now vote on their favorite, and the top book of the year will be announced November 14th.

Here are the finalists:

Surprisingly, only three of these titles overlap with B&N’s earlier Best Books of 2022 list: Lessons in Chemistry, Babel, and Skandar and the Unicorn Thief. Notably missing are come of the years’ biggest titles, like I‘m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy — though the booksellers featured Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, one of the year’s buzziest books, which was missing from that earlier list.

The booksellers’ list includes more obscure or narrowly focused books, like a history of hip-hop jewelry and a New Orleans cookbook, as well as a picture book.

This voting structure is an interesting middle ground between editors’ picks (like the New York Times’s Best Books of the Year) and public voting (like the Goodreads Choice Awards), which appears to allow for titles to get featured that would not likely show up in those other formats.

Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.