by Sarah Scire Picking favorites is almost always tricky business. For the staff of FSG, crowning just a few of the many books they read "the best of 2012" seemed close to impossible. There were last-minute additions, half-hearted apologies for self-interested choices, lengthy disclaimers about how all of the books they'd worked on were their favorites, and multi-part questions about eligibility ("This book was written almost two decades ago but first translated in 2012—with the exception of an excerpt two years ago. Does it count?"). Restricting everyone's favorites to books published in 2012 seemed unfair (and likely to start an uproar) so we chose to ask three questions we hoped would shed light on the staff's diverse reading habits:
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by Dan Piepenbring Three years ago, I was browsing a used bookstore in West Saugerties, NY when I came across an anomaly from FSG’s past. It was published in 1974. It was titled, simply, The Best. And it comprised . . . a list of things that are the best. You know, like the Best Electronic Pocket Calculator. The Best Pepperidge Farm Cookie. The Best Illustration of the “Convergence Theory” That Communist and Capitalist Societies Will Come Increasingly to Resemble One Another. If you’re confused, so was I. Actually, perusing the pages of The Best never fails to leave me a little flummoxed. Compiled with affection and not inconsiderable wit by Mssrs. Peter Passell and Leonard Ross, The Best is a strange and wonderful slumgullion of the helpful, the frivolous, and the unabashedly topical. The Library of Congress files it under “Consumer education” and “Curiosities,” neither of which quite works. It’s a book that seems almost stridently out of place in 2012, and for this reason, among others, it has a cherished space on my shelf.