Best Book is the one category in which we give our readers an opportunity to vote on something our staff does not have the option to select. This is something we have enjoyed doing in the past that we almost came to regret this year. Why? For most of the balloting process, Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol was winning. Whereas in Best Picture and Best Videogame, you didn't choose to reward name recognition, Best Book bordered on being The Da Vinci Category for far too long.

In the end, a surprise candidate usurped the title as The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution attained suspiciously strong support at the end to win the category. Meanwhile, a couple of writings we had expected to contend for Best Novel fell just short. Those works, Chuck Hogan and Guillermo del Toro's The Strain, the rarest of rare (in the 2000s anyway) quality vampire novel and Stephen King's Under the Dome finished in third and fourth place, respectively. Lev Grossman's urban fantasy novel, The Magicians, rounds out the top five.





BOP fave Chuck Klosterman's Eating the Dinosaur is the attention getter from the rest of the top ten. Those of you who enjoy reading books before they are adapted into novels should join your fellow BOP readers in flipping through Wolf Hall, as the Man Booker winner is a mortal lock to be developed into a movie at some point down the line. I also love that this crowd would vote for something like Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. BOP's readership is a strange mix of gothic romance fans and economics professors.

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