Amazon reveals ‘top billion novels of 2014’

Online vending giant Amazon has released its yearly “Best 1,000,000,000 Novels” list, and while the company admits that it was forced to make some tough choices in narrowing down the wide field of entries, it is confident the list contains this year’s very best fictional works.

“We’ve selected only the cream of the crop for this exclusive honor,” said Paloma Morgan, the company’s influential list czar.

A 10-person committee worked tirelessly to read the nearly 4.6 billion English-language novels that were published this year, a quarter of which were translations of foreign works.

While Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You” (no. 1) surprised few critics by reaching the top, many were baffled that Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See” (no. 804) and David Mitchell’s “The Bone Clocks” (no. 1045) did not get ranked higher.

Several little-known novels made the list, notably “Ice Blood” (no. 1,969,384), a graphic novel about vampire gamer frogs written by Lee Monahan, a high school student from Australia, and “The Missing Rune” (no. 32,349,304) the third novel in the Dragonscape series by Cleveland-area fantasy writer Sage Gorman. Last on the list is “To Do,” based on a stack of papers found in a London waste bin that some critics claim was not actually a novel manuscript, but just someone’s discarded list of reminders.

Amazon will be offering a Kindle package of the entire collection of one billion novels for one million dollars — “a bargain for anyone who is a prolific reader,” according to Morgan.