When LJ’s book review editors gathered to choose best books recently, a controversy emerged. Some of us were stumping for titles—Eloisa James’s Paris in Love, Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things—that were, at least in part, previously published on the web. But should they qualify for our august listing? Was rehashed material good enough? Did Facebook postings count as previously published? Were they even books?

As you can see from our lists—these ten bests and 16 other great reads that struck us as noteworthy in 2012—we decided that there’s no shame in a lowly birth.

Your patrons will be the beneficiaries: the advice in Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things, to pick the blog-turned-book that made our top ten, is so far from Ann Landers as to almost be a different genre, one that we at LJ now call “makes you cry on the subway.”

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, one of our “More of the Best,” is the one that gave me pause. Its style reminds me of a cross between David Foster Wallace’s work (think lots of footnotes) and my childhood favorite, Bunty magazine, in which parenthetical asides made clear that the author’s deadly wit was being held in check by a boring editor. But Lawson’s is a different bird altogether. Tales of her childhood surrounded by (and sometimes inside) the weird products of her father’s taxidermy career will have you crying alright but with laughter.

The other “Internet book,” James’s Paris in Love, is the Facebook title, and it’s perfect escapism, describing the author’s sabbatical year in the city with her family. (Readers who’ve complained in the past that nobody reads our best books: here you go.)

We’re breaking other new ground, too, with two “best” write-ups for the same title. It’s Suzanne Joinson’s romantically titled A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar. This book has been on my towering side-of-the-bed pile for a while, and it’s clearly time I got to it as it gets an in-house nod from the editor of our Prepub Alert column, Barbara Hoffert, and one from Jane Henrickson Baird of Anchorage PL, AK, an LJ reviewer of historical fiction.

As usual, we find ourselves bursting with more recommendations than our pages can accommodate. For more bests, including how-to titles; other LJ staffers’ picks; and the top audio and video offerings of the year, see all of our Best of… posts.—Henrietta Thornton-Verma