Kirkus Reviews 'Best of Fiction 2012'

       The 'best books of the year'-lists keep coming (even as the year has not come to a close), and while I find them moderately interesting they also remind me that I seem to be living (and reviewing) in some sort of alternate universe: not that I requested any of them, but publishers did not send me a single title on, say, the Publishers Weekly top 10 list (and I've only seen two of the eighteen on the fiction list).
       So I'm somewhat surprised to find four titles I have seen and read among the Kirkus Reviews Best of Fiction 2012: The Top 25:

• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
• The Investigation by Philippe Claudel
• Lazarus is Dead by Richard Beard
• The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

       And there are even more on the extended list of The 100 books on this year's fiction.

       As to my own 'books of the year' ... well, it'll certainly have to wait until the year is actually over and done with before I concern myself with that.