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 We asked you to tell us the best book you read in 2006 and you responded in droves! Thanks to all of the fanatical readers who voted, and congratulations to this year's winners of the Golden Galoshes: Marley and Me and The Da Vinci Code.
We hope they will wear those galoshes with pride all year long. But, please, be careful in the rain: we're pretty sure gold is neither waterproof nor ideal for splashing in puddles. We suggest they be used in a decorative fashion, perhaps on a mantle or under glass. Congratulations to every book that was read and loved by someone in the past year! And if there's a title on this list you haven't read yet, may we humbly suggest you get cracking. You still have all those new books to devour before next year's Puddly Awards!
 While we were asking you to cast your Puddly votes, we also asked our fellow Powell's employees to name the best book they read last year. As a bonus, our fifty favorites are listed here.
1.Marley and Me
by John Grogan 2.The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown 3.The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini 4.Cell
by Stephen King 5.Cross
by James Patterson 6.A Fine Balance
by Rohinton Mistry 7.Eragon
by Christopher Paolini 8.Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
by J. K. Rowling 9.Lisey's Story
by Stephen King 10.The Memory Keeper's Daughter
by Kim Edwards 11.Angels and Demons
by Dan Brown 12.Brother Odd
by Dean Koontz 13.For One More Day
by Mitch Albom 14.Mayflower
by Nathanieal Philbrick 15.The Road
by Cormac McCarthy The Road is Cormac McCarthy's darkest, most poetic book in years. In a post-apocalyptic, razed landscape (which, though archetypal, feels frighteningly plausible), McCarthy poses questions of survival, good and evil, and what makes us human. Jill, Powells.com 16.The Omnivore's Dilemma
by Michael Pollan 17.The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger 18.The Book Thief
by Marcus Zusak 19.The Innocent Man
by John Grisham 20.Life of Pi
by Yann Martel 21.My Sister's Keeper
by Jodi Picoult "Picoult's timely and compelling novel will appeal to anyone who has thought about the morality of medical decision making and any parent who must balance the needs of different children. Highly recommended." Library Journal 22.Shadow of the Wind
by Carlos Ruiz Zafon "If you thought the true gothic novel died with the 19th century, this will change your mind. Shadow is the real deal....Be warned, you have to be a romantic at heart to appreciate this stuff, but if you are, this is one gorgeous read." Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly 23.Water for Elephants
by Sara Gruen "One of the many pleasures of this novel is the opportunity to enter a bizarrely coded and private world with its own laws, superstitions and vocabulary....The pleasures of that world were so compelling, so detailed and vivid, that I couldn't bear to be torn away from it for a single minute." Chicago Tribune 24.The Echo Maker
by Richard Powers "It's a tribute to Powers's nimble plotting that the mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition.... Powers accomplishes something magnificent." Colson Whitehead, The New York Times Book Review 25.The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls "Walls's journalistic bare-bones style makes for a chilling, wrenching, incredible testimony of childhood neglect. A pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, thoroughly American story." Kirkus Reviews 26.Running with Scissors
by Augusten Burroughs "Burroughs has written an entertaining yet horrifying account that isn't for the squeamish: the scatological content and explicit homosexual episodes may limit its appeal. Recommended for the adventurous seeking an unsettling experience among the grotesque." Library Journal 27.Three Junes
by Julia Glass "The artful construction of this seductive novel and the mature, compassionate wisdom permeating it would be impressive for a seasoned writer, but it's all the more remarkable in a debut....In this dazzling portrait of family life, Glass establishes her literary credentials with ingenuity and panache." Publishers Weekly 28.Anansi Boys
by Neil Gaiman "Anansi Boys is Neil Gaiman's best novel yet. It may lack the epic scope of American Gods, but page for page it provides a higher level of satisfaction. This is Gaiman at his wittiest, most uninhibited; we feel the author having fun with his creations, and the sensation is infectious. Filled to the brim with strong characters and a personable narration as entertaining and off the cuff as the voice Gaiman uses in his online journal, Anansi Boys is pure reading pleasure." Chris Bolton, Powells.com 29.Black Swan Green
by David Mitchell "Mitchell has written another complex novel, in which multiple themes run like streams of extra data beneath every incident, and understanding comes by the process of reading into a satisfying tangle of metaphor and reference. It is the best kind of contemporary fiction." M. John Harrison, The Times Literary Supplement 30.Fairest
by Gail Carson Levine "In an alluring companion novel that some readers may argue even surpasses Ella Enchanted, Levine gives a visionary rendering of the Snow White tale that challenges conventional ideas of beauty." Publishers Weekly 31.Eldest
by Christopher Paolini "Eldest roars along from beginning to end. The author's writing has matured and he has developed great skill at layering his themes as they build to an exciting climax." BookReporter.com 32.Executioner's Song
by Normal Mailer "The big book no one but Mailer could have dared...absolutely astonishing." Joan Didion, New York Times Book Review 33.Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer "[B]eautifully designed second from the gifted young author....[A] riveting narrative....[A] brilliant fiction works thrilling variations on, and consolations for, its plangent message: that 'in the end, everyone loses everyone.' Yes, but look what Foer has found." Kirkus Reviews 34.Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro "In this luminous offering, [Ishiguro] nimbly navigates the landscape of emotion — the inevitable link between present and past and the fine line between compassion and cruelty, pleasure and pain." Booklist 35.Thirteenth Tale
by Diane Setterfield "The Thirteenth Tale is a book that you wake in the middle of the night craving to get back to....Like a childhood favorite, it is timeless, charming, pure pleasure to read." San Diego Union-Tribune 36.Apathy
by Paul Neilan "If Camus and Bukowski had written A Confederacy of Dunces and combined it with the screenplay for Office Space, it would have been this book. A triumphantly, weirdly hilarious comedy." Neal Pollack, author of Never Mind the Pollacks 37.Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell If you haven't read David Mitchell's previous novels, let Cloud Atlas be your introduction to his incredible imagination. Here six convincing and wonderfully realized worlds, filled with surprise and originality, loosely intermingle. Each story, inhabited with equally compelling characters, proves the genius of this amazingly gifted writer. Michal, Powells.com 38.Memoirs of a Geisha
by Arthur Golden "Wonderful, involving, intelligent, fascinating, and almost Dickensian in the way the characters inhabit the landscape, and the landscape permeates the characters. It's a unique, beautifully written book." Ann Beattie 39.A Million Little Pieces
by James Frey "Insistent as it is demanding.... A story that cuts to the nerve of addiction by clank-clank-clanking through the skull of the addicted... A critical milestone in modern literature." Orlando Weekly 40.Next
by Michael Crichton "Next is a novel about the implications of genetic research...a subject that requires all of Crichton's ingenuity to be stuffed into 400 or so pages along with all the sex, violence and skulduggery that the genre demands." Los Angeles Times 41.The Ruins
by Scott Smith "The book of the summer....There are no chapters and no cutaways — The Ruins is your basic long scream of horror. It does for Mexican vacations what Jaws did for New England beaches in 1975." Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly 42.Digging to America
by Anne Tyler "Tyler creates many blissful moments of high emotion and keen humor while broaching hard truths about cultural differences, communication breakdowns, and family configurations. This deeply human tale of valiantly improvised lives is one of Tyler's best." Booklist (Starred Review) 43.Dirty Job
by Christopher Moore "To keep a straight face while reading this book, one would have to be dead already and in the final stages of rigor mortis." Rocky Mountain News 44.Freakonomics
by Steven Levitt "If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt....Criticizing Freakonomics would be like criticizing a hot fudge sundae." Wall Street Journal 45.Fun Home
by Alison Bechdel Easily the best original graphic novel since Craig Thompson's Blankets! A breathtaking achievement as well as a riveting memoir in comic form, Fun Home boosts Alison Bechdel to the front ranks of today's finest autobiographical comic storytellers, right up there with Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, and Thompson. 46.March
by Geraldine Brooks In her follow-up to Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks has taken historical fiction to another dimension altogether. Using America's Civil War as her frame, she plants a famous (but deeply mysterious) literary figure at its center: Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's classic, Little Women. The result is a wholly original novel, a rich re-imagining of the nation's political and literary foundations, and arguably Brooks's finest work to date. Dave, Powells.com 47.Persepolis
by Marjane Satrapi "A dazzlingly singular achievement....Striking a perfect balance between the fantasies and neighborhood conspiracies of childhood and the mounting lunacy of Khomeini's reign, she's like the Persian love child of Spiegelman and Lynda Barry." Salon 48.A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith "Smith has a treasure lode and...in this one book she gives all of it away....The civilization of Smith's Williamsburg exists in very few living memories....[W]hen even these isolated signposts are gone, the spirit of the book, the lives and struggles it celebrates, will be with us, reminding us of who we were and who we still are." Robert Cornfield, New York Times Book Review 49.Twelve Sharp
by Janet Evanovich "Fans of the adventures of Stephanie Plum, hapless Trenton bounty hunter torn between two hunky bad boys, get what they want out of this installment..." Detroit Free Press 50.Worst Hard Time
by Timothy Egan A fresh, stirring look at the Dust Bowl and Depression, Timothy Egan follows the personal dramas of a handful of families, allowing their voices to reveal the environmental and human tragedies that rocked the nation. Grippingly detailed, this exciting yet compassionate work of history is difficult to put down. I enjoyed it to the last page. Michal, Powells.com
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