OK, we'll admit it, at Amazon.com, we're book lovers (actually, we're beyond being book lovers, we're book geeks) and we have always looked on the holidays as a chance to share with other people the books that we have loved over the past year or the books we knew they would love (while of course accumulating a sizable nightstand stack for ourselves at the same time). Wrestling with our siblings over a new comic-strip collection, staying up late on Christmas night trying to finish a new novel we got that morning, opening a package and realizing that someone else knows our tastes better than we know our own: other people might have had their eyes on toys or clothes or snow-blowers, but to us the holidays have always been about books. It's never hard to spot a book inside its wrappingùshake, shake, "Let me guess, a book?"ùbut the best books are packages inside packages themselves, continuing to hold surprises long after they've been opened.

Winter, for readers, is also the season of summing up, the time of awards and year's-best lists. Sure, top tens and prizes can never do full justice to the subtleties of good literature (or to the thrills of good pulp), but after a year's rush of new releases, reviews, and interviews, it's a pleasure to look back and see what other readers have chosen as the best of the tens of thousands of books released in North America each year. Armed with those lists, and with the heaps of books our friends and family have thought we would like, we settle in for a long literary hibernation. People may talk about "beach books" and "summer reading," but we tend to find the warm glow of a fire more conducive to reading than the bright glare of the sun. Now if only someone will give us the time to actually read the books we have stacked all around us.

Happy winter reading,
Marven Krug
General Manager, Canada

Steve Duda
Editor-in Chief, Canada

Tom Nissley
Literature Editor, Canada