Best of the Best of the Books of 2003
Thanks to fimocoulous for compiling the canonical best of 2003 list, which includes the best books. He'll add the Telegraph and Independent articles shortly. I didn't dump these lists into an Excel spreadsheet, but from a quick scan I gleaned that the best of the best, i.e. the ones with cross-list and cross-continent appeal, are:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. By Mark Haddon

The Fortress of Solitude. By Jonathan Lethem

Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer's Reflections on Dealing With the Death Penalty. By Scott Turow

Gulag: A History. By Anne Applebaum

Brick Lane. By Monica Ali

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. By Lynne Truss

An honorable mention goes to "Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, which also ended up as contender for John Wilson's Worst Book of the Year. But that prize went to Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori.

If you review books on your blog, you might enjoy allconsuming's Top 100 most frequently mentioned books of 2003, produced from a purely numerical analysis of blogs.