Everything I write is in third person; how intimate or omniscient depending upon the work. I don’t particularly like first person, because it is so easy for the author to screw up and break the sense of a personal narrative. Example: I recently finished A Box Of Matches by Nicholson Baker. The book is written like journal entries, in first person. For the most part, it’s fine, but occasionally Baker has his narrator wax philosophical about things great and small, and in the first person context that kind of highfalutin (almost pompous) prose doesn’t work. The reader winds up thinking, “People don’t actually talk like that.” If a first person narrative does not remain very natural in its voice, the illusion breaks, so to speak.
I find that a lot of writing is done today in first person not so much because first person is a superior style, but because there is a bias in the literary world for first person (and against third person). It’s the product of snobbery as much as real literary value. And it leads to narrative chicanery. For instance, the OP listed The Lovely Bones as a third person narrative. An easy mistake to make, but it’s not: it’s written in first person. It’s really a third person narrative disguised as a first person narrative, something I was conscious of through every page I read. If you want to write a third person narrative, go ahead, write one; but maybe Sebold thought her literary peers would look down on her if she didn’t write in first person. Who knows?
Maybe I don’t like first person so much because it’s considered the more “modern” style, whereas my tastes run more toward old-fashioned prose. Older works tend more toward third peson, and those are the books I prefer. (This is especially true with older children’s books, which are almost always third person narratives. I read a lot of those books.)