As is my normal routine now, I’m sitting by the fire on my last night at home in Vermont for Christmas rounding up my favorite reads of the year (2006 and 2005 here). I’ve just finished Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” which is keeping with a theme for the year of epic, lengthy novels. Case in point: I read Denis Johnson’s “Tree of Smoke” earlier this fall, which won the National Book Award, but I think I read too much hype before I got into it and so was left disappointed.
Here are my top choices for the year:
1) Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez :: What a beautiful, heart-felt story. I loved the language and the story both.
2) The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman :: Perhaps the best history book I’ve read in years, this classic of the outbreak of World War I was a bit dry, but the writing was so good and Tuchman had such a wonderful style to her that I plowed through all these Prussian generals regardless.
3) The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham :: Maugham was a big influence on Graham Greene, my favorite author, and you can see it throughout this book. I’d never read Maugham before, but I thought the writing and pictures of a very different world were wonderful.
4) The Company by Robert Littell :: An epic tale of the CIA that, towards the end of the year, became a surprisingly good miniseries on TNT, this story spans almost fifty years of U.S., world, and CIA history as it charts a series of friendships from post-war Yale.
5) The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier :: This is a simple, beautiful book, translated from French, about love, parties, and life. I read it in a single train ride back from New York where my FSG editor’s assistant pressed it into my hand. She’d worked on it with the translator, her other boss Lorin Stein, an immensely talented editor who managed to edit three of the five NBA finalists for the year, including the above-mentioned “Tree of Smoke.” I’ve since bought a dozen copies to give as gifts to friends and they have all loved it too. And: It’s all true!
6) Animal Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver :: I read this in France this summer and it made me want to move back to Vermont and grow my own food. There’s a romance to it that you have to love rural life fully to appreciate.
7) What It Takes by Robert Ben Cramer :: This is the book that destroyed the campaign book genre. No one will ever write one as good as this again simply because people are too self-conscious of this type of story now to let it happen.
8) Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White :: White invented the campaign book and the amazing thing about them is how well they hold up as historical artifacts, still seeming lively and fascinating some half-century later. I also read 1964, which was also very good.
9) Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney :: Another classic, this a tale of the New Yorker during the glory drug-fueled days of the 1980s. Hard not to main character, despite his faults and it has many classic characters like the ghost editor as well.
10) World Without Us by Alan Weisman :: A fascinating thought experiment of imagining how nature would overtake and remake the human landscape if humans disappeared. It’s amazing how transient even our most permanent contributions are when put in a geologic, natural timeframe.
Also for 2007, here’s a new category: The most disappointing book I read was “Mergers and Acquisitions,” by Dana Vachon, for which I had very high hopes to be the “Devil Wears Prada” for men. It wasn’t. I did read “Devil Wears Prada” earlier this year and loved it, but M&A didn’t even come close. And the author got a huge advance for it. Sigh.
[Check here for my past lists: 2006, 2005, and 2004.]
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