The New Year is just around the corner and what better way to celebrate its arrival than remembering the best books published in 2007? Every year since 1997, the editors of
The New Yor
k Times Book Review
have announced their choices for the
10 Best Books of the year , always one of the most-watched end-of-the
-year lists. All books reviewed in the Book Review since December of last year are eligible, which explains why two 2006 books (
Man Gone Down and Imperial Life in the Emerald City) made the
list. For those of you who would like to know more, you can also have a look at the
Times full list of
100 Notable Books from 2007.
Here are the best 10 titles as selected by the famous newspaper .
 The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme
Court
By Jeffrey Toobin (Doubleday $27.95)
An erudite outsider's account of the cloistered court's inner workings. "This is a remarkable, riveting book. So great are Toobin's narrative skills that both the justices
and their inner world are brought vividly to life." --Doris Kearns Goodwin
|
 Then We Came To The End
By Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown & Company, $23.99).
Layoff notices fly in Ferris's acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle. "Hilarious in a "Catch-22" way, but with an
undercurrent of sadness that works counterpoint to all the absurdity." -- Stephen King
|
 Out stealing Horses
By Per Petterson (Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22)
In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude. "Out Stealing Horses is tinged with an autumnal
sense of loss and the self-examination of an old man looking back on his life....This book is a minor masterpiece of death and delusion in a Nordic land." The Guardian (UK)
|
 The Rest Is Noise: Listening
to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker's music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music. "A work of immense scope and
ambition.... a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand 'more seeingly' in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly." --
Geoff Dyer |
 Tree Of Smoke
By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27)
The author of "Jesus' Son" offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War. "Once Johnson gets his hooks into you - it takes
about two sentences - it's . . . pretty much impossible to stop reading." -- David Gates |
 Little Heatens: Hard Times and High
Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. (Bantam Books, $22).
Kalish's soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy. "Not only trustworthy and useful, but also
polished by real, rare happiness. It is a very good book, indeed. In fact, it's averyveryverygoodbook." -- Elizabeth Gilbert |
 The Savage
Detectives
By Roberto Bolaño. (Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27).
A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas. "Bolaño, it seemed to me, hovers over many young Latin American writers, even those in their 40s, the
way Garciá Márquez must have over his generation and the following one." -- Francisco Goldman |
 Imperial Life In The
Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95).
The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogues the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America's governance of Iraq. "A visceral - sometimes sickening - picture of
how the administration and its handpicked crew bungled the first year in postwar Iraq. . . . Often reads like something out of Catch-22 or from M*A*S*H." -- The New York
Times |
 The Ordeal Of Elisabeth
Marsh: A Woman in World History
By Linda Colley. (Pantheon Books, $27.50).
Colley tracks the "compulsively itinerant" Marsh across the 18th century and several continents. "This is a remarkable book, both for its contents and because it is
a new species of biography... Linda Colley has written a full-blown economic romance with an extraordinary range... bringing all the resources of her skills as a historian and
researcher to her story. It is a major achievement and an enthralling narrative." --Claire Tomalin, The Guardian |
 Man Gone Down
By Michael Thomas (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14)
This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a coloured writer's life. "Powerful and moving . . . An impressive success . . .
[Thomas] knows how the odds are stacked in America. He knows the unlikelihood of successful black fatherhood. He knows that things are set up to keep the Other poor and the poor
in their place. More than anything else, he knows how little but also--fortunately--how much it can take to bring a man down." --Kaiama L. Glover |
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