Best Books of the Year: Lists Are Your Friend
I still think that word of mouth is the best way and most trustworthy way to find out about books. You find someone (or a site) that has similar tastes and then you can trust them and try something new or off base.
I love all the “best-of-the-year” lists. If you see enough of them you can make some good choices without regretting which book you pick.
- Here is Salon’s Their Favorite Things feature, which shows the favorite books of well-known “book personalities.” (note that Junot Diaz, author of my favorite book of the year, picked The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a book I thought was great. Word of mouth…).
- Salon’s favorite books of the year. They have Diaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on there. Shocker. Just go read it already.
- Amazon is a great place too. They have their top books of the year as well as the best-selling books of the year here. It’s a constant reminder that I have to read The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns already. Their number 2 book? Oscar Wao. Getting the picture yet?
- Slate has a lot of good articles, but their best of 2007 list is littered with several books I have never heard of. That’s a good thing, though. Lets expand our horizons people. They do have Tree of Smoke, which I’m super excited to read. Also Then We Came to The End, which I will read pretty soon. And What is the What by Dave Eggers, which was really good.
- I think Metacritic can be a very useful site when it comes to finding out more about a video game, a book, or a movie. But they don’t have a best books of 2007 list yet. You can look up their all-time best scores and a few from 2007 are near the top (Harry Potter, which I tried to get into but it didn’t work out). If you look closely you’ll see Then We Came to The End as the third highest score from 2007. Getting the point yet? One bad thing about this site: sometimes the reviews are way off or there aren’t enough reviews to properly weight a book in its place. Suite Francaise was the first book I blindly trusted from this site (I had never heard of it) since it was (and still is) the top rated book of all time. It was OK. It’s an unfinished book and the story doesn’t really go anywhere. The writing is good, yes, but the reviews are all great because she was a woman that died in a concentration camp as she was writing the book. Heroic, yes, but that alone doesn’t make a great book.
- Here’s a nice blog post with a collection of good “best of” links.
- Publisher’s Weekly and their list. They have a bunch of my own favorites on there, which is a good sign. They also have the best book no one’s ever heard about (in my opinion), Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman. Some great writing in that book.
- New York Magazine has a nice little feature on the best novels you’ve never read. Sure enough, umm, yeah, that’s four pages of books I’ve never even heard of. There is an infinite number of books in the world people, deal with it. Their number one pick? David Markson’s The Last Novel and Vanishing Point. Ah, yup, never heard of them. But I did try to read his Wittgenstein’s Mistress. My review? Yech. But David Foster Wallace likes it so I guess I can’t yech too loudly.
Go forth and read!
December 18th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Oooh, thanks for posting. I’d seen some of these, but always love new reading suggestions.
December 19th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Hope you find one you really like, it can be frustrating!
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