In previous years, I've done "Best Of" lists for the year. This year, there's only three books that reached the level of excellence to my way of thinking.
- The Best Fiction of 2007 goes to ...Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. A comedic but serious novel of life-at-work: what happens when layoffs come to a Chicago advertising agency. The title is too hard to remember, but it's great. This book deserves a wider audience; I'm quite fond of it.
- Best Nonfiction of 2007 goes to ... The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. Essays on life, politics, and the media, all keenly observed with a sharp sense of humor and an abiding spirit of compassion. Saunders is known for his off-beat short stories; this was his first work of nonfiction, published at a nice price in paperback.
- Special Commendation for a book I read in 2007 that published previously ...The Road by Cormac McCarthy. OK, nothing funny about this one. I was an emotionally spent wreck after reading it. One of the rare books that changed the way I see the world. It's about a father and son trying to survive a post-Apocolyptic dystopian landscape; they have to head south before winter hits. Many of us look at the world and wonder why evil exists; I suspect McCarthy looks at the world and wonders just as seriously why there's good. His book shows a world of evil with a tiny speck of luminescent good that somehow, miraculously endures.
1 comment:
Hi, I'm on the waiting list for Then We Came to the End. I liked The Braindead Megaphone but for me, the dystopian vision of New Orleans presented in The Tin Roof Blowdown was far more haunting than anything in The Road, but you may disagree. (See Mark Timlin's review in the Independent).
Saunder was born in 1958 and he mentions reading Slaughterhouse Five for the first time while in the service (in 1983 if I'm not mistaken), and that he was a Republican at the time. I'm a little older than him, but I was never a Republican and I had a band when I was in my early 20s named after a Vonnegut novel. I guess I liked the literary essays the most.
Post a Comment