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Letter to the editor

Colette's best books of 2007

An intrepid book critic takes a page from the list-makers and selects her top reads of the year. It's a hard job.

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published December 9, 2007

Along with brain-numbing quantities of holiday music and avalanches of gift catalogs, one sure sign we're approaching the end of the year is everybody's best-of lists.

Literary awards wind up in the fall with the Nobel and the National Book Awards, and "Best Books of 2007" lists weren't far behind in newspaper book review sections where they still survive.

An interesting new addition to the list roundup was released in November. The National Book Critics Circle invited its nearly 800 members to send in their picks for best fiction, nonfiction and poetry books they had read this year - just one title in each category.

About 300 of them did, and if you think it's easy for a book critic to select one favorite book out of a year's worth of reading - well, it took me days to decide.

Also invited to vote were winners and finalists in the NBCC's annual literary awards, given for fiction, general nonfiction, biography, autobiography or memoir, poetry and criticism. More than 100 of those writers voted, including Julia Alvarez, Jonathan Lethem, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley and John Updike.

The results, which were dubbed the NBCC's Best Recommended, were posted on the organization's blog, Critical Mass (bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com).

The list has five titles in each of three categories: fiction, nonfiction and poetry. The winners were chosen simply, by most individual votes received.

Fiction winners, ranked by vote totals: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz; Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson; The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon; Exit Ghost, Philip Roth; and Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson.

Nonfiction winners: Brother, I'm Dying, Edwidge Danticat; The World Without Us, Alan Weisman; The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein; Schulz and Peanuts, David Michaelis; and Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner.

Poetry winners, with a three-way tie for first place: Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, Robert Hass; Collected Poems: 1956-1998, Zbigniew Herbert; Gulf Music, Robert Pinsky; Next Life, Rae Armantrout; and Elegy, Mary Jo Bang.

So, if you've ever wondered what books the critics really like, now you know.

At Critical Mass, the NBCC also has lists of other books in each category that received multiple votes, as well as posts by a number of the voters about why they voted as they did.

For example, Alvarez (Once Upon a Quinceanera) writes that she voted for Peter Cameron's young adult novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You because it's "funny, smart and totally engaging. A sort of 21st century Catcher in the Rye."

Chauncey Mabe, the often-acerbic book editor at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, chose Brother, I'm Dying even though "I had always avoided Edwidge Danticat as a 'vegetable writer,' someone you were supposed to read because it was good for you." But he found her powerful memoir "a model of restraint and craftsmanship."

The NBCC plans to post a new Best Recommended list monthly in 2008. Actually, that's a relief. It will be easier to select my favorite book of the month.

All these lists and awards always leave me pining for the many wonderful books on them I haven't read yet. Even though it's my job as well as my passion, I never get to read everything I want to read - not even close.

But I did read some terrific books this year. Here is my Best of 2007 list, the books that, for a very wide variety of reasons, have delighted me the most and lingered longest in my mind.

Fiction: Returning to Earth, Jim Harrison; On Chesil Beach, Ian MacEwan; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling; Shadow Catcher, Marianne Wiggins; Bridge of Sighs, Richard Russo; and The Tin Roof Blowdown, James Lee Burke.

Nonfiction: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver; About Alice, Calvin Trillin; Due Considerations, John Updike; The Book of Vice, Peter Sagal; and I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert.

- - -

Finally, in November, a few weeks after his death, Norman Mailer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and countless other plaudits, got another award.

In London, the Literary Review announced that Mailer had won its 15th annual Bad Sex in Fiction award for his last novel, The Castle in the Forest.

The scene cited for the award describes the conception of Adolf Hitler (the book was the first of a proposed trilogy of novels about the Nazi dictator).

The scene is kind of a three-way among Hitler's father, Alois; his mother, Klara (who, in Mailer's version, is Alois' daughter by his half-sister; the whole family tree is gnarled with incest); and the devil himself.

I reviewed Castle, and, much as I admired Mailer and a lot of his work, I have to say he deserved the award. It's not so much that the sex in the book is crude and tasteless (one of the award criteria).

It's worse than all that: It's boring.

Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com.

[Last modified December 6, 2007, 16:23:57]