New York Times Names 10 Best Books of 2007

The New York Times has named its top 10 books for 2007. Visit their web site to read the full book reviews. The library currently owns 6 of the titles and the rest are on order. Happy reading!

Fiction:

1. Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
   
2. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.


3. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.


4. Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.


5. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

Nonfiction:

1. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.


2. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.


3. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin. An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.


4. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by Linda Colley. Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.


5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross. 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.