This is the first of what will probably be a short series of “best of 2007″ notes. My “best movies of 2007″ list will have to wait until I’ve seen a few that I missed. I hope to write out my “best albums I bought in 2007″ entry sometime in the next couple of weeks. I did quite a bit of reading this past year, at least it was quite a bit by my standards of recent years. Most of the reading was done during slow hours at work but some was done at home before I started working and all of the final Harry Potter book I read at my apartment. Here is the list, as best as I can remember it, of all the books I began or finished in 2007, in order of how much I liked them. I liked every one of them, with the exception of one non-fiction book, but just liked some better than others, which is how two novels that won the Pulitzer Prize didn’t manage to crack my top 7.
fiction:
1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
2. The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie
3. The Human Stain by Philip Roth
4. The Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield (began in 2006, finished in 2007)
5. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
6. Tishomingo Blues by Elmore Leonard
7. The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield
8. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
9. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
10. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
11. Tides of War by Steven Pressfield
12. I Married A Communist by Philip Roth
incomplete: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon (began in October 2007 but not yet finished)
Nonfiction:
1. Now I Can Die in Peace… by Bill Simmons
This book is a collection of columns by Simmons, a sportswriter and lifelong Boston Red Sox fan. The book contains Red Sox-related columns written both in the years preceding their historic World Series win in 2004, and also during that season and afterwards. He also includes footnotes that sometimes serve as comments on past columns years after he’d written them and seen how they read in hindsight. Simmons is one of my favorite writers working today and his frequent pop culture references sprinkled in every column make him both frequently hilarious and occasionally insightful.
2. What If?, edited by Robert Cowley
I only read a few chapters of this. The book is an anthology of essays by historians talking about how history might have changed had certain landmark battles or events (such as the Battle of Salamis or Cortez’s conquest of the Aztecs) happened slightly differently. At times it’s a very fascinating read.
3. Hot Property: Screenwriting in the New Hollywood by Christopher Keane
This book purports to be a guide on how to write a good screenplay that will get noticed or can be sold to a studio. It has some interesting things to say but the book loses credibility with the many factual and spelling errors throughout the book, and becomes astoundingly self-promotional when the writer dedicates the last 100+ pages to a screenplay he was working on at the time, ostensibly to be used as an example of a written script, but it feels more like he’s just trying to get his script read by somebody. That was the only part of the book I didn’t finish because I read about 15 pages into his screenplay and stopped because it sucked. When you read that it’s little wonder that the author’s biggest screenwriting successes to date have been a couple of TV movies that aired on the USA network.
