Books of the year
January 1, 2008
With the new year upon us, and a host of year’s best lists all around, I thought I’d add to the cacophony with my own best books of 2007. It’s really a list of the books I’ve read this year that are my favorites, almost none of them were written or published in ‘07.
Do you have any favorites for ‘07? Please let me know, I’m always looking for something new and interesting.
To another year of reading ahead of us, Happy New Year!
Fiction
Margaret Atwood - The Penelopiad
Jorge Luis Borges - A Universal History of Iniquity
Jorge Luis Borges - Dreamtigers
Italo Calvino - The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Miguel De Cervantes - Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman
J.M. Coetzee - Waiting For The Barbarians
Cormac McCarthy - No County For Old Men
Orhan Pamuk - My Name Is Red
Orhan Pamuk - Snow
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows
Salman Rusdie - Shalimar The Clown
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Non-Fiction
Reza Aslan - No god but God - The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam
Jean Baudrillard - The Consumer Society
John Dewey - Art as Experience
Thomas L. Friedman - The World is Flat
Craig Harbison - The Mirror of the Artist, Northern Renaissance Art in its Historical Context
Photography and Art Books
Mitch Epstein - Recreation
Paul Graham - American Night
Paul Graham - Empty Heaven
Andreas Gursky - (from the Istanbul Museum of Art)
Marco Livingstone - Pop Art, A Continuing History
Tod Papageorge - Passing Through Eden
James Meyer, editor - Minimalism, Themes and Movements
Martin Parr - Small World
Martin Parr and Gerry Badger - The Photobook: A History volume I and II
Taryn Simon - An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar
January 1, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Interesting choices. I’d put The Road over No Country for Old Men. There’s a stark beauty in the way McCarthy captures the father-son traveling that I haven’t found in the other books of his that I’ve read.
January 1, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] mathew pokoik - blog/news added an interesting post on Books of the yearHere’s a small excerpt [...]
January 7, 2008 at 3:14 pm
mathew (and others),
I just finished a great read. “A Great Improvisation…Franklin, France and the Birth of America” by Stacy Schiff. Pulitzer winner , 2005. The first 50 pages can be overwhelming w/ so many personalities to keep track of, but I was reading passages aloud to my wife every few pages. I have a new appreciation for diplomacy, generosity, the complexity of history, the national cultures of France and America, the rollercoasting nature of events, and the wonder of not knowing what could happen next. Not to mention of Franklin himself. Whew!
January 7, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Wow, thanks Lynn, I’ve been glancing about lately looking for some good early american history reading. I’ll check it out.