The Year in Books – 2007
There’s a big round-up feature over at PopMatters that I contributed to which casts a great wide net over the books of 2007 and tries to put them in some sort of order. Following is an excerpt from the main introduction, then a list of the books which I thought deserved inclusion. You can read the feature in its entirety here. Not a bad year, all things considered…
On reflection, book-wise, 2007 is going to be a hard one to put into easily digested perspective. Although it was the year that Oprah helped turbo-charge Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road into mainstream immortality, the book had actually been released the previous fall. As for other books of note, there were no real popular/critical breakouts whose success would ring down through the years. There was also, with James Frey rapidly receding into the distance and HarperCollins having already kicked Judith Regan to the curb, a disturbing paucity of controversies for the blogs to carp about. So what are we left with? A lot of lousy books, a number of good ones, and a very small number of great ones, which (sad to say) fit no real model.
Non-fiction
Whether it’s New Orleans, Sri Lanka, Chile, or Iraq, there is money to be made by companies specializing in the fiendish mutation that agitprop hellraiser Naomi Klein terms “disaster capitalism” in her book The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan). The ideologies may change, but the implements of the shock (“elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations, and skeletal social spending”) don’t ever seem to change, nor does the ever-yawning gulf between the wealthy few and the poor and powerless many. Klein convincingly argues in this crushingly pessimistic but magisterial work that the future could well be a “cruel and ruthlessly divided” place where “money and race buy survival”.
- Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (Random House)
- Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776-present by Michael Oren (W.W. Norton)
- Kafka by R. Crumb (Fantagraphics)
- God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens (Twelve)
- Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb by Mike Davis (Verso)
- Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
- Thick as Thieves: A Brother, a Sister–a True Story of Two Turbulent Lives by Steve Geng (Henry Holt)
Fiction
In between popping out more baroque, jokey space operas (Feersum Endjinn, Use of Weapons being two good examples), Iain Banks returns to the real world with books only marginally simpler and more based in reality. Like with his fantastic satire The Business, Banks’ newest novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale (MacAdamCage) finds a protagonist ensconced inside a fantastically powerful and wide-ranging private enterprise of the kind that fares far better inside novels than in the modern-day business climate. For decades, the Wopuld family has made its fortune off the proceeds from the fantastically successful board game, Empire!, which sounds like some addictive mixture of Diplomacy and Axis & Allies. On the eve of their selling out to the evil American Spraint Corporation, prodigal Wopuld son Alban is dug up out of his purposefully shabby council-state existence, hosed off, dragged to the grand Scottish estate and given the business by family members who want to sell and make themselves a mint. Although Banks ultimately vents one too many tiresome rants—his satiric lashings against the cartoonish Americans would have some sting if they weren’t so obvious and misplaced—for the most part this is a shrewdly observed and wincingly funny comedy of manners from an author who knows that behind every great wealth lies a great crime, but also that greater crimes can always be avoided in the future.
- Children of Hurin by J.R.R. Tolkien (Houghton Mifflin)
- Forgive Me by Amanda Eyre Ward (Random House)
- Harm by Brian Aldiss (Del Rey)
- The Headmaster’s Dilemma by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin)
- On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (Random House)
- Percy Gloom by Cathy Malkasian (Fantagraphics)
- The Year of Endless Sorrows by Adam Rapp (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
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