Top 20 Books I Read in 2007

I've been posting book reviews in here for most of the year. Here's a compilation of my top twenty--fiction (12) and non-fiction (8). The titles are linked to their pages in Amazon.com.

Fiction

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002) was the best book I read of any kind in 2007 and one of the 10-20 best novels I've ever read. Eugenides' sprawling tale of the Greek immigrant experience as told by recovering hermaphrodite Calliope Stephanides is rollicking, insightful, fascinating and often hilarious. Calliope/Cal is the best fictional narrator I've met since John Irving's T.S. Garp.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007) was other than Harry Potter VII, probably the most eagerly anticipated novel of 2007. In my view, transplanted Afghani-American author Hosseini outdid his previous publishing sensation The Kite Runner in this touching story of life over 40 years in Afghanistan from the perspective of two women. Less sentimental and dependent on coincidence than The Kite Runner, Hosseini's new book provides a poignant and often harrowing look at the life of females in the Islamic world.

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (2006) was the most readable novel I encountered in 2007, averaging about one-and-half days per reader in my household. Gruen takes the reader under the big top of a Depression-era traveling circus for a show an order of magnitude more entertaining than Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey's current version. Truth proves to be just as strange as fiction, as Gruen populates the story with vignettes discovered in her research about circus life of the era.

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver (1988) was this fine author's first novel and first of two stories (along with Pigs in Heaven) about Taylor Greer and her young charge Turtle. Kingsolver's writing is impressive in so many ways. As a trained biologist she handles the botany implied by the title effortlessly, as she does the touching relationship between adult and child. Her first-hand knowledge of Kentucky and Arizona, her two homes, also shines through. The Bean Trees is a wonderful book for readers of all ages.

Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns (1984) came to me via my ninth-grader's summer reading list. After being diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, Ms. Burns wrote this novel about life in small town Georgia during the early years of the 20th century based on the recollections of her grandfather. The result is a warm and funny book that shimmers with authenticity of place and time.

Peace Like a River by Leif Enger (2001) is another debut novel from my daughter's summer reading list. (I'm impressed by the literary acumen of the high school English department.) Enger tells a story set in rural Minnesota during the 1960s about the fascinating Land family, spiritual father Jeremiah, asthmatic son (and narrator) Reuben, violent older son Davey, and precocious daughter Swede. A highlight is Swede's ongoing epic poem about the Old West. Peace Like a River is a well-written and touching novel about family and the nature of miracles--touching even to a reason-based UU like me.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2007) was his much awaited followup to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Chabon's fabulous imagination is again the centerpiece of his Jewish whodunit wrapped in the alternate history of a US-leased Sitka District in Alaska inhabited by Jews who lost the Israeli war for independence in 1948. The world of an imagined Judeo-Eskimo community is a particular treat. Chess and a kosher Mafia fit into the story as well. Free your mind and enjoy the amazing talent of Michael Chabon.

On Chesil Beach by British author Ian McEwen (2007), more novella than novel, is an intensely personal story of the sexual intiation of a newlywed couple on their honeymoon in the U.K. of the 1960s. Almost uncomfortably intimate with his characters at times (but without becoming pornographic), McEwan makes an excellent point about the impact of communication or lack thereof in a relationship. For adults only.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2007) was my introduction to this celebrated author. His unadorned, almost free verse style fits well with a bleak story of a man and his son in the U.S. after some sort of apocalyptic event that devastates both the population and the landscape. About the same time as I read The Road, I watched the Italian movie Life Is Beautiful . While more comic in nature, the story arc and the relationship between Guido and Joshua in "Beautiful" took me back just a month to the story of father and son in "The Road." I highly recommend both the novel and the film.

The Company by Robert Littell (2002) provides a captivating look at the history of the CIA and KGB during the Cold War through the adventures of both fictional and historical characters. You'll recognize Kim Philby, the Hungarian revolt, the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan among other historical characters and events. Fictional spies recruited from Ivy League colleges work their way through the ranks to play roles in all the mayhem. The Company is my favorite spy novel, though I haven't read many.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (2005) tells the story of Lily and Snow Flower, two "old sames" in 19th century rural China. This complicated relationship, akin to marriage between two women in parallel with traditional male/female marriages) carries on for 70-plus years. The two women communicate using the nu shu language (unknown to men) on their "secret fan." Ms. See writes both prose and poetry adeptly as she tells the story of this little-known aspect of Chinese history.

Spud by John van der Ruit (2007) was a publishing sensation in van der Ruit's native South Africa. He tells the coming-of-age-at-boarding-school story of young John "Spud" Milton, so nicknamed for the slow pace of his pubescent development, who develops in many other ways as he struggles to survive in a world of crazy classmates, sadistic upperclassmen, drunken teachers, from whom his only escape is the occasional weekend visit to the maniacal world of his parents and grandmother, Wombat. Mostly hilarious to non-boarding school veterans, and both hilarious and relevant to such graduates, Spud is a waiting joy for both teenage and adult readers.

Fiction Honorable Mention - What is the What by David Eggers, Jesus Out to Sea: Stories by James Lee Burke, Going Postal by Terry Pratchett, Landsman by Peter Charles Melman, Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult, The Master and Margarita by Michael Bulgakov, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling, Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, and Pigs in Heaven by Barbara Kingsolver.

Non-Fiction/Biography

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (2006) - I've already posted a review of this important book in here twice and on Amazon.com. Here's a link to the dadlak review.

Clemente: The Passion and Grace of Baseball's Last Hero by David Maraniss (2004) - I had trouble reading this excellent biography of the late baseball star and Puerto Rican icon, Roberto Clemente, because I knew it would end tragically. Near the end of his Hall of Fame career, a plane carrying both Clemente and relief supplies from Puerto Rico to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua crashed into shark-infested waters off the island. Maybe by delaying reading about his death I could somehow delay its reality, or at least its renewed emotional impact. Clemente helped me understand how a great baseball player, who was so much more than that, journeyed to his fateful and heroic end.

In The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth E. O. Wilson (2006) appeals to fundamental Christians (as one of which he was raised) to consider the commonality of their beliefs--that the miracle of creation, whether made by God in seven days, or evolved after the Big Bang over a period of billions of years, is something worth saving. He goes on to demonstrate how humans, the supposed lords of the earth, depend of the rest of nature for their continued existence. Whether you come at the subject from the scientific or religious perspective, or from somewhere in between, you'll gain a broad perspective on the issue of global sustainability and mankind's role in the struggle. Highly recommended to all readers--middle school on up--even a 5th or 6th grader with a strong interest in nature could enjoy and learn from Wilson's short but powerful book.

1 Dead in Attic by Chris Rose (2007) - The most personal book I've read about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans is this collection of newspaper columns from New Orleans Times Picayune writer Chris Rose. Proving that living somewhere involves more than occupying a house there, Rose seemingly suffers the trauma of all New Orleanians, even though his own house and family endure essentially no damage from the storm (other than a four-month relocation of wife and children to Maryland). The title refers to words painted on the side of a house as a message to recovery crews. More than a year after the storm, the words are still on that house. 1 Dead in Attic stands as a chronicle of the Katrina's impact on one man and his city.

Nine Hills to Nambonkaha by Sarah Erdman (2003) is a wonderful first-person account of a young Peace Corps worker's experiences in Ivory Coast in 2000 and 2001. She served as a health care worker, primarily trying to teach the village women about prenatal health and infant care. AIDS became an issue while she was there. Erdman shows maturity beyond her years in her efforts to relate with people of all ages and stations in a little village as remote from her private school upbringing as could be imagined. Both her work with the local people within their culture and her writing skills are inspiring, hopefully enough so to cause other young people to serve the world and themselves in similar fashion.

The Subway Chronicles: Scenes from Life in New York by Jacquelin Cangro (editor) (2006) - You'll recognize some of the authors in this entertaining collection of essays surrounding the New York City subway system--Calvin Trillin for sure, novelist Jonathan Lethem and others, but many of the essays result from Ms. Cangro's successful http://www.thesubwaychronicles.com/ website--launched after an idea born at Thanksgiving dinner with friends--and as such are written by hoping-to-be-published writers. Ms. Cangro has done an admirable job with the material--chasing the pace and style of the essays to keep the subject fresh for the reader. The book also offers a feel for the psyche of the urban dweller--folks who live their life without a car--an unimaginable state of being in the small town or suburban life (or even big city like LA or Houston) that has come to dominate American culture.

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama (2006) - As an almost lifelong Democrat, I was a ready-made candidate to enjoy Barack Obama's second book. Obama's comfortable writing style almost makes you forget that you're reading a policy outline, though he does provide a good deal of background about his views on the Constitution and about his personal experiences. What's especially encouraging is his even-handed approach to issues--carefully considering and respecting where those who might oppose his position are coming from. I encourage people from all political backgrounds to learn more about Senator Barack Obama. The Audacity of Hope is a good place to start.

The Cold War and the Color Line by Thomas Borstelmann (2001) focuses on the presidencies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson during the U.S. civil rights era. Borstlemann describes how America's racial segregation, and support of European colonial powers and the segregationist regime in South Africa hampered it as third world countries as they chose between capitalist/democratic systems and the Communist model. Bortelsmann also notes that the presidents doing the most in support of civil rights were those who grew up in the South--Truman desegregated the military; Johnson passed the Voting Rights Act, and both Carter and Clinton took a strong interest in the rights of both African-Americans and blacks in Africa. On the other hand, the presidents raised outside the South (Eisenhower in Kansas, Kennedy in Massachusetts, Nixon in California, Reagan in Illinois and Bush in Connecticut) viewed racial equality as a secondary issue at best, or in some cases even worked to reverse past gains. Highly recommended to students of history and race relations.

Non-Fiction Honorable Mention - Bagels and Grits by Jennifer Moses, Breach of Faith by Jed Horne, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson.

Book Reviews - July with Morrie, Meyer and McCarthy

Here are the books I finished in July 2007. This was a diverse set--ranging from "historical" fiction at its most fictional (the Chabon book) to a non-fiction book from my own backyard, as it were (Horne's book on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans).

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My introduction to McCarthy was this unforgettable short novel about a man and his son making their way on the road in a post-apocalyptic America of the near future. McCarthy's prose is spare, even Spartan, echoing the barren landscape that the main characters encounter. As you'd expect, survival is a theme throughout the book--survival in the face of starvation, and survival in the face of others who are dealing with the same situation in more brutal ways.

Along with the simple, almost poetic language (unadorned with even much punctuation) McCarthy brings the story to the reader with descriptions of the havoc a nuclear holocaust and nuclear winter would bring upon everyday life and the earth we take for granted. There's no "Mad Max" post-apocalyptic new world full of crazies--just "good guys" and "bad guys" doing heroic, brave and sometimes unspeakably ugly things to survive in a world that's at once both unimaginable and all too real.

What shines light into what otherwise would be an almost relentlessly bleak story is the developing relationship between the father and his son. To say more would ruin the story.

I watched the Italian movie Life Is Beautiful right before I wrote this review. It's about life in Italy before and during World War II for an Jewish-Italian waiter and his wife and young son. From their fairy tale pre-war existence they're transported to a concentration camp, where father and son are put in the men's wing and mother is sent to the women's wing. While more comic in nature, the story arc and the relationship between Guido and Joshua in "Beautiful" took me back just a month to the story of father and son in "The Road." I highly recommend both the novel and the film.

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent by Julia Alvarez

Ms. Alvarez writes about her two homelands, the Dominican Republic and the United States, with such believability that I kept checking to see if I was reading a memoir rather than a novel (it's the latter). Her most famous work, In the Time of the Butterflies, is her imagined account of the lives of historical people who gave their lives in resistance to General Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican in the first half of the 20th century. "Garcia Girls" covers some of the same period, but tells the story of girls who lived, eventually to emigrate to the U.S. to struggle in different ways.

The structure of the novel takes some getting used to as Alvarez writes from now to then--starting with vignettes about grown women and working her way back to stories about their early childhood in the Dominican. She also switches voices among the four sisters--each has a distinct personality and life, but their similarities had me checking back sometimes to remind myself exactly who was speaking.

Fans of Ms. Alvarez who haven't read this book should do so. Newcomers might better start with "Butterflies" and then try "Garcia Girls", given that the latter switches among both place and narrator ("Butterflies" does the latter as well), and works its way back in time. "Butterflies" also gives some historical perspective about life under Trujillo that is important to understand to appreciate the travels of the Garcia family. Both books are appropriate for teenagers as well as adults.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

As a sports fan, I was already familiar with lbom's work before this phenomenal little book came along. I stayed away from it for all these years, afraid that it would be a Pablum-encrusted little self-help volume. My wife bought the book and recommended it so I decided to invest three hours and join its long list of readers.

What I found was a relatively unsentimental and humanistic look at dying. Morrie of the title is an former sociology professor of the author who is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. A novelistic coincidence gets Mitch and Morrie back together after more than two decades for a series of Tuesday meetings to discuss important topics--family, marriage, faith, work, and of course dying (there were others, and I may not have these exactly right, working from memory). Morrie faces his predicament with amazing grace and courage. Or course, in sharing his soul with Mitch, Morrie helps Mitch find a bit of his own soul--a little sentimental, but okay in this context.

As a Unitarian-Universalist with an ambivalent view of what happens after death, "Tuesdays with Morrie" appealed to me with its message that life takes place on earth, primarily through our relationships with others. Career-oriented and otherwise driven people could benefit from taking three hours out to read this short and enlightening book about a man who lived and died on this own terms, making the world a better place in the process.

A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

No, it's not the story of the filly Ruffian's breakdown at Belmont Park. Rather, investigative reporter Sebastian Junger takes on a piece of his family's accepted history--that when he was less than a year old, neighbor woman Bessie Goldberg, living in the upscale Belmont section of suburban Boston, was killed by Albert DeSalvo, the infamous Boston Strangler, who at time of the murder was working on a remodeling job in the Junger home. At the time, an African-American man, Roy Smith, who had been cleaning inside the victim's house on the same day, was accused, tried and convicted of the murder.

Junger brings the eye of a seasoned investigator to the task, scrupulously mapping a timeline for the man convicted of the crime, and compiling a trove of details about DeSalvo and the other "Strangler" cases. Still, his prose is quite readable, resembling a novel moreso than an investigative piece, although the almost clinical approach belies the passion you might expect from such a violent story hitting so close to home.

I'll leave it to you to find out both your and Junger's conclusions. The descriptions of various murders are pretty grisly, so I'd restrict this one to adult readers.

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

When I read this book I was stunned by its imaginative premise--that the State of Israel failed in 1948 and the U.S. offered part of Alaska (the Sitka District) for settlement by Jews from around the world. I learned later that this idea was actually floated by FDR, but never acted on. With the support of then-U.S. President Harry Truman and the resilience of its people, Israel survived and thrives almost 60 years later. Still, while no longer amazed, I'm still very impressed at how completely Chabon imagines and describes this cold world of the Jews, inhabiting Sitka on a 60-year lease from the U.S.

While operating at the same high level of imagination as in his triumph, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", Chabon writes a much different book here. The scope of time is something less than a week rather than 50 years; the action is all "confined" to the Sitka District, large but still smaller than Kavalier's world that stretched from Prague to Antarctica to New York City. Kavalier was historical fiction at its best. Yiddish is at heart a whodunit, wrapped up in a made-up history. The closest parallel I can think of Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America" in which the U.S. elects isolationist Charles Lindbergh as President while war rages in Europe, with the kidnapping of Lindbergh's baby acting as the whodunit.

All this is not to say that the reader is somehow shortchanged by "Yiddish". Into the murder mystery, Chabon works in world class chess, Hasidism (which at some level resembles the Mafia), bush pilots, the Judeo-Eskimo community (there's one he probably had few live experts to consult with), espionage, Judeo-Arab tensions, protagonist Meyer Landsman's challenge of doing police work for his now supervisor ex-wife, along with a whole host of Yiddish cultural references that can't be enumerated without better understanding of that culture and more space. Lurking in the background is the "reality" that the 60-year lease with the U.S. is about to expire and only a small number of Jews with "useful" jobs will be allowed to remain. Now that I write all this, my evalution of the breadth of Chabon's imagination is working its way back toward amazing.

I'm not sure how the reading public will handle "Yiddish". Chabon fans will enjoy it, but will be making the impossible comparison to "Kavalier." Detective story fans make me disoriented by the imaginary setting and all its unfamiliar cultural references. Someone looking for historical fiction might be put off by both the made-up history and the seemingly simple-minded detective story about a murdered chess player.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is not quite a 5-star book, but at 4.5 I'll round up for Amazon. I recommend the book to all Chabon fans and to the adventurous among readers of current American fiction. A work by such a special talent has to be given a chance. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Well-read teenagers might enjoy it too--there's nothing in here that's particularly offensive, but it's a long step from typical young adult novels to "Yiddish".

Breach of Faith by Jed Horne

A Washington Post reviewer took Horne to task for the detached style of this book, asking for more "gut" and less "head". I'm glad that Horne used the balance of head and gut that he did in recounting the damage and aftermath of Katrina. The stories of the survivors are so gripping--sewage, snakes, stinging mosquitos, searing heat while waiting to be rescued followed by squalid conditions at the various collection sites--the Superdome, the Convention Center and a variety of road overpasses--then the gruesome cleanup stories (the exploding hamburger story is guaranteed to make anyone's stomach flip). Had the accounts been any more personal, I couldn't have finished the book. But this is coming from someone who experienced the storm just 75 miles up the road, where the story is already personal enough. Our suffering was very limited--some hours without electricity; days without cable TV; working around and with the thousands of evacuees, but we know how profoundly the storm and flood have affected Louisiana in general and the New Orleans metro area in particular.

I salute the doughty Picayune for publishing throughout and Horne for publishing such a thorough account just a year after the disaster. I also thank Horne for presenting a comprehensive picture of Louisiana Governor Blanco's actions during and after the storm. The reputation of this dedicated and experienced public servant took a heavy hit from the storm, enough so to discourage her from running for a second term. Horne reveals that in the context of the event and the politics surrounding Washington's response, Blanco probably did about as well as anyone could, and better than many other political figures managing the response to the storm.

Horne also adds some structure to the story of the chaotic "planning process" (or lack thereof) that's taken place in New Orleans since the storm. This process goes on to this day as people and businesses make decisions about whether or not to return.

As fellow Louisianans, we do our best to support the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina and the resultant flooding. Horne has helped us in that effort with his thorough and thoughtful account of the tragic events.