An email from Amazon arrived yesterday announcing their Best Books of 2007 lists. This is an earlier-than usual opening of the “Year’s Best” season, in which every publication in the universe produces a list of the N best Whatever of the past year, but with the Christmas shopping season now starting before Halloween, I suppose this is only to be expected.
Amazon helpfully provides both a list of bestsellers, and an Editor’s Picks list of the Best Books of 2007:
- A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), J. K. Rowling
- The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
- The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn Iggulden
- Heartsick, Chelsea Cain
- Tree of Smoke: A Novel, Denis Johnson
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah
- Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande
- I Am America (And So Can You!), Stephen Colbert
I look at that list, and all I can say is “Wow. What a terrible list.”
I’ve read exactly one of those books. There’s one unread book that I definitely want, and one other that seems vaguely interesting, and that’s pretty much it. Their Science Fiction and Fantasy list isn’t a whole lot better. The Science picks are the best of the lists I looked at, but I’ve still only read one of the ten, and while some of the others look interesting, realistically, I probably wouldn’t get around to reading them any time soon.
These are, of course, only the first of approximately a billion of these lists to come, but it’s got to be possible to do better. So, what should I be considering for the real Best Books of 2007?