“Year’s Best” Season Arrives: Amazon’s “Best Books of 2007”

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:

  1. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
  2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
  3. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7), J. K. Rowling
  4. The World Without Us, Alan Weisman
  5. The Dangerous Book for Boys, Conn Iggulden
  6. Heartsick, Chelsea Cain
  7. Tree of Smoke: A Novel, Denis Johnson
  8. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah
  9. Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Atul Gawande
  10. 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?