{"id":1975,"date":"2007-11-17T11:14:24","date_gmt":"2007-11-17T11:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/17\/years-best-season-arrives-amaz\/"},"modified":"2007-11-17T11:14:24","modified_gmt":"2007-11-17T11:14:24","slug":"years-best-season-arrives-amaz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2007\/11\/17\/years-best-season-arrives-amaz\/","title":{"rendered":"“Year’s Best” Season Arrives: Amazon’s “Best Books of 2007”"},"content":{"rendered":"

An email from Amazon arrived yesterday announcing their Best Books of 2007<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

Amazon helpfully provides both a list of bestsellers, and an Editor’s Picks<\/a> list of the Best Books of 2007:<\/p>\n

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

    I look at that list, and all I can say is “Wow. What a terrible list.”<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

    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<\/a> list isn’t a whole lot better. The Science<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

    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<\/strong> Best Books of 2007?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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… Continue reading “Year’s Best” Season Arrives: Amazon’s “Best Books of 2007”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-pop_culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}