Books: Your best read of 2007!

I'll name mine later!

What? No takers?

How disappointing!

OK, I'll go first, then.

It would have to be Janette Turner Hospital's Due Preparations for the Plague. Let me tell you, it was brilliant, engrossing, moving, scary, uplifting ... everything! I honestly could not stop reading, once I'd started.

Due Preparations has been described a "thriller" but it is so much more than that. It embraces contemporary politics, terrorism, espionage, love ... the lives of real people coping with loss & other devastating predicaments, seeking atonement, redemption for things they have done .... yet somehow it manages (after taking us well & truly through the wringer! Phew!) the conclusion leads us to continue remain hopeful, to hang onto optimism despite the terrible things that have occurred.

Best book I've read in ages!

Reviews:
http://www.janetteturnerhospital.com/reviews/plague.htm

bookmark

Water for Elephants

Don't we all have a weakness for the circus? This book is very deligthful, moving, and with a surprise ending that makes it all the more a lovable story. To me it was a real "feel good" book.

Here a short synapsis:

Stripped of everything after his parents' untimely death, twenty-three-year old Jacob Jankowski has failed to sit for his veterinary exams at Cornell, left with no home and no future, the country struggling through the Great Depression, bartering in goods instead of money. Hopping a train that by chance belongs to The Flying Squadron of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, Jacob hires on to care for the menagerie, his training an entre into this bizarre world; but as the novel begins, Jacob is an old man, restricted to an assisted living home, his memories sparked by a nearby visiting circus and a creeping helplessness that assaults his ageing body: "Age is a terrible thief. Just when you think you're getting the hang of it, it knocks your legs out from under you and stoops your back."

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul

I'd love to know more about it, osso, when you have a minute.

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

In the 111-year life of the Spokane Indian reservation, not one person has arrived by accident-until the day the black stranger appears with nothing more than the suit he wears and the guitar slung over his back. The man happens to be the legendary bluesman Robert Johnson, in flight from the devil and presumed long dead. And when he passes his enchanted instrument to young Thomas-Builds-the-Fire-storyteller, misfit, and musician-a magical odyssey begins. From reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement trails of Seattle to the concrete canyons of Manhattan, Thomas and his Coyote Springs bandmates careen through ancestral nightmares and rock-and-roll dreams, sounding chords of celebration and survival as timeless as their tribe.

That one's awesome. (Reservation Blues.)

Mine is probably "The Inheritance of Loss" by Kiran Desai.


NYer review

Oh sozobe, that does look interesting!

Gonna see if I can find a copy!

bumpity-bump

Msolga--

I want to play, but singling out any one book means that all my other gleanings are devalued.

Besides, I'm a person of many moods. Best book when heartsick? Best book when healthily tired? Best book after a day of small setbacks?

Best book for revealing a new world? Best book for a soothing visit to an old world? Best book for...

I'm sorry to quibble, but quibble I must.

To me, Pamuk opens up a new complex world in a city, city in world... and the world of a particular child, himself.


An extract of a bit of "Istanbul" (edited by Pamuk) in the Guardian -
http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,,1435601,00.html

An article on Pamuk by Pico Iyer in a thread I started -
http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=2877662#2877662

You're allowed to quibble, Noddy! :wink:

The reason I suggested choosing one book was, when I started thinking about it, I ended up with a longish list. Again.

Choosing just one meant I really had to think about it. Made it more difficult, of course! :wink:

But folk should feel free to choose the best read in a variety of different categories, along the sorts of lines you've suggested. Which ever category of books they read.Yes, why not?

I promise not to berate them for doing so! :wink:

Fantasy/science fiction--AKA "Speculative fiction".

Tim Pratt: The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl.


http://www.sff.net/people/timpratt/rangergirl.html

Noddy

"When people ask me what the book is about, I usually say something like "It's about Westerns, comic books, coffee shops, the folly of anthropomorphizing the natural world, friendship, loyalty, the responsibility of the artist in society, gunslingers, madness, and love." Sometimes I vary the nouns."

I can't think of anything!!!


I am wondering if this is because I haven't read any good books, or if my memory is failing???


The books that are sticking in my mind are work books...and nobody wants to hear about them!!!

I'm reading Desolution Angels by Jack Kerouac.

Sozobe, I loved Inheritance of Loss. I found the ending of that book profound.

Osso, I haven't read Istanbul. I struggled with his Snow. It was so political, and imperfectly veiled as a vehicle for his ideas.