Reading Lists
The National Book Critics Circle queried its members this month about what titles from this year they would recommend, then had a poll to narrow down the list. My enthusiasm for Julian Bourg's From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought (McGill-Queens University Press) was bound to be a minority judgment in the best of cases. Anyway, I've been sent a copy of the final list (in descending order of votes per category) and will set it so that this item posts automatically after the embargo lifts.
Fiction
1) Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
2) Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
3) Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (HarperCollins)
4) Philip Roth, Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin)
5) Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses (Graywolf)
Nonfiction
1) Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying (Knopf)
2) Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (St. Martin's)
3) Noami Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan)
4) David Michaelis, Schulz and the Peanuts (HarperCollins)
5) Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes (Doubleday)
Poetry
1) Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005*
2) Zbigniew Herbert, Collected Poems: 1956-1998 (Ecco)*
3) Robert Pinsky, Gulf Music (Farrar Straus & Giroux)*
4) Rae Armantrout, Next Life (Wesleyan)
5) Mary Jo Bang, Elegy (Graywolf)
*there was a three-way tie for first in poetry.
See also my reviews, in Newsday, of the books by Michaelis and Weiner.
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