Book-blog's best reads of 2007

We're nearing the end of 2007, which means that it's time for me to look back over the my year of reading and revisit the books I designated as 5-star reads.

I was a less prolific reader this year than in years past. The slow-down occurred from May to June, and it's because I was so busy at that time with the creation and upkeep of my new site TwitterLit, on which I post the first lines of books twice daily. (I subsequently created a YA version of the same idea, called KidderLit.) I'm always tweaking my web sites or creating new ones (this year's other additions to the fold are the Sunday Salon and Blogging Bewitched and, in connection with TwitterLit, TwitterLit News) and being otherwise distracted by computer issues, but it doesn't always eat into my reading time as noticeably.

As of this writing (on December 6th) I've read 56 books in 2007, 54 of which I've reviewed here on the book-blog. The two books that I did not review here were Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (on which see below) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--because I can't imagine contributing anything useful to that discussion. Seven of those 56 were, in my estimation, 5-star reads. (Interestingly, of the seven authors listed below, two appeared in last year's best reads post. For all my best reads posts, from 2003 on, click here.)

Behold, then, without further preamble, my annual best reads list--the best books that I read this year, whatever their original publication date, with links to the complete reviews.  (If I read any other 5-star books before the new year, I'll add them to the list.)

Joseph Finder, Power Play St. Martin's © 2007, 384 pages Jake Landry is a junior executive with Hammond Aerospace, a company riven more than usually by corporate infighting since the recent selection of a new CEO intent on cleaning house. Jake is exceedingly competent, and in fact knows more than anyone else at Hammond about the new wide-bodied jet the company is rolling out. His expertise lands him a last-minute summons to the company's annual leadership retreat -- three days off the grid at a remote fishing lodge in British Columbia, team-building with a bunch of alpha male execs. But once they're arrived at the lodge, professional backstabbing takes a back seat to more immediate dangers: a gang of dead-eyed hunters take the group hostage and demand an enormous ransom for their release.... Continue reading.

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley Vintage © 1999, 248 pages [orig. pub. 1955] Note: I read Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley and wrote about it for Norman Geras's normblog. Most definitely a five-star read! My records indicate that between 1999 and 2003 I read 22 books by Patricia Highsmith - 20 novels, one collection of short stories, and one book on writing - beginning with her 1955 classic The Talented Mr Ripley. My guess is that my interest in reading the Ripley series was prompted by the 1999 release of a film based on the book, also called The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon as Tom Ripley and Jude Law as Dickie Greenleaf. I didn't in fact watch the movie until years later, but the ads will have prompted my interest in reading the novel..... Continue reading.

Barbara Holland, Bingo Night at the Fire Hall Harcourt Brace © 1997, 210 pages When she was in her early 60's author Barbara Holland moved from Philadelphia to Loudon County in Northern Virginia, to a small house in the Blue Ridge Mountains some 60 miles outside of Washington D.C. It might as well have been a different planet. In Bingo Night at the Fire Hall Holland describes the world she came almost by accident to inhabit, a place somehow "unreachably far beyond the headlines and the evening news."  Her house on the mountain overlooks a fertile valley in which the same families have farmed for generations. As she describes it, the people there live (or lived, at least, in the 1990s, when she was writing this book) in a sort of time capsule, a Mayberry-like idyll of 4-H clubs and church picnics. It's a place where nobody locks their doors (locking them would seem unneighborly), where people are defined not by their resumés but by their family ties.... Continue reading.

Peter Sagal, The Book of Vice HarperCollins © 2007, 254 pages Peter Sagal is the whip-smart host of NPR's news quiz show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Fans of the program will be delighted to learn that Sagal is also now the author of a deliciously titled (and even more deliciously subtitled) exploration of iniquity: The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to Do Them). The book is as fun as its title suggests.... Continue reading.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Girls of Tender Age Free Press © 2006, 289 pages Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's Girls of Tender Age is a memoir wrapped around a true crime story. She writes about growing up among the "working stiffs" of 1950's Hartford, Connecticut under less than ideal conditions. Smith's mother was distant and negligent: "Until I am in first grade, I have no idea that when you are hurt, some people have the urge to hug and comfort you. In the first grade, my fingers get caught in the girls' lavatory door and my teacher, Miss Wells, takes me in her arms and hugs me to her big bosom. I don't understand why this is, a body surrounding mine, pressing sympathy from one heart into another. But my mother is the prototype of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown." Her father was a sort of saint who devoted his life to caring for the author's autistic older brother at a time when no one understood that condition. Smith's autobiographical chapters--compelling enough without the introduction of further drama--are interspersed with brief sections, sometimes chillingly succinct, on the career of serial rapist and murderer Bob Malm.... Continue reading.

Scott Smith, A Simple Plan Vintage © 1993, 416 pages It's a simple premise. What would happen if three men--two brothers and a friend--should stumble on a bag full of money in the woods? Stolen money, you'd have to assume, millions of dollars in non-sequential, hundred-dollar bills--enough that somebody, somewhere, has to be looking for it. Should they keep the cash? Use it to escape from their one-traffic-light town? Call the police? Scott Smith immerses his characters in this moral dilemma of a situation and lets us watch as the ostensibly reasonable plan they agree on leads inevitably, inexorably, to a string of tragic consequences.... Continue reading.

Dick York, The Seesaw Girl and Me New Path Press © 2004, 231 pages Dick York had had a great career. He was on the radio as a teenager, then on Broadway, and he appeared in a number of films and television shows before he landed the role we all know him best for. York starred as Darrin Stevens--the "first Darrin"--in 156 episodes of the sitcom Bewitched, which first aired in 1964. But York's stint on the series ended abruptly one day in 1969 when he had a seizure on the set. He had in fact been suffering from chronic back pain during the show's entire run, the result of an injury he sustained while filming the 1959 western They Came to Cordura. The spry Darrin Stevens, who looked the picture of health, often had to be helped on and off the set.... Continue reading.

Comments

[Kimmy]

I love Patricia Highsmith! I've read several of her books so far, but have not yet had the pleasure of starting the Ripley books. Hopefully I'll get to those next year. I think I'll also be adding A Simple Plan to my TBR list for 2008.

[Debra Hamel]

Oh, you'll love the Ripley books! I went on a big Highsmith binge a while back--well, as I say above in that review. What have you read so far? I really liked one called....A Suspension of Mercy. Well, they're all at least good, but I particularly liked that one. As well as the Ripleys.

[Kimmy]

I feel like I've read more, but looking back, I've only read two. Strangers on a Train and A Suspension of Mercy. I loved them both. I have a book of her short stories on hand, and one called Small g. I can't wait to read them and more!

[flash]

Thanks for this list, I'll have to check them out! I'm mostly a nonfiction reader, but I am always on the lookout for some fiction...