What Was YOUR Favorite Book of 2007?

January 9, 2008

I know some of you read, too. I keep talking about my books, what I read, how great of a reader I am, my favorites, books I bought: such is the self-indulgent nature of blogs (really, whaddyagonnado?). But I’d like to know if you read something you liked, too. Please?

AGGHGHGH, that was so hard. me ME memememe I iiii ….ahhhhh, much better.

3 Comments

tODD says:

Yeah, given the oft-itinerant nature of blog visitors (at least among us leaves, if you will), it’s a lot easier to talk about one’s self than open the floor for discussion. Also, for several seconds there, I thought you had typed “meme meme”, and I asked myself, “Is discussing favorite books really even a blog meme? Don’t people do that all the time?”

I read pitifully few books in 2007. But one I did like was “If on a winter’s night a traveler” by Italo Calvino. I’d somehow stumbled upon its opening chapter online somewhere and was hooked by its metaness. The book only got weirder from there, it turns out.

I imagine you might like the book much more than I did, since it’s all about books — the act of reading and the act of writing. You likely know more about such things than I.
autumn says:

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark by Brian Hall

This novel was beautifully written and employed tricks of which I am not usually fond. Such was the talent of this writer, that what might otherwise have seemed gimmick-y was instead moving and engaging. His prose was beautiful and his ability to capture the voice of a women (let alone one who barely spoke the language of the white heathens) was compelling and had veracity I rarely find in men attempting to write in a woman’s voice.
doug says:

I forgot that I read IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER this year! That was pretty terrific. As were the two McCarthy books I read (NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THE RoAD).

My favorite new discovery (fiction) this year was Paul Auster: so far I have read IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS and (my first book of 2008) THE BOOK OF ILLUSIONS. Very different books, and the latter may be more interesting to a filmmaker than not, but the former is highly recommended post-apocalyptica.

Non-fictionwise, my flatmate gave me Geoff Dyer’s THE ONGOING MOMENT for my birthday and it was an astoundingly terrific meditation on photography and subliminal connections across the work of different photographers.