A healthy dose of favoritism: Book Review’s picks of 2007
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
It’s that time of year again, when reviewers and the media in general make their lists of noteworthy books. At Book Review, we’re no different; this Sunday, we release our list of favorite books for 2007. As we did last year, we’ve chosen 50 titles--25 in fiction and poetry, and 25 in nonfiction. We’ve also asked our online columnists to cite favorite mysteries, science fiction, children’s books and paperbacks.
One of the questions that often comes up around favorite books lists is the criteria for selection--how do these books get on the list? The process is different everywhere, but for us, it’s a mix of intention and serendipity. In the first place, we don’t look at other lists until ours is compiled; we don’t want to be influenced. In addition, we restrict our list to books that we’ve reviewed, which narrows the pool a little bit, although we review something in the vicinity of 1,000 books a year. Last, we use our original review as a guide; if it’s negative, that book doesn’t make the list.
Then we hash it out.
The way it works is this: Everybody on the Book Review staff comes up with his or her own set of selections. All of this goes into a master list. Some are obvious choices--Tim Weiner’s ‘Legacy of Ashes,’ for instance, or Judith Freeman’s ‘The Long Embrace.’ Others we argue over, going back and forth, discussing why a book worked for us or why it didn’t, making a case pro or con. The key is to recognize that all these lists are fundamentally subjective, which makes the whole experience much more fun. That’s why we call our list ‘Favorite Books’ as opposed to ‘Best Books’; who’s to say, after all, what the best book truly is, or even if such a designation is relevant at all?
There’s also another subjective component at work--the size of the list. Our decision to settle on 50 titles is partly a concession to space, but it’s also meant to keep things from getting out of hand. If the list gets too long, it starts to blur, to become predictable, unspecialized. Better to err on the side of concision, even though this means certain books that might have made a longer list are inevitably left off.
And yet, this year, as in other years, we’ve highlighted some unexpected choices: Anders Nilsen’s ‘Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow,’ for instance, a profoundly moving experiment in graphic storytelling, and Irene Dische’s novel ‘The Empress of Weehawken.’
What have we left off? There isn’t room to name them all, of course, but there are some notable omissions: Philip Roth’s ‘Exit Ghost,’ for instance, and Denis Johnson’s ‘Tree of Smoke,’ which won a National Book Award.
You can argue with that--and, in fact, you’re welcome to, for this is the ultimate role of the favorite books list. It’s a conversation-starter, not a definitive statement of what’s important, and when it works, it opens up a discussion between critic and reader. There are choices here that some of us at Book Review disagree with, both in terms of what has made the list and what has not. But that, too, is in the nature of the enterprise, which is, in the end, a matter of enthusiasm, an expression of the reader in us all.
David L. Ulin