Top Five books read during 2007

I'm early setting up this thread, but post when you are ready (we do have a whole month of reading left!).

Some of us have been posting to the quarterly threads with the idea that when the end-of-year thread came around we would be able to note which 'Year's Best' was read in which quarter (we had the thought that as readers we tend to list our more recently read books on Year's Best lists...so by posting quarterly we would not only see if this was true but also remind ourselves of the great books we read last February). If you have been participating in our quarterly experiment could you post the quarter the book was read like this (1), (2), (3) or (4) after the title and author? Thanks!

The number to list is not carved in stone, but we ask that you keep your post down to five or no more than 10 books total in your post.

This is ALWAYS a great thread to read!

I wanted to refresh my memory as to what I chose each quarter, and at the half, so I went hunting for those threads. Here they are in case anyone else wants to peruse:

First Quarter
Second Quarter
First Half
Third Quarter

And, just for kicks, the third quarter party thread !

PARTY THREAD!!!
It's *not* 2008 yet ...and it's the holiday season!

*Looks around for a blender*

P.S. Can we party here this month if we promise to sober up at the stroke of midnight 2008?

Eggnog with a little bit of rum anyone?

Oh, me!! I have not yet had eggnog this season and was just thinking about it.

By the way, save some of that rum for my sweet mulled apple cider. It's made with Spencerville Red apples from Heyser Farm in Colesville, Maryland. I have the cider heating in the crockpot now. We'll just add a splash of rum and a cinnamon stick into the glass cups before we serve them.

What do we have for hors d'oevres?

P.S. Do you mind if I light the first Chanukah candle here at our party tomorrow night?

So, is mulled cider the same as wassail? Either way, I'll have some, please!

I think wassail has rum in it...

#7 kaelirenee: that's all I needed to hear ;)

For hors doevres, how about scallops wrapped in bacon, bread bowl w/ spinach dip, mini quiches, meatballs, shrimp cocktail, and hot taco dip.

Oh my, did someone say PARTY? =) Anyone bringing the music?

OMG, this thread has gone out of control already!! Poor avaland, trying to get some serious discourse going, and just look at you all. And what with the eggnog, you'll all be stumbling around before you know it.

I for one am still very seriously contemplating my top 5-10 ...

(and if you believe that, I have some swampland in Florida for sale!)

I have an image of avaland standing at the door with her arms crossed, tapping her foot, shaking her head....

We'll post our top 5. I promise!! Only it'll be after we sober up on January 1, 2008. In fact, I'm compiling my list now.

Give that woman at the door something to eat and drink. Hurry!!

What's wassail? Nothing like a good party to learn about something new to drink!

*runs off to check on the temperature of the hot mulled cider*

>5 SqueakyChu: Squeaky Chu

P.S. Do you mind if I light the first Chanukah candle here at our party tomorrow night?

By all means, do so! Chag samaech! (Happy holiday!)

I'll whip up some potatoe latkes (pancakes) with a little sour cream and some apple sauce alongside.

Pass the cider!

Chu-Wassail is mulled cider with rum. When I was growing up, it's how you made sure the kids actually slept on Christmas Eve.

As for my top 5 list-I have a tentative one, but I still plan to read at least another 10 books before the year is over, so I don't want to commit to anything quite yet.

Do pass me some latkes. I'll take the mine with applesauce. Thanks for making them!

*sings and lights the first candle*

Ooooh, I love latkes! I haven't had any homemade for years, since the last time I celebrated Passover with some friends. Can I have mine with both the sour cream and applesauce, please? Oh, and the hot mulled cider smells divine! All I have to share is a box of chocolates. *hangs head for not being better prepared*

ETA: Happy Chanukah, Everyone!

I'll have some chocolate. Just pass the box my way...

*still singing - I have a little dreidel...*

--> 15

What is the "chu" for in Chu-Wassail? Is it like the "chu" in SqueakyChu? :D And how do you pronounce wassail? What language is that?

Here's a wikipedia article about wassail. Everything you wanted to know, and then some.

wah-SAIL English. Old.

--> 19

That was interesting! So who here volunteers to make the wassail? I volunteer to drink it. Someone with a better voice than mine needs to sing the wassail songs.

If everyone drinks enough wassail, it won't matter who is singing or how badly!

Oh goodness. I think I'm ready to post my list, but where do I start?
I don't think I read anything much that I didn't enjoy, because I rarely read a book I don't enjoy.
I'm currently reading my 75th book of the year, so it's going to be an incredibly hard decision.

In no particular order:

Twilight, New Moon & Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer
I think they deserve to go together, with another four on top, because it's basically the same story just broken up.
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Haunted: A novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Plus there's the Uglies trilogy by Scott Westerfeld which was very well written.

Ohhhhhh, so many to choose from.
Well, there's a small snippet of what I enjoyed this year, and I hope next year is just as enjoyable.

#22 trinah: For a moment I forgot which thread I was reading and thought I was in the Clunker thread, so I couldn't believe you hated these books! HA! So, anyway, it turns out that I agree with you about Dirk Gently and 1984 (sorry, too lazy to type out the number words, even though at this point, this aside have taken more time and effort. Sheesh.) - fantastic books, in my opinion!

*downs some frothy eggnog*

My best books of 2007 (not counting rereads):

• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

• Middlemarch by George Eliot

• The Children of Húrin by J. R. R. Tolkien

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (pending; I'm about halfway through)

Mine are:

Nineteen Minutes Jodi Picoult
A Thousand Splendid Suns Khaled Hosseini
Middlesex Jeffrey Eugenides
Shadow of the Wind Carlos Zafon
Sammy's Hill Kristin Gore

With probably A Thousand Splendid Suns as the best with Nineteen Minutes a close second.

Possession by A.S. Byatt
My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (a re-read)
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Bleak House by Charles Dickens (another re-read)

So far mine are:

Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (2)
Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (2)
Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb (3)
and The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (4)

I'd like to make it a nice, round five, but I'll wait until the end of the year to pick a final title. Right now I think it'll be either Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner or The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, but there's still almost a month left. Something might come along and blow me out of the water.

I'm kind of disappointed that my list isn't more diverse this year. Everything's fantasy. Last year I had a good spread; a variety of genres, some literary stuff and a graphic novel series.

My top reads for this year include:

Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse

Adventures of a Biographer by Catherine Drinker Bowen - Nonfiction

The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

An Unequal Music by Vikram Seth

Every Book Its Reader by Nicholas Basbanes - Nonfiction

A plague on touchstones!!

In no particular order

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Runners-up:

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope

well, things settled down, didn't they? I'm having a little trouble getting my list - at least my fiction list - down to five. I may have to close my eyes and pick. And there's still a few weeks left in December...

My top five for 2007:

Fiction:
Anne Enright - The Gathering
Rebecca Barry - Later at the Bar
Louise Dean - This Human Season
Colm Toibin - Mothers and Sons
William Trevor - Cheating at Canasta

Non Fiction

Leslie Garris - House of Happy Endings: A Memoir
Mary Gordon - Circling My Mother: A Memoir
Claire Tomalin - Thomas Hardy
Michael Streissguth - Johnny Cash: The Biography
Chris Rose - 1 Dead In Attic: After Katrina

Q4 - A Thousand Splendid Suns; The World to Come; The Color of Water
Q3 - Touching the Void; The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Q2 - Lipstick Jungle

My top 5

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Honorable Mention
Good Dog. Stay. by Anna Quindlen
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling

I can name my nonfiction picks for the year, but have to give some long thought to the fiction, I've read so much good stuff! And still am....

Here's the n/f top five:
oops - I was looking at my July to December list; edited to add/remove.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- Barbara Kingsolver (3)
The Worst Hard Time-- Timothy Egan (2)
Ex Libris : confessions of a common reader -- Anne Fadiman (3)
A Path with Heart -- Jack Kornfield (1)
A Walk in the Woods : rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail -- Bill Bryson (3)

Fie on author touchstones!!!

ETA the quarters in which I read these, to the best of my middle aged memory.

#34 teelgee - You have listed one of my favorite books all time - I re-read Ex Libris at least once a year!

alcottacre - I love Fadiman. I have At Large and at Small and have read just a couple essays, but it looks just as promising. Have you read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down? It's an incredible book; very different from her essays.

Touchstones on strike tonight.

1. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (4)
Ship of Destiny - Robin Hobb (1)
Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson (3)
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (1)

And I'm reserving the last space in case I read something really good in the rest of this month. The Remains of the Day is unquestionably my favorite book for the year and I highly doubt anything is going to surpass it at this point.

two jump out at me as head and shoulders (spine and pages?) above the rest: The Road by McCarthy and The Giver by Lowry... I'll have to get back with the next 3...

teelgee #36, alcottacre #35, It was The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down that got me started reading everything Anne Fadiman (not touchstoning) writes.

I think I'm ready to choose. It would take a very incredible book to knock any of these out of my top five.

I read quite a few series in 2007 and the majority of my picks are series books. It is impossible for me to pick just one book from the series. Also, some of these introduced me to new genres/sub-genres I previously had never really read before.

The Weather Warden series by Rachel Caine

Her Majesty's Dog, a manga series by Mick Takeuchi

The Wallflower Quartet (along with Again the Magic which, in my opinion, should have been included in the series) by Lisa Kleypas

Ransom, Winds of Change and Sail Away by Lee Rowan

Ironside by Holly Black. I actually loved this whole series, but only read Ironside in 2007.

This is unlikely to change, but . . .

Needless to say, I can't narrow itdown to 5 books, so I am cheating and creating three categories: new books (books first published in 2007 or very recently), old books (books published earlier that I had never read), and rereads. A star indicates I read this book because someone on LT recommended it.

New Books
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
*The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
*The Secret River by Kate Grenville

Older Books Read for the First Time
*Troubles by J. G. Farrell
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy
The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge (yes, I know this makes six!)

Rereads
War and Peace by Tolstoy
The Straight and Narrow Path by Honor Tracy

Maybe I will work up the strength later in the month to narrow this down!

Author touchstones are very temperamental.

Also unlikely to change and I also am cheating! (pay no attention to that person in post#1!) I find I can't eliminate any of these (although I was able to eliminate some of my required reading).

Fiction, in no particular order.

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) (1)
Zoli, Colum McCann (Ireland) (1)
The Logogryph, Thomas Wharton (Canada) (1)
By the Sea, Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzibar) (1)
The Gravedigger's Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates (USA) (2)
Burning Your Boats: the Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter (Great Britain) (2)
Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson (Norway) (3)

Famished Road, Ben Okri (4)
The Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emecheta (4)
Sleepwalking Land, Mia Couto (4)

Nonfiction (tie!)
Infidel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (memoir, Somalia) (3)
Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (history) (3)

Poetry (also a tie!):
Lizzie Borden in Love, Julianna Baggott (USA) (2)
The World's Wife, Carol Ann Duffy (Scotland) (1)

Young Adult
Red Spikes, Margo Lanagan (short fiction, Australia) (2)
runner up: Siberia by Ann Halam aka Gwyneth Jones (UK) (3)

#36 teelgee - Yes I have read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. I enjoy all of her works, but Ex-Libris will always be my favorite. (I like books on books in general as a reading category). I did not realize she had a new book of essays out, so I am updating my want list with At Large and At Small. Thanks for the heads up!

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Angelica by Arthur Phillips

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

Best of the year - 2007
1. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
2. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan- Lisa See
3. The Muse Asylum - David Czuchlewski
4. Troll: A Love Story - Joann Sinisalo
5. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak

#45 - Squeaky

I'm not doing my list yet, but when I do The Road is sure to be on it! That was one fantastic novel.

I really didn't want to post my list yet either...as one never knows what the next book will bring. However, this thread has a very serious crowd. Everyone here wants to talk about their top 5 for 2007 now (!) so I thought I'd join in the conversation. :-)

There are still 4 weeks left in 2007. The funny thing is that my husband read The Road and hated it so much that he refused to finish it. Different strokes, I guess.

After that he read Peony in Love by Lisa See and loved it more than he did Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. I haven't read Peony in Love yet.

Well, I'm going to post my top 5 in two categories (fiction and non-fiction) and then, if I read something amazingly wonderful in the next 3 weeks, will edit the list(s) accordingly:

Non-Fiction

Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Caesar, Life of a Colossus by Adrian Goldsworthy
Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Civil Wars by Julius Caesar

Fiction

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Find Me by Carol O'Connell
The Lions of al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay
Judas Child by Carol O'Connell

Honorable Mentions in Fiction (which would have made the list if I wasn't forced to hold the number of favorites at 5)

Storm Front by Jim Butcher
Killing Critics by Carol O'Connell
The Book Thief by Markus Zukas
A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
The Man Who Cast Two Shadows by Carol O'Connell

ETA: Fifteen favorites isn't really too many since I've read 102 books this year. So far. I'll probably read at least another 10 books before midnight on Dec. 31.

ETA to correct a mistake in the name of one of the books.

Edited 1/5/07 to add Jane Eyre to the list of fiction favorites and remove The Man Who Cast Two Shadows to the list of honorable mentions.

>48 Storeetllr: -- Wow! 102+?!?!?! So what is the most books you have read in a year?

(what are the most books...?)

#49 ~ No clue, really, as this is the first year I've kept a record faithfully. Somewhere between 50 and 100, I suppose, depending on what else was going on in my life. When my daughter was born (many years ago), I think my reading dropped to about 10 books a year for the first 3 years, and those were mostly all baby and childcare books. lol It helps to have no life. ;)

ETA: If you're interested in what I've read so far this year, go to the 50 Book Challenge group and look for my thread. Here's the link (I hope): http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=15333

I've been keeping a reading list for the last 12 years and never have I read as many books as this year, exactly 102 to date. For the last 5 years I've been averaging between 85-92 books a year, but I've been spending less time on-line and my total just sort of crept up there this year.

My "best of" list has to break into three categories:

Fiction:
The Great Gatsby
Women of the Silk
Slaughter House-Five
Saturday (touchstone not working)
O Pioneers

Honorable Mention: Kafka on the Shore

Non-Fiction
The Lemon Tree
A Man Without A Country
Dead Man Walking
Team of Rivals (which I haven't actually finished yet)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Honorable Mention: AIDS in America (touchstone not working)

Children's:

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Sold
Kira-Kira
The Secret Garden

Honorable Mention: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (touchstone not working)

All in all a good reading year.

Here are my favorite fiction books for 2007

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Adichie
Birds without Wings by Louis de Bernieres
Fortunate Son by Walter Mosley
Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

My top 5 for '07 are: (in no particular order)

He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
Peony in Love by Lisa See
The Rug Merchant by Meg Mullins

I'm gonna go ahead and post my top 5, since I'm sure I won't get much more reading done this year, what with the holidays coming up and all.

(In the order read):
1. The Drawing of the Three - Stephen King
2. Wizard's First Rule - Terry Goodkind
3. The Tommyknockers - Stephen King
4. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
5. Practical Demonkeeping - Christopher Moore

I don't suppose it's too obvious that I tend to like horror/fantasy books at all, eh?

All right, I'm ready to post. Although I'm hoping to get a lot of reading done over the holidays (being on vacation from work and all), I would be surprised if anything topped my top 5. In the order I read them:

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Q1)
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (Q1)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Q1)
Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Q4)
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (Q4)

I had one re-read which ranked right up there with these five: To Kill a Mockingbird.

This is hard...especially since this years I start reading mostly older classic fiction picked out from a list (Modern Library's 100 best of the 20th century) and I have enjoyed these tremdenously. So from about 30 fiction and 20 nonfiction...in order

1) A Bend in the River - a near perfect novel
2) Glory Enough for All (also published as the The Discovery of Insulin) - history of science at its best
3) Of Human Bondage - deservedly a classic
4) The Angle of Repose - I was surprised by the extent to which I got caught up in the characters and plot of this truly American novel
5) Portnoy's Complaint - sustained laughter

Okay. I think I can get it down to at least the neighborhood of 5ish.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

Honorable Mentions:
Colors: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Looking for Alaska by John Green

There were plenty more that I really enjoyed, but it's a loooooong list this year (currently at 120 and counting), so it's hard to choose.

The standout books I've read this year have been The Rings of Saturn, Lipstick Jihad and Trieste and the meaning of nowhere. Strange that they are all non-fiction, since I read a lot more fiction.

I'm also in the middle of The Hours by Virginia Woolf, which I think is going to be on the top 5 list as well.

#59 I'm also in the middle of The Hours by Virginia Woolf, which I think is going to be on the top 5 list as well.

--------------
This makes me curious what book you're reading . . .
Virginia Woolf didn't write The Hours, she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, which had The Hours as her working title. Michael Cunningham wrote The Hours. They're very nice compliment reads, as they play off each other nicely (not sure if that's the right term, since Mrs. Dalloway was written so many years before Cunningham's book). Anyway, they're good to read together.

None of the touchstones are working here.

#57 piefuchs: I read Angle of Repose for the first time this year, too, and while I did not list it in my top 5, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I learned of the book while reading one of Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak mysteries!

Sorry, I meant The Waves - bit of a brain warp there! If only the touchstones had been working I could have saved myself the mistake...

Sorry, I meant The Waves - bit of a brain warp there! If only the touchstones had been working I could have saved myself the mistake...

--------------

Oh! Tell us how it goes. I just bought an annotated version of The Waves. I hear it's her most experimental work. I have it scheduled to read after my next term at university is over, so late spring probably. I plan to read it very slowly and do lots of journaling about it. I'm really interested to hear your thoughts on it.

1. The Rest is Noise - Alex Wolf on the 20th C deconstruction of the classical tradition in music.
2. Thirte3n - Richard Morgan - sci-fi dystopia w/ characters rather than ciphers
3. Kafka on the Shore - Murakami
4. The Rabbi's Cat Joann Sfar
5. The Patron Saint of Plagues Barth Anderson
Read most of the rest of Murakami this fall and very much enjoyed it all.
6. The savage detectives - Bolano - tragicomic, picaresque novel about competing cliques of aspiring Latin American poets

well..i couldn't get the touchstone to link properly to the Morgan 13 i wanted...could on put in isbn # ?

So far:
1 - Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
2 - The History of Love by Nicole Krauss
3 - Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
4 - Perfume: The story of a murderer by Patrick Suskind
5 - Choke by Chuck Palahnuik

Well, in no particular order, these are my top 5 for the year:

1. Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
2. She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
3. Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule
4. Dirty Work by Stuart Woods
5. The Best Laid Plans by Sydney Sheldon

Honorable Mentions: About a Boy by Nick Hornby, Memnoch the Devil by Anne Rice, and Spanish Lessons by Derek Lambert

It was hard to choose this year! Also in no particular order:

Top 5:
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Twelve Kingdoms by Fuyumi Ono
Water for Elephantsby Sara Gruen
Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi
The Yokota Officers Club by Sara Bird

Honorable Mentions:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Broken Paradise by Cecelia Samartin
The God of Animals by Aryn Kyle

P.S. I'm reading American Shaolin by Matthew Polly right now, and it looks like it might be at least an honorable mention.

I already set up a Top 10 list, so I hope you don't mind if I double the number (especially since I read so many books this year). In no particular order:

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (touchstone not working)
After by Francine Prose
In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove
the Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon
Blankets by Craig Thompson
Mind Fuck by Manna Frances
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Erotism by Georges Bataille
How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff

Most of my top 10 come from early in the year... maybe because I've had more of a chance to process them in my mind?

Can't really put them in order.

The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Catcher In the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Traveling Vampire Show by Richard Laymon
Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

my top five are:
The Road Cormac Mccarthy
After Dark Haruki Murakami
Darkmans Nicole Barker
The Thirteenth Tale Diane Setterfield
The Reluctant Fundamentalist Mohsin Hamid

mine are:

1. Regeneration - Pat Barker

2. Terms of Endearment - Larry Mcmurtry

3. On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan

4. The Gift of Rain - Tan Twan Eng

5 Broken Verses - Kamila Shamsie

It's been a very l-o-n-g year.

Top reads include:
Fiction - Half brother by Lars Saabye Christensen I can't stress the brilliance of this book.
Fiction re-read - Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Non-fiction - Wildwood by Roger Deakin Truly erudite and learned.
Teenage fiction - Apache by Tanya Landman
Graphic novel - The arrival by Shaun Tan

But this is not a definitive list

In no particular order:

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
What Happened to Henry by Sharon Pywell
The Muse Asylum by David Chzuchlewski
Water for Elephants by Sarah Gruen
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

I'm not ready to post my top five but I have to agree about Cloud Atlas -it is in my top reads for 2007.

I forgot The Fortress of Solitude! Awesome book... and just finished Into the Wild which I won't say is great, but a top read for me in '07...

My list(s)-

Mr. White's Confession by Robert Clark
The Madness of a Seduced Woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

honorable mentions -
Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman
The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr
Drop City by T.C. Boyle
Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen Carter
The Education of Mrs. Bemis by John Sedgwick
The Eighth Dwarf by Ross Thomas

Having just completed my Christmas-shopping list from this thread, I think it's only fair that I list my favorites of the year:

1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
3. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

Honorable Mentions:
4. The Spartan by Caroline Dale Snedeker -- This was Ms Snedeker's first book, and it does have some problems, but there's something about her style that has delighted me since I first read Downright Dencey when I was 9 years old.
5. Bootlegger's Daughter by Margaret Maron -- Light, entertaining and interesting; I've read the first 3 books in the series, and am looking forward to reading the rest.
6. The Lost Madonna by Kelly Jones -- Not a great work of literature, but an interesting story, and the reality of being a young woman in the 1960s is presented more truly than almost anything else I've read.

I guess I'm ready to declare my winners for fiction in 2007. Envelope please!!!

(No particular order)
The Brothers K by David James Duncan (2)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (3)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (3)
The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (3)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (4)

Honorable mention must go to:
In the Name of Salomé by Julia Alvarez (3)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (4)
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See (3)
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama (4)

ETA the quarters in which I read these, to the best of my middle aged memory.

teelgee, you've absolutely floored me with your choice of David James Duncan's The Brothers K, one of my favorite books of the last 30 years and one that I've recommended time and time again, a true American masterpiece.

I think I can do this now -- I supose something fabulous could come along and cause me to edit.

in order:

Middlemarch George Eliot (2)
The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles (3)
A Bend in the River V.S. Naipaul (2)
Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry (4)
I am Charlotte Simmons Tom Wolfe (1)

jhowell, I'm surprised at Charlotte Simmons. I couldn't even finish it, even though I enjoyed Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full very much. Maybe I'll give it another try, if you tell us why you liked it so much. :-)

Oooh, jhowell, wasn't Lonesome Dove wonderful!

>79 LouisBranning: Louis: I've been a Duncan fan for years but had never read Bros. K before. I was encouraged by someone on LT to read it and I'm so glad I did! It was truly wonderful. I hope he comes out with another novel soon, though I've really loved his nonfiction the last few years too.

78 & 79... Brothers K was one of those rare books that instead of eyeing the next book on my list, I wished it wouldn't end and I could keep reading...

I've got my top five non-fiction boiled down but am having a hard time scrunching the fiction down to five. I'll keep reflecting on the fiction.

1. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. A great thought experiment.

2. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. Follows the major players up to 9/11.

3. Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau. Speculations on where we are headed.

4. The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel. Palimpsest from 1200s AD bought at auction for $2 million in 1998 is still delivering lost knowledge ten years later.

5. Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets by William Bonner and Lila Rajiva. Nothing is sacred. Everything gets excoriated.

1. The Time Traveler's Wife
2. My Sister's Keeper
3. Nineteen Minutes
4. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
5. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

It was a really good year for books.

I'll post my top 2 non-fiction and my top 2 children's books now, then post 5 fiction titles later. I still have The Kite Runner to read and don't know if it'll figure in my top 5 fiction or not.

My top 2 non-fiction:
1. Wild Swans Jung Chang
2. The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad

My top 2 children's:
1. The Giver by Lois Lowry
2. Coraline by Neil Gaiman

1. Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
2. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
3. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
4. Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson
5. Julia's Chocolates by Cathy Lamb

#81 -- citygirl

I thought Charlotte Simmons was hysterical. I am usually not a big fan of satire, but for some reason that book just spoke to me -- Wolfe just nailed the transition of a country girl to an elitist college -- it was so good, it was painful to read. Maybe you have to have experienced something similar to apreciate it -- I was a fish out of water when I started college. I just recently bought a used copy of The Bonfire of the Vanities, so I am going to give that a try.

>85 VisibleGhost:, VisibleGhost

I loved Radical Evolution! Absolutely, And I can't wait to read World Without Us...

Meanwhile, I'm going to have to see what The Brothers k is all about...

Re: The Brothers K...

I'm fairly widely read in literature (just not Russian lit), and I only got through about a third of it and regretted every second I spent. If memory serves, it could be summed up as 'Dad's a jerk.' Now, I'm REALLY wondering what happens in the last 2/3 that makes it the book it is considered to be...

mikeepatrick - this is not the Russian novel Brothers Karamazov -- this is a distinctly American book. I wasn't clear from your post if you were referring to the same book. The Brothers K was written by David James Duncan.

92: I'm an idiot. I'm talking Dostoyevsky. Feel free to ignore me. Or to tell me why Mr. D, and this novel in particular, is considered so great. :)

No, you're not an idiot. It's a common mistake.

The Idiot is a different book, isn't it?

LOL!!!

Too funny!

Man, if I can stumble into a joke involving 19th century Russian literature, just think of what I should be able to do with more contemporary stuff! Scary...

I feel like Dennis Miller over here!

So far this year I have read 128 books. 21 more then last year. In no particular order my top 7 are:

Red River by Lalita Tademy
Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseni
The View From Mount Joy by Lorna Landvik
Lottery by Patricia Wood
The 13th Tale by Diane Setterfield
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemorovsky

Couldn't do just five...

I just realized how little good fiction I've read this year. I was struggling to come up with a few for my list, but I had to seriously shorten my nonfiction list!

Nonfiction:
UnSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation
Religious Literacy
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Made to Stick
1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Fiction:
Golden Compass
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Fourth Bear
Torture the Artist

I'm surprised that only a couple people have included the final Harry Potter book for a top five; it was on so so so many lists for the 3rd quarter favorites. (Not a complaint, just an observation.)

> So far this year I have read 128 books.

Die. :)

Unless something drastic changes and I go on a reading spree next week (which I doubt), here are my picks. I read 114 books this year and these are the ones I fell in love with and will remember the most.
Fiction
1.) The Book Thief
2.) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
3.) Jane Eyre
4.) The Shadow of the Wind
5.) We Need to Talk About Kevin

Non-Ficiton
1.) Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
2.) A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
3.) All Over but the Shoutin by Rick Bragg

It has truly been a fabulous year of reading. I read a lot of the books people have listed in their top five this year, and I really loved them Water for Elephants, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Thirteenth Tale, but just had to narrow it down.
What a great world where our choices in literature are so incredibly rich!

On a comparative note. While it's interesting to neat note how many books we have read and it is good sometimes to put that number to paper or post as a means of self-congratulations, no one should feel compelled to compare their quantity of reading to another's. I'd be bummed to think that some may be home beating themselves up because they only read a dozen books, or thirty, or only sixty...if you know what I mean. We are all different readers who read different kinds of books and who can and cannot read in various circumstances (i.e. 5 novels in a year for a young mother with triplets might be an amazing feat!).

*end of encouraging pep talk*

Ooh, let me put mine in...

The first is the best, the others in no particular order.

1. The Shifting Fog by Kate Morton
2. About a Boy by Nick Hornby
3. Back when we were grownups by Anne Tyler
4. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
5. The miraculous journey of Edward Tulane by Kate Di Camillo - I mention this one for its illustrations more than the story itself, drawn by Bagram Ibatoulline. Absolutely magical, the best illustrations I've ever seen in a book.

Oh, my, yes, avaland ~ I agree 100%. If a person reads one book a year, that's actually more than many people (at least in the U.S., according to some survey I saw) read.

I happen to read a lot of books now, it's true, but only because I live alone, don't watch TV, and don't have a life outside of work and books! And LT. lol

Wow, lots of variety on these lists

#104 avaland - thanks, I needed that.
#91 mikeepatrick - I also only made it about 1/3 through The Brother's Karamazov...I actually thought it was intense, but so slow that I needed to take a break. I'll try again sometime.

Ok, my list so far:

Fiction
1. Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2001)
2. Sophie's World - Jostein Gaarder (1994)
3. To Ride Hell's Chasm - Janny Wurts (2002)
4. The Golden Compass - Philip Pullman (1995)
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston (1937)

Non-Fiction
1. The Looming Tower: : Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 - Lawrence Wright (2006) -- finished dec 31 2006, but missed last year's list
2. The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise - Michael Grunwald (2006)
3. The Glass Castle: A Memoir - Jeannette Walls (2005)

Poetry
- I was all set to read lots of poetry this year, and then I sort of stopped. But, these were really nice.
With the Light of Apricots : Poems - Larry D. Thomas
At the Bonehouse - Jack Bedell

If I've already posted this somewhere, I'm sorry, but here goes:

Just five? Okay. No particular order.

The Thirteenth Tale - D. Setterfield (but this one is number one)
Never Let Me Go - K. Ishiguro
Nora Jane: A Life in Stories - Ellen Gilchrist
Trust - Cynthia Ozick
Lunar Park - Bret Easton Ellis

Honorable Mentions to Sharp Objects - Gillian Flynn and Prep - Curtis Sittenfeld

I'm usually quite ruthless in choosing my top books but this year I have to choose six. Apologies.

Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2)
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (4)
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks (3)
The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle (1)
Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty (2)
The Gathering by Anne Enright (4)

>107 dchaikin: I really got back into poetry this year also. I somehow felt freer to do so after leaving the bookstore. I have reacquainted myself with the joy of pulling up a chair before the poetry section and leisurely browsing the collections and anthologies. I also picked up a few new poets from seeing their poetry on either poets.org or poetry daily.

Going over the lists so far, I see some repeat recommendations:

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love by Lisa See
Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Twilight by Stephanie Meyers
Book Thief, by Markus Zusak
Middlemarch, George Eliot

Of course, the month isn't over yet...

Going over the lists so far, I see some repeat recommendations:

The Thirteenth Tale, Diane Setterfield
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Peony in Love by Lisa See
Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (won the Booksense BOTY award, 2007)
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (won the Impac/Dublin Prize, 2007)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (won the Orange Prize, 2007)
The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (won the Orange Prize for 1st novel, 2007)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (won the Pulitzer Prize, 2007)
Twilight by Stephanie Meyers
Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (many awards, including a Commonwealth Prize)
Middlemarch, George Eliot

Of course, the month isn't over yet...

And looking back on the 2006 list, which is here, some of these titles appeared there also. Particularly; Twilight, Snow Flower & Thirteenth Tale.

I also noticed rebeccanyc's posting there of Half of a Yellow Sun which was very new in hardcover at the time. Her recommendation created a ripple effect through LT which got started in the Reading Globally group and is still going (I think it's out in paperback now or about to be).

Finally condensed the fiction for this year's top five list.

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Reading tip. Use a Spanish to English dictionary if needed.

2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Hey, it's still several hundred pages shorter than The Baroque Cycle by Stephenson.

3. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

4. The Last Witchfinderby James Morrow.

5. The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas. Different, very different.

****************
Six that vied for my top five.
Night Soldiers by Alan Furst.
To the Edge of the World by Harry Thompson
The Meaning of Nightby Michael Cox.
Eifelheim by Michael Flynn.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson.

I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe
Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium by John Ed Bradley
The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler
Landsman by Peter Charles Melman
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres

Ok, I am going to try to keep it to 5 each for fiction and non-fiction. I have read much more non-fiction this year than ever before - thank you LT members for all of the great recommendations. Here goes (in no particular order):

Fiction:

1. Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
2. We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
3. Montana, 1948 by Larry Watson
4. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon
5. Looking for Alaska by John Green

Honorable mention fiction: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Nineteen Minutes

Non-fiction:

1. All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg
2. Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress (I think this is non-fiction)
3. Jesus Land: a memoir by Julia Scheeres
4. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
5. Paper Trails by Pete Dexter

Honorable mention, non-fiction: What the World Eats, Material World and Going Back to Bisbee.

I don't know how much reading I am going to get done before the end of the year. I still have 4 books from the library and a ton of books in the house. I have a lot to do between now and Christmas but then after that I may have some time to read. I don't see the list changing though, especially non-fiction since I don't believe I will read any before the end of the year. It would have to be an absolutely amazing to change my fiction list although it could happen. I just finished Heart Shaped Box the other day so who knows.

I loved reading everyone's lists. Many great suggestions once again. I don't think I have any hopes of ever completing my TBR lists but I will certainly have fun trying.

It's so hard to limit the list to 5 - so many good books this year.

Top 5 Fiction

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2. Restless by William Boyd
3. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell
4. The Tortilla Curtain by T.C. Boyle
5. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I've loved looking through these lists and getting recommendations. Not that I should buy any more books - my NY Resolution is to reduce my tbr piles of 131 books.

Edited for touchstone.

#116 - I'd be interested to see what others think of The Tortilla Curtain. Boyle obviously has the reputation he does for a reason (I assume), but Curtain was my first by him, and, to be honest, I thought it was a miserably cliched piece of filth. Seriously.

Then again, I live around plenty of illegals (and my wife is a school nurse, so...) so, yeah, I already know their lives are rough beyond our comprehension and ours are ridiculously priviledged...

#112, avaland, Yes Half of a Yellow Sun is now out in paperback, and you are kind to say that my recommendation created a ripple effect since others have suggested that I touted it at every opportunity, and possibly ad nauseum!

mikeepatrick, classifying Boyle's novel as a 'miserably cliched piece of filth' seems a rather heavy indictment, and I'm wondering what you found in Boyle's book that would prompt your use of the word 'filth' specifically.

#117 -- I didn't like The Tortilla Curtain at all. It has been awhile but I do know I never read anything else by him after that; and I think I did find it cliche as well.

#119 - I like my words descriptive. :) But seriously, Boyle is considered to be one of the bigger guns of American lit., and I simply could NOT believe how bad the book was; I finished it out of morbid curiosity. It seems soooo myopic and unaccomplished - it's not subtle (not that serious topics need to be handled that way) or clever or emotionally challenging, or...

If you told me some pro-immigration group paid Boyle to write it ('And don't use any of that fancy-pants writing of yours - just keep it to uncaring yuppies living up on the hill and immigrants living in a ditch - nothing more.') so they could give away free copies to Congress, I'd believe it.

#102 now now.. being a librarian helps.. used to be over 140 so I am slowing down.

I don't think I'll be finishing anything else before the end of the year (and if I do, and something blows me away, I'll come back and amend this list). So here are my top reads for 2007, excluding rereads:

The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
The Accidental by Ali Smith
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

And a few honorable mentions:

The Gathering by Anne Enright
The Dark Angels by Karleen Koen
The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Innocent Traitor by Alison Weir
England's Mistress: the infamous life of Emma Hamilton by Kate Williams

1) Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
2) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
3) Seven Japanese Tales by Junichiro Tanizaki
4) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
5) DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman

many other good reads, great in fact, but these are the ones that had the greatest impact overall.

Many might loathe for leaving out such classics as Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye, and Slaughterhouse Five... don't get me wrong. those were great too.

hard decisions.

Boy, at least as far as long-dead writers go, Trollope has been doing quite well for himself lately here on LT. Warm fuzzies, anyone?

>113 VisibleGhost: I enjoyed The Last Witchfinder also, but read it last year as an arc. I thought it a romp and wonderfully clever (but then again, I enjoyed several of Morrow's previous novels).

--> 117

Mikeepatrick, The Tortilla Curtain was the first book I ever read by T.C. Boyle and I *hated* it. I also found the stereotypes in that book disgusting. I thought the ending to that book was absolutely ridiculous.

Subsequently, I've given T.C. Boyle a few more chances, and I'm glad I did. I found Drop City as well as Riven Rock interesting. However, where T.C. Boyle absolutely shines is in his short stories. I have a 600 plus page book called T.C. Boyle Stories with an incredible assortment of his short stories. I'm not sure I'd send you off to read such a thick book, but this book is actually several books combined into one. Try at least one book of his short stories before you read anything else of his. You might just change you mind about his writing.

P.S. I'm married to a former "illegal". :-)

Gosh, I didn’t realize I was touching such a nerve with my nomination of The Tortilla Curtain. I’m a big T.C.Boyle fan and I will admit I was dithering between that and Riven Rock but I stand by my choice. I didn’t find it ‘filth’ or full of ‘disgusting stereotypes’ but that may be because I’m British rather than American and also not married to a former illegal. We all read books with our own prejudices firmly in place, which affects whether we love or hate a book. That’s one of the reasons threads like this are so interesting – I’m sure everyone saw books on the Top 5 lists that they hated (mine was The Brothers K, one of the few books I’ve ever given up on). I’m obviously not the only person on LT who liked The Tortilla Curtain – it averages a 3.5 star rating and most of the reviews are positive. So put up your Top 5, mikeepatrick and let us slag off (British for criticize) your choices.

Fair enough, janeekelly, fair enough.

I read quite a bit of fantasy this year, none of which I'll list, because I'm big enough to admit that none of it really holds up to the 'literary' work I also read. Mine is a mix of fiction and nonfiction (which should be obvious):

The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - If you don't like this, you're dead inside. :)

Then We Came To the End by Joshua Ferris - The best novel about work EVER.

Big Bang by Simon Singh - Deniers of the whole 'universe' thing need not apply. Really stunning clarity - complex science for the layman WRITTEN by a 'layman'.

Fallingwater Rising by Franklin Toker - Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous work. AND a history of an America when the department store ruled all.

Treason's Harbor by Patrick O'Brian - Kind of a copout on my part, given that it's the middle-ish of a 22 book series, but as manly stories by the late 20th century's best writer goes, it was a good one. :)

Sorry, no Boyle. But I SWEAR I'll read another in '08. Swear.

ok, so do we have a top book in the fantasy category?:-)

#130 - OUCH. :)

Okay, lots of stuff that I enjoyed despite DEEP flaws. Of those, the one that crushed my skull was Vellum by Hal Duncan. Fair warning: Duncan is unapologetically gay (not that there's anything wrong with that - it just features heavily in the writing), Irish, and an open Joyce worshipper. Plus, the book is like twelve parallel alternate realities weaving around one another. Yeah, so NOT an easy read. I just grabbed on and went for the ride. People either love it, or HATE it.

>129 mikeepatrick: Thanks Mike - I can't criticize your choices after all as I haven't read any of them though 1 and 2 are on my list and 4 is now added as it sounds interesting. Another book about work which is very funny (which I've seen Joshua Ferris's compared to) is E by Matt Beaumont.

Edited for touchstone

There. That wasn't so bad, was it? No need to apologize (or almost apologize) for the books you read, there are many of us here that read all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons. Last I knew this was not an exclusive "literary fiction' thread (or group). I do find it difficult to make these lists, sometimes it's like comparing apples and oranges. I like hearing about all kinds of reads, I'm sure that's true of most LTers. Thanks.

Gee, I hope it's not exclusively a "literary fiction" group, or I'll have to drop out! Though I do read some literary fiction and classic fiction, I also love mysteries, thrillers, romance, historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and non-fiction. As my own list of favorites (#48) attests.

I didn't mean that this group was limited to 'literary fiction'. It's just that my reading is all over the map, and while I can enjoy different styles and genres, when it comes down to deciding the 'best' of what I've read, I'm hard-pressed to pick genre fiction. It's a matter of preference, I guess. Now, there IS exceptional genre fiction, no question. I just didn't read much of it in '07.

I am very glad that the group is not limited to 'literary fiction', although it has certainly expanded my horizons in that regard since I had never read all a lot of literary fiction prior to joining the group. My reading is very eclectic and not at all limited to one genre although I prefer nonfiction, mysteries, and yes, even the occasional romance. I sometimes get strange looks from librarians at the variety of my reading. If you look at my top 5 for the year you will see what I mean. Adventures of a Biographer is an older book, published in 1959, but An Unequal Music and The Savage Garden are both relatively new. All of them, however, were new to me, and thus made my list for this year.

I agree 100% because this site has opened my eyes to a lot of books I probably never would have touched before. I have a diverse range of reading in my library and I like that. I do love mysteries and true crime mostly, but I've opened my eyes to so much more thanks to LT!!!

>136 alcottacre: I know what you mean. One of the booksellers at the bookstore I frequent (and the one I used to work at) told me she is fascinated to see the variety of books I order and buy (I often order things not on the shelves). I think it was one of the best compliments I have received! (although I can't take credit for all of it, there are my husband's book and assorted gifts...).

Oh, this is so hard!

Fiction:
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Vintner's Luck by Elizabeth Knox
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde

Honourable Mentions:
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips

Non-Fiction
A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut
The Definitive Book of Body Language by Alan Pease
Moab is my Washpot by Stephen Fry
Unimagined by Imran Ahmad

I'm 1/3 of the way through my Early Reviewers copy of The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block and, unless it ends with a clunk, which I doubt, I'm going to be adding this to my favorites. Incredible writing, story weaving, and this guy is only 24!!!!

My list wasn't that hard, I read a lot of mystery cozies that although fun and good don't belong on a top 5 list.
My list -

the Red Tent by Antia Diamant
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Into thin Air by Jon Krakauer - I also just picked up from the library - Into the Wild which I'm hoping is just as good.
What the dead know by Laura Lippman, a mystery but a new author to me this year and I really enjoyed it.
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Top 5 (in no particular order):
Straight Man-Richard Russo
Cloud Atlas-David Mitchell
Pride and Prejudice-Jane Austen (first time!)
Plowing the Dark-Richard Powers
Special Topics in Calamity Physics-Marisha Pessl

Honorable mention:
Kafka on the Shore-Haruki Murakami
The Diamond Age and Snow Crash-Neal Stephenson

Glad to see so many folks listing Cloud Atlas. Also the many folks listing The Book Thief. I read it last year and L-O-V-E-D it. (Would have gone on my Top 5 list for that year, for sure.) I'm taking notes from this thread. :)

In alphabetical order:

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Saffran Foer -- creative and emotional; packed with spot-on details

Grace (Eventually) by Anne Lamott -- gentle and inspirational

Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O’Nan -- I’m still in this novella’s snowy day, rooting for the protagonist

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss -- creative and emotional

The Rejection Collection ed by Matthew Diffee -- I expected the collection of cartoons rejected by The New Yorker, and the book delivered on that -- but its delivery of terrific info about the cartoonists was a surprising bonus!

Alister McGrath's The Twilight of Atheism
Richard Rorty's Philosophy as cultural politics

It's official, I'm adding The Story of Forgetting to my favorites. My review is here.

I just read "Lovely Poems for Keeps". Nice book and easy to read and finish.

Highly Recommended.

I don't think I'm going to read much more this year, so here's my top five (new reads):

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (4th quarter)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (3rd)
The Railway by Hamid Ismailov (3rd)
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (3rd)
Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra (4th)

Probably approximately in order. Though my opinions are so changeable that I'll probably come and edit this every day until the end of the year :-)

I actually want to slide one more in for my top 5. I just finished reading my ER copy Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and was amazed! I think this moved strongly up into the top of my list for this year.

Stoner by John Williams was my favorite novel of the year - highly recommended!

Also on the list:
A Street of a Thousand Blossoms by Gail Tsukiyama
Sundown, Yellow Moon by Larry Watson

and

Unaccustomed Earth out in 2008 from Jhumpa Lahiri

Can't go wrong with any of them.

Yeah, I finally feel I can do my list. I think I will read one or two more books this year, but I don't think anything will topple my list.

1) Vanishing Point by David Markson
2) Midnight's children by Salman Rushdi
3) Life of insects by Victor Pelevin
4) I know this much is true by Wally Lamb
5) A tie (yes its a cop out) between The glass castle by Jeannette Walls and Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively.

Honorable mentions

The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Family matters by Rohinton Mistry
The master by Colm Toibin

Overall, it was an outstanding reading year with many quality books. I am looking forward to 2008 with its many more reading pleasures.

Looks like most everyone had a great year for reading in 2007. Let's hope that 2008 brings many more book adventures for us all!

Here are my top 5 reads for '07:

1) The Year of Pleasures by Elizabeth Berg
2) Sweetgrass by Mary Alice Monroe
3) Marrying Mozart by Stephanie Cowell
4) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
5) Rescuing Sprite: A Dog Lover's Story of Joy & Anguish by Mark Levin

Honorable mentions:

1) How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
2) Where the River Runs by Patti Callahan Henry
3) Gramercy Park by Paula Cohen

alphaorder, I sort of discovered John Williams this year too, absolutely loved Stoner and also his spectacular Butcher's Crossing. I also mightily enjoyed Williams' National Book Award-winning epistolary novel Augustus, which I thought was easily in the same class as Robert Graves' I, Claudius, all just great stuff.

Touchstones buggered, it seems, at the moment.

Decided to go for no non-fiction, and only stuff newly read this year :-

Rynemonn : Leopard Dreaming - Terry Dowling
Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction - Damien Broderick and David G. Hartwell
Year's Best SF 12 - David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Crarmer
Science Fiction: The Very Best of 2005 - Jonathan Strahan
The New Space Opera - Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection - Gardner Dozois
Galactic North - Alastair Reynolds
The Best of Cordwainer Smith - Cordwainer Smith
Mammoth Book Of Extreme Science Fiction - Mike Ashley
Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present - Cory Doctorow

>150 keren7: keren7, I loved Life of Insects by Pelevin (I think it is my favorite Pelevin, although my husband's favorite in HomoZapiens). I still have wonderful pictures in my head of the two mosquitoes discussing their favorite 'landscapes' and the woman termite (?) landing in heels, sawing off her own wings, and then immediately looking for a place to stay. And the moths... Of course, one wonders what parts of Russian society he is poking fun at...

>149 alphaorder:: alphaorder
So glad to know of an upcoming release by Lahiri!!

>150 keren7:: keren7
The Life of Insects sounds interesting, your review was helpful!

I was blown over by The Interpreter of Maladies when I first read it at publication. If memory serves me correctly, I think Unaccustomed Earth is every bit as good!

Avaland

spoiler

My favourite part, if not heartbreaking, is the part where the termites child leaves her to find the world and instead gets trapped in the spiders web. It just shows how unfair life is and how there is no rhyme or reason to what happens to us.

>157 keren7:. Ah yes, I remember. Makes me want to read it again. Thanks.

Boy, oh boy, is it hard to keep to five books, but after much deliberation, here is my top five list, in order:

1) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2) The Road by Cormac McCarthy
3) Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
4) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
5) The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Thank you all for making this a great year of reading - and to the many of you who suggested these books (and others), thanks for helping me read such enriching and memorable books. Looking forward to a great 2008!

My five favorite reads (out of 89) for 2007:

1) Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
2) The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
3) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
4) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

and it's a toss up which of these books I'd put in as 5)

You're Not You by Michelle Wildgren
Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire
I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb
The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst

Edited to say how could I forget Snow Flower and the Secret Fan!

My top five this year- in no particular order.
The World to Come by Dara Horn
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Istanbul, Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk
This has been a good reading year with many outstanding books.
(touchstones not working on some of the authors)

The Pesthouse Jim Crace
Bridge of Sighs Richard Russo
I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down William Gay
Finn Jon Clinch
Twilight William Gay

Not The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Finn.

I think I have a definite Top 5 now:

Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay (2)
Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay (2)
Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner (3)
Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb (3)
The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch (4)

Honourable Mentions:

Thieves & Kings by Mark Oakley (series) (1)
Elantris by Brandon Sanderson (2)
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson (2)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (3)
The Fall of the Kings by Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman (3)

Edited because I forgot to add which quarter I read each book in.

I posted my favorites a couple of weeks ago, thinking that it was unlikely that I'd read another favorite by the end of the year... but I was given The Road by Cormac McCarthy for Christmas, so I have to revise my list:

1. Water for Elephants
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns
3. The Road
4. His Dark Materials

I think with less than 48 hours to go I'm ready to make my choice:

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Beware of God by Shalom Auslander
Everyman by Philip Roth
Under The Skin by Michel Faber
Where I'm Calling From by Raymond Carver (although I still have about half a dozen stories left to go)

In no particular order...
The Girls who Went Away by Ann Fessler
Llama, Llama Red Pajama by Anna Dewdney
Knuffle Bunny Two: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
The Best Place to Read by Debbie Bertram

Perhaps my top reading list for 2007 shows why one reading goal for 2008 is to read more books written for adults.
Although there is something wonderful about finding a great read alound.. the rhymes in The Best Place to Read and Llama Llama Red Pajama make them WONDERFUL read alouds to kiddos.

Had no "10's" in 2007. The following "9's" don't include re-reading old favorites:

FICTION:
White Oleander by Janet Fitch
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
All Together Dead by Charlaine Harris
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

NONFICTION:
Stiff by Mary Roach
The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (2)
The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt (2)
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (2)
Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl (3)
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield (3)

Honorable mentions:
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (3)
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (4)

My top 5 for 2007, in no particular order:

Fiction:

Clara Callan by Richard B. Wright
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwen
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Can You Hear the Nightbird Sing? by Anita Rau Badami
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson

I am a bit ambivalent about Middlesex - it was almost usurped by Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee or The Last Days of Dogtown by Anita Diamant

Non-fiction:
Saxons, Vikings and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland by Bryan Sykes
Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson
God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

dihiba, I've been waiting to hear what someone had to say about the new Badami novel. It's the first to NOT be published in the US (a bummer!). Wondering if it's worth paying the extra and ordering from Canada or hope that a US publisher picks it up in paperback.

My top novels in no particular order:

Watchmen
Snow Crash
V for Vendetta
The Absolute Sandman
Bad Monkeys

It's only a couple of hours 'til the New Year here in the Philippines, so I can safely post my top five reads of the 2007:

1. Fragile Things, by Neil Gaiman (1)
2. Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie, by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess (2)
3. M Is for Magic, by Neil Gaiman (3)
4. InterWorld, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves (3)
5. The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighteenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant (3)

Because I'm biased, and Gaiman's books just HAVE to be at the top of my list, I'll name some runners-up:

Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami (2)
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami (1)
Beasts, by Joyce Carol Oates (1)
The Secret Books of Venus I and II, by Tanith Lee (4)
A Bed Of Earth (The Gravedigger's Tale), by Tanith Lee (4)

avaland - I think she is a wonderful writer - that said, The Hero's Walk remains my favourite but they're all great. Can You Hear the Nightbird Sing? is out in trade paperback now.
I don't have any of my own copies of her books - one of my goals for '08 is to find them secondhand - not an easy feat.

I read a lot of good books this year, but these are my top 5, in no particular order:

The Sunne in Splendour
Atonement
John Adams
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
The Other Boleyn Girl

This has been a year of ecclectic reading - a little bit of everything....but my favorites are:

The Brief History of the Dead by Brockmeier - a clever sci fi story of the afterlife that questions what is out there, deals with memory, loss and the effect each person can have on another
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Hosseini - powerful
World Without End by Follett - middle ages, historical fiction at its best
World War Z by Max Brooks - apocalypse, plague, zombies, yet oh so real
Other Boleyn Girl by Gregory - excellent

And one YA books that I highly recommend -

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick - mystery, suspence, history, filmaking - should be up for the Newbery award

I struggled to cut this list down, and had to go with a top six for fiction and another for nonfiction. Books are listed in alphabetical order, with quarter read in parentheses.

Fiction:
Case Histories by Kate Atkinson (2)
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1)
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (2)
Restoration by Rose Tremain (3)
Troubles by J.G. Farrell (1)
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2)

Nonfiction:
The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty by Caroline Alexander (2)
The Circus Fire by Stewart O'Nan (1)
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (3)
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families by Philip Gourevitch (3)
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (4)

Wow, this was tough. I read so many great books this year. Apologies to the books I didn't mention. ;)

In no particular order.

Fiction:

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
The Secret River by Kate Grenville
Zoli by Colum McCann
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Non-Fiction:

A Walk in the Woods : rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson
Marley and me by John Grogan
Scribbling the cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller
Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters and Survival by Anderson Cooper
Ex Libris : confessions of a common reader by Anne Fadiman - reread
Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee - Thanks, karenwardill . I've had it for ages, but had never read it.

The Time Traveler's Wife
The Thirteenth Tale
The Book of Lost Things
The Star Garden: A Novel of Sarah Agnes Prine

These are off the top of my head in no particular order & excluding re-reads. The majority of my books are still boxes from our move so, unless I see them, my memory remains a little foggy...

Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O' Farrell
Astrid and Veronika by Linda Olsson
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Astonishing Splashes of Colour by Clare Morrall
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
Ursula, Under by Ingrid Hill

I have even more on my UNFINISHED list!

Top 5 Fiction:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird***** by Harper Lee review
1. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan***** by Lisa See review
1. The Book Thief***** by Markus Zusak review
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde***** by Robert Louis Stevenson review
4. Heart of Darkness***** by Joseph Conrad review

Top Non-Fiction:
Wild Swans by Jung Chang review
The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad review

>izzybee, I'm so glad someone else has read Zoli, it was such a great book. Surely it isn't getting the attention it deserves!

#166 ShannonMDE -- hmm, children's books. Here is a top five list of sorts, from memory.

Eat Your Peas, Ivy Louise by Leo Landry (warning, about throwing food)
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague
How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon? by Jane Yolen & Mark Teague
Pinkalicious by Elizabeth & Victoria Kahn
Good Night Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann

I could on...
Hug by Jez Alborough
What's Wrong, Little Pookie? by Sanda Boynton
Frankie's Bau Wau Haus by Rizzoli
Dreaming with Rousseau by Julie Merberg & Suzanne Bober
...

Here are mine in no particular order.

Non-Fiction:
Devil In the White City by Erik Larson
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chadrasekaran
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Grace Eventually by Anne Lamott
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

Honorable Mention: Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup

Fiction:
Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill
The Secret Hour by Scott Westerfeld

Honorable Mention: Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

#174 Oh, ktleyed ~ Wasn't The Sunne in Splendour wonderful! Have you read any of her other stuff? I think Penman is one of the finest writers of historical fiction around today.

#184 Storeetllr, yes I loved it! I've read her Here Be Dragons Trilogy and am going to read When Christ and His Saints Slept soon and then Time and Chance I devoured The Sunne in Splendour and then read The Daughter of Time shortly after, I'm such a Richard III fan now! LOL!

My top five, broken into fiction and non-fiction categories, more or less in order of excellence and with the quarter read in parentheses:

Fiction:
Pallaksch, Pallaksch by Liliane Giraudon (3)
Akhenaten by Dorothy Porter (2)
In transit by Brigid Brophy (4)
Kafka in Bronteland by Tamar Yellin (4)
The Dedalus book of Finnish fantasy (2)

Honorable Mentions:
Toddler-hunting & other stories by Kono Taeko (2)
Spleen by Olive Moore (2)
The Marquis of Bolibar by Leo Perutz (3)
The Snow Ball by Brigid Brophy (4)
The Book of Small by Emily Carr (4)
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan (2)

Non-fiction:
My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe (4)
Two sisters and their mother by Françoise Héritier (1)
How Sex Changed by Joanne Meyerowitz (4)
Hidden anxieties by Lesley Hall (1)
The power of feelings : personal meaning in psychoanalysis, gender, and culture by Nancy J. Chodorow (4)

Unequivocally oddest book I've read all year (about which I am hopelessly ambivalent and can't make up my mind whether to class in clunkers or top five):
Armed with madness by Mary Butts

In no particular order.

Top Five Fiction:
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow (3)
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (4)
At Midnight on the Thirty-first of March by Josephine Young Case (2)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (4)
The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barkworth (4)

Top Five Non-Fiction:
Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America by Peter Mancall (1)
Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature by Bryan Waterman (3)
Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne (3)
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings (1)
Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow (3)

It's so hard to do this as most of my reads came in with strong recommendations from LTers or via award lists. In no particular order...

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Black Girl, White Girl by Joyce Carol Oates

Competition was stiff for the fifth slot so I chose one not yet represented on this thread.

#181 Zoli is one of those books that I keep picking up in the bookshop but end up putting down before I leave. Part of that is undoubtedly due to my having read Dancer by the same author. But I'll give it a chance next time.

Here are my picks:

Fiction:
The Historian
Shadow of the Wind
The Book of Lost Things
The Secret History
I Am the Messenger
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (I had to pick 6...I couldn't leave off Harry!)

Non-Fiction:
Ex Libris
Fun Home
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Honorable mention must go to Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging and the rest in the Georgia Nickleson series. They are so very funny and have kept me giggling all year.

My top five of 2007:

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn
Have You Found Her
The History of Love
The Myth of You and Me

>189 Cariola: Cariola, I had not read his other books before reading Zoli so I cannot speak for how it compares or doesn't. I found it well-researched, well-written, and an intriguing story.

>188 CEP: I read Black Girl White Girl also but it would be on a long list of honorable mentions. She has a new one (when doesn't she?) coming out in April or May called Wild Nights!: Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway, sounds delightful!

#192 Dancer is a fictionalized bio of Nureyev. It starts out interesting but then descends into a lot of kinky, sadomasochistic gay encounters. While this may have been somewhat based on fact, if so, it was a lot more than I wanted to know--especially the violence and cruelty.

>193 Cariola: There is definitely violence in Zoli but none I thought particularly gratuitous or otherwise over-the-top. I believe amandameale read it also and enjoyed it (not that I'm trying to be a book pusher or anything:-).

#192 and 194. I will definitely check out Zoli. As I said, the synopsis on the cover intrigued me enough that I almost bought it several times. Thanks for your input!

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Bel Canto
Therese Raquin - Zola
New Yorker Book of War Pieces (World War II)
Remains of the Day
Madame Bovary (2nd time)
Scarlet Letter (2nd time)

I've been trying to narrow down my list of best books for days now and this is what I came up with:

1. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
2. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
3. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
4. The Stand by Stephen King
5. The Book of Flying by Keith Miller

For non-fiction which I don't read a lot of it's Stiff by Mary Roach

Other books that didn't make the top five are:
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn
Novecento by Alessandro Baricco
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
The Road by Cormac McCarthy

..... I read a lot of really good books in 2007.

My top five for 2007 are:

1. Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam (3)
2. Life as we knew it by Susan Beth Pfeffer (1)
3. The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife (still haven't finished Amber Spyglass) by Philip Pullman (3)
4. World War Z by Max Brooks (4)
5. Sold by Patricia McCormick

Honourable Mentions:
How I live now by Meg Rosoff
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Skellig by David Almond

**Edited for touchstones.

I propose we put a stop date on posting favorites to this thread and then compile the results. Suggestions? Shall we give it another week? or to the end of the month? Is anyone a whiz at doing the count?

I was pondering doing a count. I can be bribed.

Not in order
The Time Traveler's wife

Bel Canto

Possession

The Road

Truth & Beauty

In no particular order:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Heat by Bill Buford
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Gardener's Year by Karel Capek
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

My top fiction:
Ysabel
The Garden Angel
Before You Know Kindness
The Great Gatsby
We Need to Talk About Kevin
One Mississippi
Bridge of Sighs

Top nonfiction:
She Got Up Off the Couch
I'll Always Have Paris
Better
Coal to Cream

My list is a little long, but this is after ruthless elimination of several others I wanted to include. This list also doesn't include any re-reads.

I couldn't get it down to five, but I came close. The first is definitely the best, after that they are in random order.

The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje
What is the What by Dave Eggers
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

#199 Good idea, teelgee. I was wondering if someone was going to make a list of the most popular books on this thread.

Tough to come up with just five. My top four for 2007 had to have been

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
Blindness by Jose Saramago
Winds of War by Herman Wouk
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

There's about a 13-way tie for fifth place, though, and I've given up trying to settle the issue, so I'll leave it there. Each of the four I listed, at least, really blew me away in one way or another.

I've read every one on your list, emaestra, and both Divisadero and Half of a Yellow Sun made my Favorites of 2007, while Dave Eggers' wonderful What is the What was on my 2006 list, all terrific novels.

>199 teelgee:, 200. I think you should feel free to do a count at any time if either of you are up to it. The post of your results will mark where you counted from. I don't think there is a need to close a thread to do so.

Warning: such an endeavor could test one's sanity. It's certainly worth noting the books mentioned repeatedly (which I did somewhere way back in the thread, can't find it now. . .) I'm going to predict The Book Thief, A Thousand Splendid Suns and Half of a Yellow Sun end up in the top five (just from skimming the posts).

I'll start a compiliation on Monday unless someone else raises their hand.

Go for it Morphidae-

I am eager to see the results, but not eager to tabulate...

alphaorder

I could swear I posted my top 5 here, but apparently I didn't. I read some great books this year, but overall, my top reads of 2007 were:

1. Mosquito, Roma Tearne
2. Anil's Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
3. The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles
4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
5. Enduring Love, Ian McEwan

I may be back to change this . . . it's so hard to decide which five are best.

You go right ahead, Morphidae!!!

I would actually volunteer to do it, but I'll be going out of town this weekend, so I'll allow Morphidae to proceed with the tally!

Ahhh.. I completely forgot about Confessions of a Closet Catholic.. Such a great and highly recommended YA read for this year.

FYI, I'm doing a VERY rough compiliation. I basically copy/pasted the thread into Excel and I'm doing a quick manual "scrape" looking for book titles. I'm not looking at context at all. So if someone says, "The Best Book" is one of their favorites, and someone else says "The Best Book" was awful, the book will be counted twice.

P.S. These seem to be the most mentioned so far:

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Cloud Atlas
Half of a Yellow Sun
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Nineteen Minutes
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
The Book Thief
The Road
The Thirteenth Tale
The Time Traveler's Wife
Water for Elephants

Ah, you people and your Excel sheets are amazing!!!

Morphidae, it sounds delightfully organized. I did the first by skimming, jotting down titles on first repeat and ticking off mentions thereafter (I wasn't aiming for accuracy).

I think my favouroues were

Fiction

Measuring Time by Helon Habila

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard

The boy in the striped pyjamas by John Boyne

The Night of the Burning by Linda Press Wulf *** Written as novel...but is based on story about Author's mother in law!

Gents by Warwick Collins

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar

Non Fiction
(Creole) by ((Babette de Rozieres))

Lucky man: A memoir by Michael J. Fox

Olga's Story by Stephanie Williams

Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crewe by Bernard Hare

Honourable mentions: -
Fiction
half of a yellow sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Maps for Lost Lovers by Nadeem Aslam

Restless by William Boyd

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Special topics in calamity physics by Marisha Pessl

Non-Fiction

Shadow of the Silk Road by Colin Thubron

Counting through post 207. This is a rough compiliation. Again, book names were grabbed regardless of context.

The winner with 17 mentions is A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The remaining top ten are:

The Road
The Thirteenth Tale TIED with 13 mentions

Half of a Yellow Sun with 11 mentions

The Book Thief
Water for Elephants TIED with 10 mentions

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with 9 mentions

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan with 8 mentions

Cloud Atlas
The Time Traveler's Wife TIED with 7 mentions

Honorable mentions with 5 mentions each are:

Bel Canto
Nineteen Minutes
Out Stealing Horses
The Glass Castle

Thanks, Morphy! Now I know exactly what to check out for the coming year.

My top tier of 2007 (in no particular order):

American Psycho
The Lovely Bones
Remains of the Day
Einstein's Dreams

Runners-up:

Concrete Island
Unbearable Lightness of Being
Into the Wild
Pleasure of my Company
High Fidelity
God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater

All of these books caused various rumblings within my intellect and emotions. I rarely truly dislike a book, so picking favorites in general is difficult for me. But the top favorites are always those that caused the most deeply felt rumblings of all.

A good book intrigues me, but the best ones possess me.

I am reading The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly right now and I am really enjoying the book. It is interesting that it was one of your top books of the year.---Alice

Keeping it to five:

Hitler's Beneficiaries
Storm Front
Through Mobility We Conquer
Rubicon
The Wizard Hunters

Morphidae, I missed your post earlier! Thanks for doing that; it's a interesting list (#220)

In Cold Blood

The Prestige

any of the Dresden Files

The Looking Glass Wars

The Girl Next Door

#220 Yes, thanks Morphi! I see I've managed to read 3 out of the top 10 in '07. Not too bad, though that leaves 7 for my TBR list. :)

My favorite 5:
Tess of the D'ubervilles
Mill on the Floss
Half of a Yellow Sun
Everything is Illuminated
Sit Down and Shut Up!

Did not quite finish it, but Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was very important to me in 2007.

my top 5 for 2007

the fortress of solitude by jonathen lethen
the poisonwood bible by barbara kingsolver
birdsong by sebastian faulks
rebecca by daphne du maur

and my favourite book was..... middlesex by jeffrey eugenides

>230 stayhuman36: My husband would've chosen Fortress of Solitude as a favorite in the year he read it. He really loved it. I very much enjoyed Middlesex also.

My five are mostly re-reads:

Lights Out for the Territory Iain Sinclair

Before the Fact by Francis Iles

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh

My top 5 books read in 2007 were:

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hess
The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Plainsong by Kent Haruf

my top five fiction:

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The Other Side of the Bridge by Mary Lawson
Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

#229 Darrol: Warms my heart, it does. My favorite book, ever. Trying to get up the gumption to give it a re-read. My TBR pile doesn't exactly get any smaller when I ignore it...

sferrando, I read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle last year too and enjoyed it a whole lot more than I thought I might. This past month I read Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil!, the 'inspiration' for the new film There Will Be Blood, and while there was too much proselytizing on socialism, I still thought it a very valid representation of the greed and corruption that dominated in the early days of the California oil fields.

LouisBranning, thanks for telling me about Oil!. I'll keep my eye out for that if I see it at a used book sale. I enjoyed The Jungle, as well, however, I felt that it ended kind of abruptly. It seemed like Upton Sinclair could have gone on with the story for another couple hundred pages, or so.

My top 5 books were:

Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella
Momzillas by Jill Kargman
Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
Sisterchicks on the Loose by Robin Jones Gunn

in no order;

Fiction;
1. "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" by Robert Crichton
2. Tales of The South Pacific by James A. Michener
3. A Bell For adano by John Hersey
4. Armageddon;A novel of Berlin by Leon Uris
5. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafron

Non-Fiction;
1. Fix Bayonets! by John W. Thomason
2."Great Mutiny" by James Dugan
3. The Wreck of the Memphis (Classics of Naval Literature)
by Edward Latimer Beach
4. Private Yankee Doodle: Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier by Joseph Plumb Martin
5. Every Man Will Do His Duty by Dean King

My top five for 2007 in descending order:

#5 The Terror by Dan Simmons
#4 Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
#3 Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
#2 A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
#1 The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell

For the briefest of snippets regarding WHY I chose these five, see:

http://alaskabookworm.blogspot.com/2008/01/top-five-2007-reads.html

Hi, alaskabookworm ~ The Sparrow? Oh, yes! One of my favorite books ever! I think it may be time for a reread. :)

Storeetllr, I have wondered how The Sparrow might fare in a reread. While it's themes are timeless it is still very much a book of the 90s. I suppose I will not find out, there are just too many books on my TBR pile and, well, they keep publishing new ones!

I know what you mean, avaland. Actually, my TBRR pile is almost as tall as my TBR pile 'cause there's just not enough time to read everything I want to read!!! :(

My top 5 for 2007 -

1. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, which led to...
2. Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
3. Ines of my Soul by Isabel Allende
4. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
5. The Space Between Us by Thrity Umrigar

Not a typical year for me - I read a lot of novels by Indian authors (spurred by the two excellent Lahiri books, I can't wait for her Spring '08 release!), and didn't read as much non-fiction as I normally do. The Bronte was a real treat.

Top five for 2007:

No One Belongs Here More Than You - Miranda July

Blue Suburbia - Laurie Albanese

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon

and of course...

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling

2007 was a great year, making the selection process painful, even cheating I still left out some great books, however:

1. Anna Karenina
2. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
3. A Farewell to Arms
4. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
t5. The Painted Veil
t5. Swann's Way

Honorable Mention

Atonement
Les Miserables
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

zanix, The Painted Veil was on my list too.

I think I can only come up w/ four:

The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiongo
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clark
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzenitsyn
Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Were any of them even published last year? No matter, I thoroughly enjoyed them all.

RcCarol, I also loved The Wizard of the Crow, which I read last year, and Living to Tell the Tale, which I read several years ago.

rebeccanyc it's so cool that you loved it! I can find so few that have actually heard of it.

#249-251 The Wizard of the Crow has been sitting on my shelf for a while (seems I hardly have time for long books these days). Now I'm really looking forward to it!

Be warned with Wizard of the Crow that it can take a little while to get into it as the author takes the first section to introduce all the characters. By the way, RcCarol, I bought it partly because it was on display in my favorite bookstore and I loved the cover!

>249 RcCarol:-253. Wizard of the Crow sits patiently on my shelf waiting for me to read it. I read a great amount of African fiction last fall into January for a class and, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I've needed a break since. I'll get to eventually and its encouraging that the two of you like it:-)

Rebeccanyc - the cover is really cool. Avaland and Medellia12, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Like rebeccanyc says, give it time. Once it gets into the story, it becomes a blast.