Lists O' Lists: Best Books of 2007

Best Books of 2007
(as judged by frequency of inclusion on above lists)

Fiction

Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinksi

Away, Amy Bloom

The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon

Falling Man, Don DeLillo

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz

Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini

Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson (even though The Atlantic hated it!)

The God of Animals, Aryn Kyle

On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

Cheating at Canasta: Stories, William Trevor

Nonfiction

How To Talk About Books You Haven't Read, Pierre Bayard (translated by Jeffrey Mehlman)

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life, Hugh Brogan

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A.J. Jacobs

Travels with Herodotus, Ryszard Kapuscinski (translated from the Polish by Klara Glowczewska)

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm

The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography, from the Revolution to the First World War, Graham Robb

The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century Alex Ross

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Jeffrey Toobin

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, Peter Turchi

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner

The World Without Us, Alan Weisman

Poetry

Next Life, Rae Armantrout

Time and Materials, Robert Hass

2007 Prize Winners

Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards: Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fiction); Blue Front, Martha Collins (Poetry); Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend, Scott Reynolds Nelson (Nonfiction)

Bancroft Awards: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert D. Richardson, and Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South, Jack Temple Kirby

Booker Prize: The Gathering, Anne Enright

Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Mister Pip, Lloyd Jones (Best Book); Vandal Love, D. Y. Bechard (Best First Book)

Impac Dublin Award: Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson

National Book Awards: Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson (Fiction); Time and Materials, Robert Hass (Poetry); Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, Tim Weiner (Nonfiction); The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie (Young Adult)

Nobel Prize in Literature: Doris Lessing

Orange Prize: Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Pulitzer: The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Fiction); Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire (Drama), The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Generation, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (History); The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, Debby Applegate (Biography); Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey (Poetry); The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright (General Nonfiction)

Other Notables

Books that almost made it to the best of the best list, or books that are just plain cool.

Wall and Piece, Banksy

The Tiger that Isn't: Seeing Through a World of Numbers, Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot.

I Am America (And So Can You!) Stephen Colbert

Novels in Three Lines, Felix Feneon (translated by Luc Sante)

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver

Exit Wounds, Rutu Modan (graphic novel, pictured left)

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

Poor People, William T. Vollmann

Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team, Michael Weinreb

Spanking Shakespeare, Jake Wizner

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf

Click: One Novel Ten Authors, by David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Lanagan, Gregory Maguire, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park, and Tim Wynne-Jones

Not a "best of" list, but pretty cool (and from 2007) nonetheless, is New York magazine's list of Best Novels You've Never Read. Sick of bestsellers and classics alike? Browse this list for ideas on what to read next. You may get turned on to a whole range of writers you never knew about!

If you don't have a giant list of books to read (or give as gifts) by now, you were either a voracious reader in '07 or somehow none of these diverse titles appeal to you. If that's the case, we wonder--what does interest you?. Anyway, even if you don't check out these big names, we urge you to read something over the holiday season--goodness knows you're not going to read those obnoxious update letters from your family, and you might as well pass at least some of your time in front of a book instead of the TV.

Did we miss an awesome book from 2007, or a great "best of" list? Let us know in the comments!

Book cover images from Amazon, Powell's and Drawn & Quarterly