Bay Area authors' books among best of '07 (original) (raw)

The Savage Detectives

Now that the avalanche of fall books has rumbled through - only moments after we recovered our bearings, having barely withstood the stampede of spring and summer titles - and before the dust kicks up again (Christmas and New Year's Eve and beautiful, beautiful college bowl games), there's time to engage in the great pastime of criticism: choosing the year's best whatever.

Best football game: Stanford destroying the lives of so many bettors by snatching victory, and a shot at a national championship, from the Trojans (though that point spread was ridiculous; insulting, really). A close second: Indy vs. New England.

Best movie: "Zodiac," which was one of only about four movies I saw this year, what with all the reading and watching football.

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And the best book ...

Before we get to that, let's point out that some fine books by Bay Area authors came out in 2007. Not only did Michael Chabon deliver a highly entertaining, genre-busting novel - "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" - that was a national best-seller to boot, but there were also plenty of strong follow-up works in fiction by authors such as Khaled Hosseini ("A Thousand Splendid Suns," also a national best-seller), Daniel Mason, Vendela Vida, Kaui Hart Hemmings, Michelle Richmond, Tess Uriza Holthe, Erika Mailman, Alice Sebold and Vikram Chandra. There were also impressive first novels by Ann Cummins and Spring Warren.

In nonfiction, books by Earl Shorris, Rebecca Solnit and Wendy Lesser displayed the elegant writing and the nuanced thinking we've long appreciated in their work; Richard Rhodes produced another compelling history on our nuclear-poisoned world, and Salon founder David Talbot weighed in on what really happened during the Kennedy presidency. (Speaking of media figures, KQED's Michael Krasny's memoir also came out this year.)

Having said that, here are what I consider to be the top books - fiction and nonfiction - of 2007, as well as what I though to be the best book of the year.

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The Shadow Catcher (Simon & Schuster) by Marianne Wiggins: Her previous novel, "Evidence of Things Unseen," was dazzling, and this dual tale - about the life of Western photographer Edward S. Curtis and the author's drive to Vegas to confront a man claiming to be her long-dead father - confirms that she's on a tear that's a pleasure to behold.

Lost City Radio (HarperCollins) by Daniel Alarcon: There's a reason Granta named Oakland's Alarcon one of the country's best young novelists. His first novel is a beautifully crafted story about a legacy of terror and ruin all too common in the modern Americas, told soberly and free of exoticization. "Lost City Radio" was one of many exciting works this year by Latino writers redefining what "American" literature is.

On Chesil Beach (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) by Ian McEwan: This seems to be the novel that McEwan has been working toward all these years. A slim but biting work, his telling of a wedding night gone horribly wrong gets to the heart of human frailty and the grim comedy of love. Whereas in his past novels McEwan would punctuate romantic loss with awful death, here he knows that true heartbreak doesn't need any violence to accentuate it. It's a minor masterpiece.

Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Denis Johnson: There was no more haunting a set piece this year in fiction than the one at the beginning of Johnson's novel: A young GI thoughtlessly shoots a monkey in the jungles of the Philippines, then torn up by guilt and self-loathing, watches the poor creature slowly die. That feeling of being doomed to destruction and lost to redemption pervades this sprawling novel set in Southeast Asia and Arizona during the Vietnam War. It is an unflinching look at the pitiless world men have constructed for themselves, to their everlasting regret.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead) by Junot Diaz: Readers waited for more than a decade for Diaz's first novel, and they weren't disappointed. This story of an overweight Dominican nerd's tragic youth, as told by a womanizer who was his roomie at Rutgers, is at once hilarious and harrowing. And the book's meditation on the history of the Dominican Republic, and the far-reaching consequences of Trujillo's dictatorship, prove that for all the writing's street charm - the snap of the sentences, the melange of Spanish and English, both slang and proper - "Oscar Wao" is a serious work.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) by Tim Weiner: Like a tent-hall preacher wet in the eye with passion, Weiner's take-down of the management of the Central Intelligence Agency is a seething catalog of the sins and buffoonery of the most powerful men in the country for the past 50 years or so. Weiner's exhaustive research spares no one, and further proves that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? (Grove) by Francisco Goldman: In contrast to the fiery indignation of Weiner's book, Goldman's reportage of the bludgeoning of a Guatemalan bishop is appropriately sober, allowing a multitude of facts to slowly wash over us till a picture of a country living under utter repression and horror emerges. Not only is this a magnificent crime book on the murder of a human rights advocate, but it's also a testament to the bravery and resilience of a people and the steep price citizens pay to hold their governments accountable.

All Over Coffee (City Lights) by Paul Madonna: The comic strip All Over Coffee leaves some people cold, while it makes others curl their toes. While I could do without the elliptical, disembodied dialogue, the drawings are wonderful. And as packaged in this collection by City Lights, they can be downright beautiful. The solitary charm and mystery of San Francisco are somehow captured in Madonna's art; it's as if he's distilled the essence of hanging out alone in an apartment, contentedly watching the weather change outside, just happy to be here.

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And the best book of the year - The Savage Detectives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) by Roberto Bolaño: Only a few books every decade or so are true live wires: You read them and are shocked out of your quotidian existence, floored by the power of literature. When Bolaño's novel came out in 1998, it was garlanded by the Spanish-reading world. When the English translation by Natasha Wimmer came out this spring, it was easy to see why the late Bolaño (he died in 2003) was hailed as a lion. His novel, set mostly in Mexico in the '70s, is an ode to both youth and literature. Told through the diary of a teenage hanger-on and the first-person accounts of a wide cast of characters, "Detectives" trails the lives of a pair of shabby, mysterious poets who one day go on the run both to save their skins and to search for a forgotten poet. The novel is mammoth (though "2666," the sequel of sorts to "The Savage Detectives" being translated by Wimmer, is more than 1,000 pages long), wrapping you up in its world, holding you there through the intoxicating warmth of its intimacy.

Here are some other notable books of 2007.

Novels

After Dark (Knopf) by Haruki Murakami; The Almost Moon (Little, Brown) by Alice Sebold; Arlington Park (FSG) by Rachel Cusk; Away (Random House) by Amy Bloom; Be Near Me (Harcourt) by Andrew O'Hagan; Before (Knopf) by Irini Spanidou; The Bad Girl (FSG) by Mario Vargas Llosa; Bird of Another Heaven (Knopf) by James D. Houston; Blood of Paradise (Ballantine) by David Corbett; Bowl of Cherries (McSweeney's) by Millard Kaufman; Bridge of Sighs (Knopf) by Richard Russo; Call Me by Your Name (FSG) by Andre Aciman; Channeling Mark Twain (Random House) by Carol Muske-Dukes; Crossing the Sierra de Gredos (FSG) by Peter Handke.

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Dancing to "Almendra" (FSG) by Mayra Montero; The Descendants (Random House) by Kaui Hart Hemmings; Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin) by Philip Roth; A Far Country (Knopf) by Daniel Mason; Fieldwork (FSG) by Mischa Berlinski; The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes (Crown) by Tess Uriza Holthe; Free Food for Millionaires (Warner) by Min Jin Lee; The Gathering (Black Cat/Grove) by Anne Enright; God Is Dead (Viking) by Ron Currie; The Gravedigger's Daughter (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Joyce Carol Oates; H ouse of Meetings (Knopf) by Martin Amis.

Kalooki Nights (Simon & Schuster) by Howard Jacobson; Last Night at the Lobster (Viking) by Stewart O'Nan; Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Vendela Vida; Mac Gregor Tells the World (Random House) by Elizabeth McKenzie; Man Gone Down (Black Cat/Grove) by Michael Thomas; The Ministry of Special Cases (Knopf) by Nathan Englander; The Monk Upstairs (St. Martin's) by Tim Farrington; My Holocaust (HarperCollins) by Tova Reich; Nada (The Modern Library) by Carmen Laforet.

Peony in Love (Random House) by Lisa See; The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt) by Mohsin Hamid; Remainder (Vintage Original) by Tom McCarthy; Sacred Games (HarperCollins) by Vikram Chandra; The Street of a Thousand Blossoms (St. Martin's Press) by Gail Tsukiyama.

Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown) by Joshua Ferris; A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead) by Khaled Hosseini; Trespass (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) by Valerie Martin; Turpentine (Black Cat/Grove) by Spring Warren; The Water Cure (Graywolf Press) by Percival Everett; What You Have Left (Free Press) by Will Allison; The Witch's Trinity (Crown) by Erika Mailman; The Year of Fog (Delacorte) by Michelle Richmond; Yellowcake (Houghton Mifflin) by Ann Cummins; The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins) by Michael Chabon; Zeroville (Europa Editions) by Steve Erickson.

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Short stories

Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black and Other Stories (FSG) by Nadine Gordimer; Chaos: A Novella and Stories (Carroll & Graf) by Edmund White; Cheating at Canasta (Viking) by William Trevor; The Collected Stories (FSG) by Leonard Michaels; The Complete Stories (Pantheon) by David Malouf; Dead Boys (Little, Brown) by Richard Lange; Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Knopf) by Jim Shepard; Shakespeare's Kitchen (New Press) by Lore Segal; Shining at the Bottom of the Sea (Riverhead) by Stephen Marche; Throw Like a Girl (Simon & Schuster) by Jean Thompson; Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money (HarperPerennial) by Rebecca Curtis; Varieties of Disturbance (FSG) by Lydia Davis.

Memoir

Criminal of Poverty: Growing Up Homeless in America (City Lights) by Lisa Gray-Garcia; Foreskin's Lament (Riverhead) by Shalom Auslander; The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (Pantheon) by Tom Bissell; The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification (The Penguin Press) by Caille Millner.

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Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press) by Michael Krasny; Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life (FSG) by Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David; Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth (Bloomsbury) by Herbert Kohl; Peeling the Onion (Harcourt) by Gunter Grass; Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Knopf) by Glenn Kurtz; Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Robert Stone.

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf) by Judith Jones; Ticket to Exile (Heyday Press) by Adam David Miller; Travels With Herodotus (Knopf) by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Poetry

The Biplane House (FSG) by Les Murray; The Book of Psalms: A Translation With Commentary (Norton) by Robert Alter; Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems (Knopf) by W.S. Di Piero; The Collected Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Zbigniew Herbert; The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Michael Rothenberg; Domestic Violence (Norton) by Eavan Boland; For the Confederate Dead (Knopf) by Kevin Young; The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) by Ellen Bass; Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Robert Hass.

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Biography

Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics (UC Press) by Bill Boyarsky; Ralph Ellison (Knopf) by Arnold Rampersad; Europe's Physician: The Various Life of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (Yale University Press) by Hugh Trevor-Roper; Nureyev: The Life (Pantheon) by Julie Kavanagh; Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper) by David Michaelis; Toussaint Louverture (Pantheon) by Madison Smartt Bell.

History

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race (Knopf) by Richard Rhodes; The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism From 1600 to Modern Times (Norton) by Tristram Stuart; Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (Free Press) by David Talbot; Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso) by Mike Davis; The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion) by David Halberstam.

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The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt) by Rick Atkinson; Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans (Random House) by Jean Pfaelzer; For Liberty and Glory: Washington, Lafayette and Their Revolution (Norton) by James R. Gaines; In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India (Doubleday) by Edward Luce; India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy (Ecco/HarperCollins) by Ramachandra Guha.

Playing America's Game: Baseball, Latinos and the Color Line (UC Press) by Adrian Burgos Jr.; Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present (Norton) by Michael B. Oren; Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture (Viking) by Jon Savage; The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia (Metropolitan/Henry Holt) by Orlando Figes; Young Stalin (Knopf) by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Essay/Criticism

American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes (Library of America) edited by Molly O'Neill; Back on Fire (Shoemaker & Hoard) by Gary Snyder; The Braindead Megaphone (Riverhead) by George Saunders.

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Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith (Riverhead) by Anne Lamott; How Doctors Think (Houghton Mifflin) by Jerome Groopman; Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Knopf) by Oliver Sacks; Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Metropolitan/Henry Holt) by Chalmers Johnson; Other Colors: Essays and a Story (Knopf) by Orhan Pamuk.

The Politics of Heaven: America in Fearful Times (Norton) by Earl Shorris; Room for Doubt (Pantheon) by Wendy Lesser; The Sandbox Investment: The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics (Harvard University Press) by David L. Kirp; Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (UC Press) by Rebecca Solnit; Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (Knopf) by Robert B. Reich; Under the Dragon: California's New Culture (Heyday) by Lonny Shavelson and Fred Setterberg; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & '30s and Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & '40s, (Library of America) edited by Lewis M. Dabney.

Journalism/nonfiction

Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration (University of New Mexico Press) by Sam Quinones; Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power (Chelsea Green) by Mark Schapiro; Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne) by Don Lattin.

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Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) by Lisa Margonelli; Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA (Viking) by Julia Alvarez; Poor People (HarperCollins) by William T. Vollmann.

Revolution in the Bleachers: How Parents Can Take Back Family Life in World Gone Crazy Over Youth Sports (Gotham) by Regan McMahon; The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt) by Naomi Klein; Silence of the Songbirds (Walker) by Bridget Stutchbury. {sbox}