The Year in Review, Part II

For what it's worth, here's a list and mini-review of the books I read in 2007. The books are listed more or less in the order of my preference. The way the year started off, I would have thought I would read more books than I did, but my reading was intermittent and like a lot of other things in life (girlfriends and sex come to mind), it's either feast or famine.

2007 Books

10/15 On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan
This is one of the best written books I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. It’s one of the few books I’ve read where I’ve gone back and re-read sentences or paragraphs for the sheer joy of it. The book is a short book, a novella really, about the wedding night of a young British couple in the pre-free-love days of the early 60’s. It’s not a feel-good book with a happy ending, but it’s so well written, I’ll be sure to read it again.

1/4 The Golden Spruce, John Valliant
I loved this book. It wove the history of logging the virgin forests of BC; the loggers who did the work; the environment and environmentalists; and the mental illness of an almost super-human logger turned environmentalist into a riveting story that I had a hard time putting down. If this book was written by an American and set in America, it would be a best-seller with a movie to open during the holiday season.

3/8 Bury The Chains, Adam Hochschild
This is the fascinating story of the personalities and their perseverance in ending the British slave trade. It should have been (but wasn't) the book that the movie Amazing Grace was based on. I had a hard time putting the book down, but I had a hard time staying awake at the movie.

11/16 The Death of Vishnu, Manil Suri
The first sentence of the book grabbed me, and never let go. (I’d quote it if I hadn’t lent the book to Marian) I’m a bit surprised that the story of the death of a homeless alcoholic on the steps of an apartment building in Bombay, and the lives of the people in the apartment building, would interest me and move me the way it did.

6/12 The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
If you want to read just one well-researched and readable history of Bin Laden and his crowd up to 9/11, this is the book.

12/29 The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
This was a good book, and I’m sure will be a good movie. I did get a bit annoyed at some of the amazing coincidences that closed various loops in the book. Those plot devices are more at home in movies than in books. In spite of those annoyances, the book entertained and moved me. I guess “atonement” is a popular theme this year, because that’s what this book is all about.

1/29 Rising Tide, John M. Barry
This book, written years before Hurricane Katrina, recounts the story of the great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It’s one of those well-researched and readable non-fiction books that I love to read. As well as the flood itself, the book examines the role of government in disasters, and how this flood really changed the role of the federal government.

7/5 The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan
Generally speaking, this was a good book about the worst of the worst dustbowl areas in the US. Egan does a good job of recounting the history of the Great Plains from the Indian days to ranching to farming and the environmental catastrophe that resulted. The only disappointment was that the author seemed to run out of steam after he got through the depression. I would have liked a bit more of an epilogue.

9/15 Waxwings, Jonathan Raban
Raban disappointed me a bit with this book. It was a good book, but just not in the same league as Passage to Juneau and Bad Land. The book is set in Seattle, so I enjoyed the references to familiar places and neighborhoods.

11/8 1491, Charles C. Mann
This is another one of those well-researched and well-written non-fiction books that I usually like, but it could have been better. There was a bit too much of the romanticized “Noble Savage” element to this book, but it did make me look at the pre-Columbian history of the Americas in a new way.

1/5 Where the Mountain Casts its Shadow, Maria Coffey
This book looks at the lives of extreme mountain climbers and the effect of their lives and deaths on the people closest to them. I’ve never understood the motivation of extreme climbers and what drives them to push their lives to the limit. I still don’t understand their motivations, but this book gave me a few insights I hadn’t had before.

12/16 The Golden Compass, Paul Pullman
Fantasy books are not my usual cup of tea. I hadn’t read one since I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy in the depths of my misspent youth, and I’m not likely to read another one soon. I think this book is a pretty good example of the genre, but there’s so much other stuff out there to read, I don’t think I’ll expend a whole lot of my finite reading time on the rest of the series or any more fantasies.

5/26 To Live’s to Fly, John Kruth
The only reason I finished this book is that I’m a big fan of Townes Van Zandt’s music. I’m amazed that such great music came out of such a self-destructive character. The book was OK, but it was a bit too long, and well before I finished it, I was wishing it was over. There were too many anecdotes about the horrible things Van Zandt did to himself and others, and after a while, it got old.

2/25 Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum
This is a classic sailing book, written 100 years ago by the first guy to sail around the world alone. But like many other “classics” I’ve read, it disappointed me. Slocum was definitely a better sailor than a writer, showing about as much imagination in writing the book as he did choosing the title. Unless you’re a hard-core sailor, don’t bother.