The New York Times Book Review has named its 10 best books of 2007, right after one of its 10 best of 2006 got shortlisted for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Want a list of books that don’t have writing, on sex or any other topic, that will test your gag reflex?
By Janice Harayda
Are you sore that your favorite novel didn’t make the list of the 10 best books of 2007 published in the New York Times Book Review today www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/10-best-2007.html?
Or did you give up on the Times’s list after Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children made it last year? (Memo to the editors of the NYTBR: Read this and tell us if you still think the novel deserved its spot www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/. Maybe it’s not too late to publish a retraction?) Or are you skeptical of the NYTBR list now that another of the 10 best of 2006, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, made the shortlist for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the writing you can read here http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217735,00.htm?
Okay, now you have an alternative list.
One-Minute Book Reviews will publish its first “10 Best Books of the Year” on Friday, December 14. This post is sure to be as controversial as its annual Delete Key Awards, partly because some of the best books may not even be 2007 books. (One-Minute Book Reviews didn’t begin until late last year, so I may have to grandfather in a couple of 2006 books that I didn’t get to until 2007 … and think how good those must be if they KO’d all the 2007 books.) You know how David Letterman said that traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines? We’re applying a similar standard this year to the publication dates of the best books.
Other links: In addition to its “10 Best” list the New York Times has published a list of “100 Notable Books of 2007” at this site www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/notable-books-2007.html
(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
One-Minute Book Reviews 
I will certainly be checking it out. One of the book I’ve seen make a number of lists and that I now really want to check out is The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.
Comment by Jon — December 12, 2007 @ 11:18 pm |
That novel interests me a lot, too. A friend whose tastes I admire — a former top editor at major publishing imprint (not the one that publishes Diaz), who has read more than his share of fool’s gold — said the other day that “Oscar Wao” is the real thing.
I wish I were going to be able to get to it by tomorrow.
Jan
Comment by 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — December 13, 2007 @ 3:24 pm |
You wrote: “I wish I were going to be able to get to it by tomorrow.” LOL. This is often how I feel about books I’d like to read. As the old saying goes, “So many books. So little time.”
Comment by Jon — December 13, 2007 @ 7:19 pm |
Did you know that there’s a T-shirt with that legend (“So many books, so little time”)? A lot of people must feel as you and I do that there will never be enough time to read all the good books …
Comment by 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom — December 14, 2007 @ 12:58 pm |