Books I Read in 2007: A Review

As I did in 2006 and 2005 I thought I’d do a roundup piece on the books I read/heard in 2007. You can always see a list of what I’ve read since starting tracking in mid-2003, but the 2007 list is:

• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Black Holes and Baby Universes by Stephen Hawking
• Don’t Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock
• Making Comics by Scott McCloud
• Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
• The Innocent Man by John Grissom
• Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein
• Nine Lords in Amber by Robert Zelaney
• Little Myth Marker by Robert Asprin
• Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Running Man by Stephen King / Richard Bachman
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
• Hit or Myth by Robert Asprin
• Executive Coaching by Valerio & Lee
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• Road Work by Stephen King
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
• Blaze by Stephen King
• Rage by Stephen King
• The Assault on Reason by Al Gore
• E=mc²by David Bodanis
• A Walk in Woods by Bill Bryson
• Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Once and Future King by T.H. White
• I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
• The Vile Village by Lemony Snickett
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck
• It by Stephen King
• Play Money by Julian Dibbell
• World War Z by Max Brooks
• The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Gerald’s Game by Stephen King

Looks like I forgot to write reviews for a couple, but that’s 34 books –11 paper and 23 audiobooks. Disappointingly that’s down from 49 in 2006 and almost half the 61 books I read in 2005. I plan to correct this trend next year, which I’ll talk about later. In the meantime here’s the breakout:

• Non-fiction books: 11
• Science: 2
• History: 2
• Biography: 4
• Business: 1
• Other: 2
• Fiction books: 23
• Sci-Fi: 2
• Fantasy: 5
• Horror: 8
• Literature/Other Fiction: 8

And here’s this year’s winners/losers:

Best Book I read in 2007

Actually 2007 didn’t have many books that really blew me away. Steinbeck’s East of Eden (see my original review here) was one of them, though. Sure, Steinbeck was about as subtle with his allegory as a ton of bricks (we GET IT, it’s ADAM AND EVE and the GARDEN OF EDEN, over and over again), but there’s still a ton of stuff in here that’s subtle and it should speak directly to just about everyone. It’s about redemption, choosing good over evil, free will, and mercy. And while the character of Cathy seems more like a walking caricature of evil drawn with simple, flat lines, she’s still one of the most memorable villains that I’ve read. Just a great book.

Honorable mentions:

• Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• David Bodanis’s E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation
• Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

Worst Book that I read in 2007

There were a few books I started and hated so much I decided to quit them (Erikson’s The Gardens of the Moon and Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice come to mind), but I decided to limit this award to a book that I actually suffered all the way through. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (see my original review here) harpoons that prize easily. I swear, there’s some kind of conspiracy among high school English teachers that has placed this book so high in the pantheon of literature. I hated it. Just blah, blah, blah, whales, blah, whales, blubber, blah, harpoons, whales, blah, whales, whales, whales. There was a story and a masterfully crafted novel in there for sure, but I just couldn’t get past all the stuff about whales. I think I can’t say it any better than I did in my initial review:

Melville strikes me as one of those people who would corner you at a party and talk incessantly about whaling, whaling ships, whales, whale diet, whale etymology, whale zoology, whale blubber, whale delacies, whale migration, whale oil, whale biology, whale ecology, whale meat, whale skinning, and every other possible topic about whales so that you’d finally have to pretend to have to go to the bathroom just to get away from the crazy old man. Only he’d FOLLOW YOU INTO THE BATHROOM and keep talking to you about whales while peering over the side of the stall and trying to make eye contact with you the whole time.

Honorable mentions:

• Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms
• Stephen Hawking’s Black Holes and Baby Universes
• Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love

Miscellaneous Awards:

Not as much this year. James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong wins the award for being the most disappointing book, since it set up a premise about various factual errors in textbooks and then largely failed to deliver. Julian Dibbell’s Play Money, a book about how the author quit his day job and made a living selling virtual items in massively multiplayer online games, gets the award for being way more interesting than it had any right to be. Max Brook’s World War Z gets the award for being the best concept gone awry given how the author took the idea of a zombie apocalypse and handled it in a way that made it devoid of any suspense, horror, or drama.

So that’s it for 2007, but I’ve already got a stack of books for 2008. What about you? What were your best reads in 2007?