I read 135 books in 2007 - that's an average of one every 2.7 days. The raw number is down a bit from last year, but considering I wrote a masters' thesis this fall, I figure it's pretty decent. I had a very good reading year; picking a top ten for fiction and non-fiction was difficult, and even those at that bottom of the list really weren't awful (with a couple of exceptions). Books are in no particular order within the categories, and were not necessarily published this year.
Fiction Top Ten
The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow (review)
At Midnight on the Thirty-first of March by Josephine Young Case (review)
Stardust by Neil Gaiman (review)
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (review)
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling (review)
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman (review)
The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barkworth (review)
The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox (review)
Round the Fire Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (review)
The Fourth Bear by Jasper Fforde (review)
Non-Fiction Top Ten
Hakluyt's Promise: An Elizabethan's Obsession for an English America by Peter Mancall (review)
Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature by Bryan Waterman (review)
Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 by Emily Cockayne (review)
Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary by Henry Hitchings (review)
The Minutemen and Their World by Robert Gross(review)
Patience & Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book Places, and Book Culture by Nicholas Basbanes (review)
The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450-1850 by James Raven (review)
Edmund Curll, Bookseller by Paul Baines and Pat Rogers (review)
Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick by Jenny Uglow (review)
Chasing the Sun: Dictionary Makers and the Dictionaries They Made by Jonathon Green (review)
Fiction Bottom Five
Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott (review)
Mr. Foreigner by Matthew Kneale (review)
Labyrinth by Kate Mosse (review)
The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips (review)
The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi (review)
Non-Fiction Bottom Five
Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reimagined Life of an African American by John Hanson Mitchell (review)
The Great Negro Plot: A Tale of Conspiracy and Murder in Eighteenth-Century New York by Mat Johnson (review)
American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, their Work by Susan Cheever (review)
Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling by James Essinger (review)
The Shadow Club by Robert Casati (review)
Publisher of the Year
I'm going to add a little something extra to my year-end post this time around. Yale University Press is my publisher of the year, for their many excellent publications.
Happy New Year to all, and may your 2008 be filled with good books and good cheer.
