Ken Kalfus, author of "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country"
"The People's Act of Love," by the British writer James Meek, is a philosophical thriller that revolves around a little-known incident of the Soviet Civil War: the mutinous seizure of the Trans-Siberian Railway by a legion of Czech soldiers sent to fight the Bolsheviks. In a Siberian railway village, where a Czech detachment encounters a sect of Christian castrates and a hardened revolutionary who has escaped from prison, the central conflict, thrummingly relevant today, is between those who renounce the compromises of earthly pleasure and those who live imperfectly, complicit with evil and pain. Foretelling post-Bolshevik agonies and those of our own century, the revolutionary declares, "I'm here on earth to destroy everything which doesn't resemble Paradise."
"Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village," by Margaret Paxson, is about life in the north of Russia, written by an American anthropologist who lived there off and on for several years. It's a distant, primitive place, and her hosts lived without running water but with color television. Her emphasis is "social memory," and how it gets transmitted through the generations. Central to Russian society is the concept of "svoi," "my own," which usually defines the household, khozainstvo, in relation to the village or the village in relation to neighboring ones, but in the time of WWII extended to the entire nation, ruled by the nation-khozain, Stalin. Svoi is the mechanism that enables the villagers to cooperate in a virtually cashless community, doing each other the favors necessary for survival while respecting the boundaries of each household. National and world events barely create a ripple. Stalin's times were good and bad, what Paxson describes as a "a symphony of dark and light." The villagers recall, "How we lived better then! How we were joyous! One wrong word and they could take you away in the middle of the night. We lived in friendship and generosity."
Greil Marcus, author "The Shape of Things to Come"
Well ... "The Shape of Things to Come," actually. But also Dana Spiotta's "Eat the Document." Times long past begin to crumble, decades later, leaving people who purposefully stranded themselves decades before forced to rejoin the world. While a teenage Beach Boys fan tries to figure out who his mother is.
Claire Messud, author of "The Emperor's Children"
I think I'd have to pick "Suite Française," by Irène Némirovsky. I didn't know the full story behind it until after I'd read it -- I only knew that she'd been killed in the Holocaust -- and while that made the book still more remarkable, I was glad to have been able to revel in her storytelling, her precise observations, her psychological acuity, without knowing the full tragedy of her curtailed life. The two existing sections of her novel enabled me, for the first time, fully to imagine what it was like to live in France under the occupation, and the ways in which collaboration came about. Occasionally, the first section is rather broad in its satire, though always effective, and darkly very funny; but the second section, set in a rural village, is an unqualified gem. I only wish she had been able to write the remaining sections that she envisaged, and sketched out in her notes. "Suite Française" is a significant literary work, and a rare reminder of the enduring importance of art, even in the darkest hours.
Neal Pollack, author of "Alternadad"
It may not have been the best read all year, and it certainly wasn't the most subtle, but the 2006 book that stuck to my gut most strongly was "The Ruins," by Scott Smith. "The Ruins" represents the apogee of a strange contemporary genre: Clueless American tourists meet a horrific fate in an unknown land that they don't understand. Smith takes this particular horror trope much further than movies like "Turistas," or even "Hostel"; he preys on our fears of the unknown at nearly Lovecraftian depths. It's a must-read for haters of backpackers, or lovers of kudzu.
Will Self, author of 'The Book of Dave"
Patrick Cockburn's "The Occupation" is a magnificent book, essential reading for anyone stateside who really wants to understand the hideous quagmire of the U.S./British invasion of Iraq. Cockburn, a veteran Middle East correspondent, has been fearless in getting out on the ground in Iraq. His front-line reporting is unrivaled, his analysis lucid and compelling, his conclusions deeply unpalatable. He knows his stuff, having already written the definitive account of the aftermath to the 1990 Gulf War, and has covered this latest conflict for the London Independent newspaper and the London Review of Books.
Jim Shepard, author of "Project X"
Mine would probably be Cormac McCarthy's "The Road": I found it unsettling and moving and beautiful in its portrait of human connection pared down to the bone. It read like a personal meditation on mortality projected out to include the entire human race.
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of "Prep" and "The Man of My Dreams"
One of my favorite books of this year is "But Enough About Me: A Jersey Girl's Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous" by Jancee Dunn. Dunn worked for years as a reporter for Rolling Stone and MTV, and she alternates between chapters giving an insider's perspective on what it's like to interview Madonna or Brad Pitt and chapters about her own weird, funny New Jersey family. A book like this could easily be a smorgasbord of name-dropping, but Dunn is completely self-effacing and honest about her own dorkiness. I suspect this book will especially strike a chord if you've ever been a reporter, had a sister (or two) or shared in our national celebrity fixation -- her descriptions of all three ring hilariously true. I should note here that I "blurbed" this book, and while blurbs are rightfully regarded with suspicion (often meaning the blurber and the blurbee once worked/slept/got their MFAs together), I've actually never met Dunn; I endorsed her book for the sole reason that I thought it was great.
Jennifer Weiner, author of "In Her Shoes"
For me, 2006 marked the lamentable triumph of style over substance. Designated PYT Marisha Pessl's much-hyped debut came tap-dancing in, all bells and whistles (and footnotes, and illustrations). There may have been a strong brew underneath, but I couldn't get through the froth. Cormac McCarthy's bleaker-than-bleak, darker-than-dark "The Road" could have been a contender, save for its distracting stylistic gimmicks. (Did the nuclear blast that eradicated the world's population take all of the world's apostrophes with it, too?)
I'll pick two winners: Ken Kalfus' "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country," in which a pair of narcissistic New Yorkers have their divorce interrupted by 9/11. Hilarity ensues. And for those who crave a big, sprawling, old-fashioned, romantic tale over the too-cool-for-school po-mo tricks of perspective or punctuation, Stephen King's "Lisey's Story" was a completely ravishing meditation on the thin skin between reality and nightmare, and the mysteries of writing, and of marriage.
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