Salon Book Awards

Our five-day book extravaganza kicks off with Erica Jong, Malcolm Gladwell, Curtis Sittenfeld and some of our other favorite authors weighing in on the best reads of 2006.

By Laura Miller and Hillary Frey

Read more: Books, Greil Marcus

Dec. 11, 2006 | For most of Salon's existence, we've come to you in December bearing a list of our favorite fiction and nonfiction books of the year. We'll do that this year, too, but this time around things are going to be a little different. Instead of one big day devoted to celebrating our favorite titles, there will be five. That's right, a whole week of books, starting today.

Why? Well, it's clear that you love to read about books. Some of the most popular Salon stories of 2006 have been reviews of new books (see Andrew O'Hehir's examination of Nora Vincent's gender-bending memoir "Self-Made Man" and Laura Miller's take on Laura Kipnis' provocative tract "The Female Thing") or interviews with authors (see Steve Paulson's conversations with Richard Dawkins and Karen Armstrong). Douglas Wolk's monthly column on graphic novels always draws a crowd (especially his piece on Alan Moore's racy "Lost Girls"), and the Literary Guide to the World has brought book lovers from all over the globe to Salon.

To kick things off, we've asked a selection of Salon's favorite writers to tell us about their favorite books of the year. Contributors include Booker-prize winner John Banville, best-selling New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, "In Her Shoes" author Jennifer Weiner and feminist icon Erica Jong. Tuesday, we'll reveal our favorite fiction and nonfiction debuts of the year. Wednesday will bring a list of our top five fiction books; Thursday our five favorite nonfiction titles. Along the way, we'll also offer interviews with the authors of our chosen winners as well as excerpts to help you better select your end-of-the-year reading. And on Friday, we'll publish your picks for 2006; just e-mail us, by Wednesday, a few sentences about the best book you read this year at bestbooks@salon.com.

So, welcome to the Salon Book Awards. And happy reading!

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Steve Almond, author of "Candyfreak"

I reviewed a lot of books this past year and the best (by far) was Peter Orner's "The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo." The novel documents the restless daily routines of the staff at a primary school in a forgotten corner of Namibia, but it is properly understood as a series of meditations -- brief, lyric chapters that celebrate the small moments in which life resides. It is a book unlike any I have ever read, a miraculous feat of empathy that manages to unearth -- in the unlikeliest of locales -- the infinite possibilities of the human heart. If it were up to me, Orner would have won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. The novel is that astonishing. At the very least, he has joined the first rank of American writers.

Jonathan Ames, author of "I Love You More Than You Know"

My two favorite books written in this calendar year are Stephen Elliott's "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" and Philip Kerr's "The One From the Other." Elliott's collection of short stories is the rawest, most exciting depiction of beautifully perverse human sexuality that I have come across since I first read, 20 years ago, "The Queen Is Dead" chapter in Hubert Selby's "Last Exit to Brooklyn." Elliott has incredible balls to write such a book, though in his case his balls must have been pinched and tormented by vicious clamps, which probably would help any writer, come to think of it.

Kerr's book is his spectacular follow-up to his extraordinarily brilliant "Berlin Noir" trilogy. Kerr is the only bona fide heir to Raymond Chandler that I have ever come across; his German private detective Bernie Gunther would have been respected by Philip Marlowe and the two of them would have enjoyed sitting down at a bar and talking. One of the things that is so amazing about Kerr's four Bernie Gunther novels, to me, is that while the books are ostensibly hard-boiled mysteries, they gave me a glimpse into the incomprehensible horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust in much the same way D.M. Thomas' "The White Hotel" and Spiegelman's "Maus" once did. For me they are all works of art that for a moment enabled me to grasp the unimaginable, before my mind clouded over and returned to the safety of the quotidian.

Stephen Amidon, author of "Human Capital"

Although I'm not entirely convinced that George Pelecanos' moody thriller "The Night Gardener" was the best book I read all year, he certainly is by far the best author I discovered in 2006. A lot of writers talk the talk about transcending genre fiction -- Pelecanos walks the walk. Whether writing about the past or the present day, his crime stories manage to evoke the mean streets of Washington, D.C., with a perfect blend of humor, excitement and humanity. Start with his unforgettable "Hard Revolution," which introduces his private investigator Derek Strange during the 1968 riots, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Shalom Auslander, author of "Beware of God"

I'm no fan of gods, religious or otherwise, and while it's true that Spinoza had a god, it was Reason, and that's a hell of a lot better than most. Reason never told anyone to suicide bomb a pizzeria or firebomb an abortion clinic; nobody stands outside AIDS clinics holding up placards that read "Reason Hates Fags." In "Betraying Spinoza," Rebecca Goldstein pulls off the neat trick of both imagining the tremendous personal toll Spinoza paid for the crime of thinking for himself, while inspiring the reader to nevertheless do the same.

John Banville, author of 'The Sea"

I'm becoming a little embarrassed at my enthusiasm for Richard Ford's novel "The Lay of the Land," but it does seem to me the finest piece of fiction out of America in a long time. Its two predecessors in the Frank Bascombe trilogy, "The Sportswriter" and "Independence Day," are marvelous works, but this new volume is remarkably fluid and accommodating in an almost Proustian way -- and it's laugh-out-loud funny, too.

David Bezmozgis, author of "Natasha: And Other Stories"

My favorite book of the year was "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army 1941-1945," edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova. This is the WWII equivalent of Isaac Babel's "Red Cavalry" war diaries. A novelist and correspondent for the Red Army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, Grossman, like Babel, captured the experience of war with poetry, sympathy and precision.

"A chicken belonging to headquarters staff is taking a walk between earth dugouts, with ink on its wings."

His impressions are often moving, frequently wry, but always frank.

"I came across the following phrase in a leading [Front newspaper] article: 'The much-battered enemy continued his cowardly advance.'"

Grossman kept such diaries at his peril. Had they fallen into the hands of the NKVD, he could have been shot. Fortunately, they survived and have been wisely and thoroughly edited and translated by Beevor and Vinogradova. More than a testament to a great talent, Grossman's diaries are also, in the editors' words, "by far the best eyewitness account of the terrible Eastern Front."

Next page: Tom Bissell, Jennifer Egan and Stephen Elliott weigh in