Salon Book Awards 2007

From an imaginary history of Alaskan Jews to a compelling glimpse of the CIA, we pick the 10 most pleasurable reading experiences of the year.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Fiction, Books, Memoirs, Raymond Chandler, Vietnam, History, CIA, Fantasy, Michael Chabon, Salon Book Awards, Denis Johnson, Biographies

Dec. 12, 2007 | It's been a tranquil year in the book industry: no big fabrication or plagiarism scandals, à la James Frey or Kaavya Viswanathan, and consequently no dramatic denunciations on "The Oprah Winfrey Show." O.J. Simpson's bizarre "hypothetical" confession, "If I Did It," was finally published after the copyright had been transferred to the family of Ronald Goldman; in the end, it achieved little more than the destruction of the career of one of publishing's premier carnival barkers, editor Judith Regan. (She's now suing her former employer, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.)

But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn't mean that graver problems aren't afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting -- and protesting -- the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.

What fragments can we shore up against this ruin? Well, there's the single, powerful fact that in 2007, books remained the most consistently refreshing, illuminating, diverting, original and enriching sources of entertainment in our lives. This is Salon's 11th best-books list, and it was as hard to whittle our short list of hundreds of titles down to just 10 as it has been every year for the past decade. And that's after conflicts of interest obliged us to eliminate two terrific new books from former Salon editors -- "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years" by Salon founder David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg's "Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software."

Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning. These are the books we thought about on the way to work and rushed through our dinner dates to get back to at night, the books we blocked out whole weekends to read and propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal. However beautiful an author's prose or important his or her subject matter, it doesn't go on our list unless we sigh every time we close the cover and just can't wait to open it again. We hope you'll agree that these titles fit the bill.

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