Their favorite things
Writers, filmmakers and other notable figures tip us off to the stuff that most excited them this year.
Compiled by Megan Doll and Eryn Loeb
Read more: Books, David Cronenberg, Music, TV, Movies, Salon Book Awards, Entertainment, Mary Harron, Arts & Entertainment Features
Dec. 13, 2007 | 
Yesterday we revealed our favorite fiction and nonfiction books of 2007. As part of Salon's book week, we also asked a selection of our favorite writers, filmmakers, musicians, actors and chefs to tell us what books, music, movies (and other assorted cultural material) got them excited this year.
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Tom Bissell (author, "The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Legacy of Vietnam")
Book: I read a number of books this year that impressed me (Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End"), frustrated me (Robert Draper's "Dead Certain"), moved me (Dave Eggers' "What Is the What") and delighted me (Jack Pendarvis' "Your Body Is Changing"), but the best book I read this year was Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke." Publishing a book about Vietnam in the same year as Denis Johnson, as I did, leaves one feeling a little like being crucified next to Jesus: in other words, nice try. Not only does it have the most impossibly beautiful and devastating first two and a half pages I've ever read, it creates a world that seems less imagined than opened for entry.
I would also be remiss if I did not mention my rereading of a great book I first read more than a decade ago: "Of a Fire on the Moon," Norman Mailer's account of the 1969 moon landing. Whether he is describing the blandly similar attractiveness of male astronauts' wives, the inner workings of rocketry, or the first thrilling moments human beings walked on what Mailer calls "the pale graveyard of sleep," the prose is never less than slightly crazy and totally astonishing. A month after I finished the book -- which is, ridiculously, out of print -- Mailer went unto the white creator. May he sleep well.
Video games: "Bioshock," an insanely intense shooter that a) imagines an underwater city ruled by an Ayn Randian overlord and b) sets out before the gamer a series of decisions and quandaries that, for maybe the first time in video game history, felt somehow inescapably ... moral. While I would hesitate to call "Bioshock" a legitimate work of art, its engrossing and intelligent story line made it the first game to absorb me without also embarrassing me for being so absorbed. Also, it's awfully hard to dislike a game in which you smoke cigarettes and drink vodka to regenerate your attack energy.
Edwidge Danticat (author of "Brother, I'm Dying")
Music: I'd recommend Wyclef Jean's "Carnival Vol. II, Memoirs of an Immigrant," his follow-up to his 1997 album "The Carnival." The album opens intimately with Wyclef's voice speaking over a throbbing rock-inspired beat as his daughter cries in the background. "Come on, Angie," he says. "Let Daddy finish writing." What Daddy ends up writing, and singing and rapping, is truly marvelous. With collaborators such as Norah Jones, Mary J. Blige, Paul Simon, Akon and Shakira (glorious once again), this is an album not to be missed.
Amy Bloom (author, "Away")
Book: The best book I did manage to read this year -- every single thing by Philip Pullman, a wonderful writer for adults and young people, heroic atheist and sensible man. What I can't wait to read: the new book by Ha Jin ["A Free Life"] and the new book by Nathan Englander ["The Ministry of Special Cases"]. Best collections of poetry were "After" by Jane Hirshfield and Mary Jo Bang's "Elegy."
Music: "Back to Black" by the completely and amazingly fucked-up Amy Winehouse.
Josh Schwartz (screenwriter and television producer, "Gossip Girl" and "The O.C.")
Book: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows." The culmination of a series that simultaneously reminds me of when I was 10, and makes me wish I still was just so I could experience it as a kid. In a time of fracturing cultural touchstones, it's nice to have one that brought so many people together and was so imaginative, satisfying and fun. Also -- "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris: A really funny, smart book from a really promising first-time author. Can't wait to read what's next.
Music: "Boxer" by the National. As you hit 30 it gets harder to find music that feels like it's speaking to your experience, but this is a really emotional record full of great songs that would speak to any guy in his 20s and 30s trying to figure out growing up. And "Cease to Begin" by Band of Horses. Their first record had some truly great songs, this one is great through and through. Ben Bridwell has one of the great voices out there. A beautiful record.
Movie: "No Country for Old Men" is a return to the "Blood Simple," "Miller's Crossing" type of simpler but gripping storytelling. Javier Bardem's Chigurh is as frightening as Hannibal Lecter was when he first appeared on-screen. And "High School Musical 2." They were showing it on a plane I was on and everyone on the plane, young and old, were watching. That's some pop cultural power.
Darcey Steinke (author, "Easter Everywhere")
Book: "Love Is a Mix Tape" by Rob Sheffield. This book centers on Sheffield's wife, Renee, who died young and suddenly. It also details Sheffield's lifelong obsession with music, from the tape he made for his junior high dance to the songs that haunted and sustained him after his wife's death. Before Sheffield wrote for Rolling Stone he was working on a Ph.D., his thesis on the poet Mina Loy. "Love Is a Mix Tape" is a weird hybrid, an elegy, both poetic and hilarious, that details one man's faith in the restorative power of music.
Music: "White Chalk" by PJ Harvey. Driving to pick up my daughter at school I've been playing this album. It has a hypnotic pull; the songs are both fragile and ragged and remind me of the tunes an 1840s songstress might play as she traveled by wagon from town to town. The are spooky, partly because of the echo effects and the gothic tint to the lyrics but also because Harvey seems to be lamenting her escape from darkness. Besides Harvey, only Johnny Cash has written so well about the melancholy of maturing, that tinge of nostalgia for a darkness that has left.
TV: "My So Called Life," starring Claire Danes and created by Winnie Holtzman, was released this year on DVD. I missed it the first time around when it ran for one year from 1994 to 1995. Recently I watched all 19 episodes with my daughter, Abbie, who was born the year the show aired and is now 12. Claire Danes' Angela is a great role model. A spooky-smart high school girl, who questions the need for a definitive personality, thinks Anne Frank was lucky and, most endearingly, is ridiculously in love with Jordan Catalano, a dim but beautiful boy played by Jared Leto.
Alex Ross (author, The Rest Is Noise")
Music: The year produced a sizable stack of classical CDs that I strongly recommend: the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's heart-rending 1998 recital from Wigmore Hall, the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble's thrilling version of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians," and Paavo Järvi's punchy interpretations of Beethoven's Third and Eighth symphonies. But my record of the year came from outside the classical field. Radiohead are filed under rock, but to me they are collectively one of the most interesting composers in contemporary music. The secret weapon on "In Rainbows" is Phil Selway, drumming intricate, tricky, spiky patterns under the surface of what seems to be a lush, almost romantic album. Was there some story about the price? I forget: "Videotape" puts me in another world.
Mary Harron (director, "American Psycho" and "The Notorious Bettie Page")
Movie: I loved a lot of movies this year: "Control," "I'm Not There," "Michael Clayton," "No Country for Old Men," "The Savages," "Superbad." My greatest film experience happened on a rooftop in the desert in Jordan. I was there taking part in the Sundance Middle Eastern screenwriting lab, and every night they showed us movies under the stars. One night they showed us Yousry Nasrallah's 1999 film "El Medina." Set in Cairo, it showed a city that was sexy, turbulent and alive in a way New York was 30 years ago and is no longer. Watching it, I felt a new world opening up.
Malcolm Gladwell (author, "The Tipping Point" and "Blink")
Book: This past year I got what every fan of thrillers dreams of: a new Joseph Finder ["Power Play"], a new Lee Child ["Bad Luck and Trouble"] (maybe his best yet), a new and brilliant Daniel Silva ["The Secret Servant"] and, best of all, Robert Harris' "The Ghost" -- his finest book since "Fatherland."
Dean Wareham (musician, "Back Numbers," and author, "Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance")
Music: "Sound of Silver" by LCD Soundsystem. This took me back to about 1981, with hints of Arthur Baker, Talking Heads, New Order and Liquid Liquid. Great songs like "Someone Great," "North American Scum" and "New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down."
Movie: "Margot at the Wedding." I was a music consultant on this film, which perhaps disqualifies me from commenting. Still, I loved it. It is hard-hitting and fast-paced, intelligent, and very, very funny.
Video: Laura Miller discusses two new Vietnam books
