New York Times10 Best Books of 2007

The editors of The New York Times Book Review have recently announced their choices for the 10 Best Books of the year 2007. This is always one of the most-watched end-of-the-year book lists.

Two of these books are already available as audio books also, so oyu have the choice between printed book and MP3 audio book. Might mean you manage to 'read' two books whilst driving, or doing other things where one usually has no hand or eyes free for a book.

Over the years a large number of best selling books have been written about the U.S. Supreme Court. If you are an avid reader (several books a week!) then you have most likely read a few of them.

Of all of the books I have read on this subject I found Jeffrey Toobin's new work "The Nine: Inside The Secret World of the Supreme Court" to be among the top choices. As senior legal analyst for CNN and a staff writer for "The New Yorker" Jeffrey Toobin is qualified like nobody else to tackle a topic that most U.S. citicens know very little about and probably also find a bit mysterious. Like peeling layer after layer of skin from a large onion Toobin succeeds in showing just who the justices are and how they have changed over time. It is a very interesting piece of information.

One feeling that "The Nine" reinforces is the old adage that says there really is no way of foretelling how a judge is going to vote on any given issues after receiving his true lifetime appointment to the United States Supreme Court. While it might seem that the majority of justices stay true to their previous philosophies after being elected to the Court, a quite important percentage of judges move away from their previous stance in totally unexpected directions.

Throughout "The Nine" Jeffrey Toobin gets us to know the men and women who have worked on the Court over the past twenty years. Depending on your own viewpoint you will start to find some of the justices very likeable and others quite hateable.... You will also understand who the reliable liberal and conservative votes are and which one of them tends to be more balanced with a view of the center. And Jeffrey Toobin points out a number of controversial 5 to 4 cases where the 1 or 2 "swing" votes would make all the difference.

It is very clear that Jeffrey Toobin is a huge fan of the retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Actually, on a couple of chapters in his book he refers to her as "the most important woman in American history". Called to the court by Ronald Reagan in September 1981 Sandra Day O'Connor had spent a quarter century on the bench and has proven to be the decisive vote in many important cases. Toobin also looks at Justice Stephen Breyer in a similarly favorable light.

Recently conservative politicians and voters have been extremely critical of what they think are a very disturbing new development at the Supreme Court. There is no doubt at all, that some of the justices have been increasingly influenced and lobbied by both the international law and by the many decisions of courts in other countries. They have adapted some of their decisions and opinions in tune with these rulings.

It's true, the members of the Supreme Court find themselves very clearly divided on this topic and Jeffrey Toobin explains in detail which judges buy into this approach and what their reason for so doing is. This is a trend that certainly nees to be watched. "The Nine: Inside The Secret World of the Supreme Court" qualifies as one of the best audio books I have listened to this year. Although Toobin shows his liberal leanings in his observations on occasion, this is an extremely well written, balanced and informative book. Highly recommended!

In this wildly funny debut novel from former advertising man Joshua Ferris, a group of fellow copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the 1990s economic boom. And things in this advertising agency get quickly out of control, in a very sarcastic and funny way Ferris describes the situation in the office and how things get mixed up. It’s a hoot!

This book is also available as downloadable audio book online:

Then We Came to the End - Joshua Ferris - MP3 Audio Book

Listen to a sound sample by clikcing the above link.

This unpretentious yet deeply intelligent memoir of growing up on a central Iowa farm in the throes of the Great Depression radiates the joy of a vanished way of life as Mildred Armstrong Kalish recounts what appear to contemporary eyes as unendurable deprivations.

Those who share Kalish's midwestern farm background will immediately identify with her recollections of winter nights spent under layers of quilts in unheated bedrooms. Others for whom agrarian life is uncharted territory will learn both the harsh rigors of days governed by unforgiving work cycles and the irreproducible sensual pleasure of savoring a just-picked, sun-drenched, ripe strawberry or tomato.

In prose that never yields to mawkish sentimentality, Kalish details the roles of family, religion, thrift, and education in her upbringing. The complexities of wash-day chores will bring up short those who know only today's appliances. Kalish's disquisition on outhouse etiquette will simply amaze those accustomed to their own bathrooms. (source: Mark Knoblauch - Booklist)

Alex Ross, the classical music critic for the New Yorker, leads a whirlwind tour from the Viennese premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome in 1906 to minimalist Steve Reich's downtown Manhattan apartment.

The wide-ranging historical material is organized in thematic essays grounded in personalities and places, in a disarmingly comprehensive style reminiscent of historian Otto Friedrich. Thus, composers who led dramatic lives—such as Shostakovich's struggles under the Soviet regime—make for gripping reading, but Ross treats each composer with equal gravitas.

The real strength of this study, however, lies in his detailed musical analysis, teasing out—in precise but readily accessible language—the notes that link Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story to Arnold Schoenberg's avant-garde compositions or hint at a connection between Sibelius and John Coltrane.

Among the many notable passages, a close reading of Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes stands out for its masterful blend of artistic and biographical insight. Readers new to classical music will quickly seek out the recordings Ross recommends, especially the works by less prominent composers, and even avid fans will find themselves hearing familiar favorites with new ears. (source: Publishers Weekly)

TREE OF SMOKE is yet another terrific Viet Nam novel, an anti-war novel, but it is more than that on its deepest level. It is written with great compassion about the condition of humanity.

The opening paragraph, noting the senseless death of one man (who happens to be President Kennedy), is beautifully juxtaposed with the sniping death of the monkey, and the mutual anguish of it. For senseless killing kills and kills the killer too. It is a karma entrenched in human history, a cycle that we cannot shake.

Not only are monkeys used literally and symbolically throughout the novel but the young American's Vietnamese counterpart, Trund, is nicknamed Monk, and double-meanings and allusions to Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity envelope the better angels of the novel's worldview.

Just as Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 was about World War II but read as an anti-Viet Nam War novel, this is a Viet Nam novel that can be read as an anti-Iraq War novel. The 'tree of smoke' in the title represents many things, among them the mushroom cloud of weapons of mass destruction and the fear of them used as both an excuse and a weapon.

Some critics have said that the 'tree of smoke' was imaginary, and I won't argue that (although President Nixon's secret plan to win the war was based upon this threat), but this is a novel, and its deeper meanings will resonate with readers in different ways.

TREE OF SMOKE's size might intimidate some, and it is over 600 pages, but it is big and fast, easy to read, a comfortable book to open and hold. The story keeps moving, and the pages fly by deceptively fast. There is a strong field of nominees for this year's National Book Award, but this one has to be my pick for its beautiful writing and its sense of compassion. An unforgettable novel.

(source: Richard L. Pangburn (Bardstown, KY USA) )

This novel - the major work from Chilean-born novelist Bolaño (1953–2003) here beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer - will allow English speaking readers to discover a truly great writer.

In early 1970s Mexico City, young poets Arturo Belano (Bolaño's alter ego and a regular in his fiction) and Ulises Lima start a small, erratically militant literary movement, the Visceral Realists, named for another, semimythical group started in the 1920s by the nearly forgotten poet Cesárea Tinajero.

The book opens with 17 year-old Juan García Madero's precocious, deadpan notebook entries, dated 1975, chronicling his initiation into the movement. The long middle section—written, like George Plimpton's Edie, as a set of anxiously vivid testimonies from friends, lovers, bystanders and a great many enemies—tracks Belano and Lima as they travel the globe from 1975 to the mid-1990s.

There are copious, and acidly hilarious, references to the Latin American literary scene, and one needn't be an insider to get the jokes: they're all in Bolaño's masterful shifts in tone, captured with precision by Wimmer.

The book's moving final section flashes back to 1976, as Belano, Lima and García Madero search for Cesárea Tinajero, with a young hooker named Lupe in tow. Bolaño fashions an engrossing lost world of youth and utopian ambition, as particular and vivid as it is sad and uncontainable. (Apr.) (source: Publishers Weekly)

In this quiet but compelling novel, Trond Sander, a widower nearing seventy, moves to a bare house in remote eastern Norway, seeking the life of quiet contemplation that he has always longed for.

A chance encounter with a neighbor—the brother, as it happens, of his childhood friend Jon—causes him to ruminate on the summer of 1948, the last he spent with his adored father, who abandoned the family soon afterward.

Trond’s recollections center on a single afternoon, when he and Jon set out to take some horses from a nearby farm; what began as an exhilarating adventure ended abruptly and traumatically in an act of unexpected cruelty.

Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force, and the narrative gains further power from the artful interplay of Trond’s childhood and adult perspectives. Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception, but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man. (source: The New Yorker)

As the Baghdad bureau chief for the Washington Post, Chandrasekaran has probably spent more time in U.S.-occupied Iraq than any other American journalist, and his intimate perspective permeates this history of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquartered in the Green Zone around Saddam Hussein's former palace.

He presents the tenure of presidential viceroy L. Paul Bremer between May 2003 and June 2004 as an all-too-avoidable disaster, in which an occupational administration selected primarily for its loyalty to the Bush administration routinely ignored the reality of local conditions until, as one ex-staffer puts it, "everything blew up in our faces."

Chandrasekaran unstintingly depicts the stubborn cluelessness of many Americans in the Green Zone—like the army general who says children terrified by nighttime helicopters should appreciate "the sound of freedom." But he sympathetically portrays others trying their best to cut through the red tape and institute genuine reforms.

He also has a sharp eye for details, from casual sex in abandoned offices to stray cats adopted by staffers, which enable both advocates and critics of the occupation to understand the emotional toll of its circuslike atmosphere. Thanks to these personal touches, the account of the CPA's failures never feels heavy-handed. (source Publishers Weekly)

This book is also available as audio book:

Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone - Rajiv Chandrasekaran - MP3 Audio Book

Click on the link above to listen to a sample recording online.

A globe-trotter, well ahead of her time, Marsh lived a life of travel and adventure few eighteenth-century women could even imagine. The daughter of a shipwright, she spent much of her youth at sea on British warships. Captured and taken to Morocco in 1756, she later escaped and wrote and published a book about her ordeal as a would-be member of the sultan's seraglio.

Rather than restrict her wanderlust, marriage opened up new vistas for Marsh. Sailing to India to join her husband, she managed stops in exotic ports of call along the way. Once in India, she traveled overland, chronicling the sights and sounds of her extraordinary journey in an intimate travelogue. Make room on the shelves in the women's history collection for this robust portrait of a forward-thinking woman well ahead of her time. Flanagan, Margaret (source: Booklist)

Born poor, black and brilliant in a Boston ghetto, the unnamed man of the title is, at 35, crashing at a friend's place in New York , trying to scrape up enough money to keep his family afloat.

As he reluctantly returns to the construction jobs that he thought he'd left behind and works to collect on old debts (and defer his own), he narrates his Boston bildung and traces his early years and the history of his relationship with his white Boston Brahmin wife, Claire.

His childhood was marked by parental neglect and early experiments with heavy alcohol consumption. A natural writer, he was taken under the wing of a prominent black intellectual during his college years, but didn't follow through as his relationship with Claire and then the demands of married life intensified.

Now, as he struggles to support a life he isn't sure he believes in, he is tempted to return to drink, give up on his marriage and abandon his children, although Claire has demonstrated her unwavering support. For all of the introspection and occasional indulgence in self-pity, the narrator retains a note of hard-won optimism, and Thomas resolutely steers him clear of sentimentality. (source: Publishers Weekly)