My Best (Read) of 2007
Explore my top book recommendations from 2007! Discover the best reads of the year across genres, from gripping fiction to insightful non-fiction. Find your next favorite book today.
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Loving Frank
by Nancy Horan
Fact and fiction blend in a historical novel that chronicles the relationship between seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Cheney, from their meeting, when they were each married to another, to the clandestine affair that shocked Chicago society
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Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Frank and April Wheeler are a bright, beautiful, talented couple in the 1950s whose perfect suburban life is about to crumble in this "moving and absorbing story” (The Atlantic Monthly) from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. "The Great Gatsby of my time...one of the best books by a member of my generation." —Kurt Vonnegut, acclaimed author of Slaughterhouse-Five Perhaps Frank and April Wheeler married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is about to unravel. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves. In his introduction to this edition, novelist Richard Ford pays homage to the lasting influence and enduring power of Revolutionary Road.
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The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A “heart-stopping account of the events leading up to 9/11” (The New York Times Book Review), this definitive history explains in gripping detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In gripping narrative that spans five decades, Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is a sweeping, unprecedented history of the long road to September 11.
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Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl
The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the Year Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.
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Eat the Document
by Dana Spiotta
An ambitious and powerful story about idealism, passion, and sacrifice, Eat the Document shifts between the underground movement of the 1970s and the echoes and consequences of that movement in the 1990s. A National Book Award finalist, Eat the Document is a riveting portrait of two eras and one of the most provocative and compelling novels of recent years.
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The Maytrees
by Annie Dillard
Toby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. Hands-off, he hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. Lou takes up painting. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk. In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts nature's vastness and nearness. She presents willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Annie Dillard's original body of work.
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Angelica
by Arthur Phillips
Interweaves conflicting interpretations of events from the perspectives of Joseph and Constance Barton, their daughter Angelica, and spiritualist Anne Montague, as the Bartons seek an explanation for a supernatural evil that may be threatening their household.