Best reads of 2007

Picasso, Dora Maar Seated

I usually abstain from doing this kind of end-of-the-year list because I generally think of them as limited to books that were published in the previous year.  But why limit yourself? I read a lot of terrific books this year, recently- and not-so-recently published, and I've vetted for you the best of the crop.*

--The Radical Aesthetic, Isobel Armstrong
--Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Art of Dora Maar, Mary Ann Caws
--Seule Venise, Claudie Gallet
--Ensemble c'est tout, Anna Gavalda
--Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
--Pages from the Goncourt Journals, Edmond et Jules de Goncourt
--Nothing, Henry Green
--Paris: The Secret History, Andrew Hussey
--Subject to Change: Reading Feminist Writing, Nancy K. Miller
--Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
--Other Colors, Orhan Pamuk
--Les choses, Georges Perec
--Sarah's Key, Tatiana de Rosnay
--Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner
--Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, Caroline Weber
--Sorbonne Confidential, Laurel Zuckerman

*Rules for inclusion: the book had to do something intellectually or emotionally engaging in an aesthetic, sophisticated, entertaining, and/or scholarly way. There are some other books I thought to include that were very good, but didn't make the list because they were either too post-modernly virtuoso or too sad.

Comments

[yansor]

I can't tell you how PROUD I am to be in this list.
:))
TR

[Frank Peterson]

Michael Ondaatje--I fell for his writing ages ago when I read the Skin of a Lion--been following ever since. The image of the nun plunging off the bridge into the arms of-- was it Caravaggio?-- is an enthralling image if I've ever read one.

Best from Seattle fro the New Year

[Frank Peterson]

Michael Ondaatje--I fell for his writing ages ago when I read the Skin of a Lion--been following ever since. The image of the nun plunging off the bridge into the arms of-- was it Caravaggio?-- is an enthralling image if I've ever read one.

Best from Seattle fro the New Year

[DrJackie]

Just discovered your most interesting site. Have you read Lucinda Holdforth's _True Pleasures_? It's a memoir of this Australian author's peregrinations through Paris in the footsteps of women who once made the city their home--and in the process played a role in making Paris what it is today.