Why should critics have all the fun? No reason at all, so with that, I've decided to publish my ten favorite books read of 2007 even if they weren't all published in 2007. These were books that I read and finished with great satisfaction in all that I learned from stories well told.
Fiction.
I'm a big reader of fiction of all sorts, yet this year, thrillers were my favorites.
Since I love anything Charles McCarry writes, I was delighted with his new book Christopher's Ghosts where we learn more about Paul Christopher's childhood in Germany with an American father and a German mother and his first love, a half-Jewish beauty. His parents are anti-Nazi and living in great peril and his mother disappears. It takes twenty years but Paul returns as an American spy and takes vengeance on his mother's tormentor, the Gestapo chief Stutzer.
"Christopher's Ghosts" (Charles McCarry)
Daniel Silva is a new favorite spy thriller writer who is a pleasure to reread. Gabriel Allon is an expert art restorer specializing in Italian Old Masters and also a secret spy in Special Operations. He walks in sadness since his infant son was killed and his wife driven irretrievably mad by a bomb in Vienna that was meant for him. In The Secret Servant, he travels to Amsterdam to find out who killed an Israeli professor who was compiling reports on the dangers of militant Islam when he uncovers an Al Qaeda plot to kidnap the daughter of the American Ambassador to London.
"The Secret Servant (Gabriel Allon)" (Daniel Silva)
I liked the Secret Servant so much that I read The Messenger again and enjoyed as much as the first time. When the Vatican is targeted for attack, Allon must find a way to infiltrate a Saudi terrorist network which he does with a beautiful American art expert Sarah Bancroft.
"The Messenger" (Daniel Silva)
A Vatican thriller is The Secret Cardinal by Tom Grace. Nolan Kilkenny, a former Navy Seal, is called to Rome after the death of his wife and son to help his father's best friend, Malachy Donaher, the Cardinal Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. There he meets Pope Leo who tells him of Yin Daoming a cardinal "in pectore", who for twenty years has been imprisoned in a Chinese jail whom the Pope wants brought to Rome so he can be elevated to Cardinal. Then the Pope dies, Kilkenny's team is in China and the Chinese learn of the rescue attempt. A real thriller as well as a fascinating look at the persecution of Christians in China along with a lot of high tech toys.
"The Secret Cardinal" (Tom Grace)
What happens when a Gen X blogger named Cassandra starts ranting about the economic disaster that begins to unfold as boomers start retiring. Call it Boomsday and another hilarious book by Christopher Buckley who brought us Thank You for Smoking.
"Boomsday" (Christopher Buckley)
Non-fiction
In his inimitable way, Mark Steyn deals with the demographic crisis in Europe and the challenge of radical Islam in America Alone, what he calls "some light reading for the new Dark Ages". The paperback is coming out in January 08.
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"America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It" (Mark Steyn)
Gentle Regrets is the first book I'd read by Roger Scruton and he completely won me over with stories and thoughts from his life whether they be on architecture, the deadening nihilism of Communist Eastern Europe, music or his years as a "voyeur of holiness" .
"Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life" (Roger Scruton)
With his great skill of making a complex story intelligible through the stories of the real-life characters involved, Jonathan Harr tells a riveting detective story in The Lost Painting, The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece. From a clue in an obscure Italian archive by one art student through to its public unveiling in the Dublin museum in 1992, Harr tells us the story of how a lost painting by a great master was found.
"The Lost Painting" (Jonathan Harr)
I think I bought Cultural Amnesia as much because I loved the phrase 'necessary memories' as for all the great reviews it received.
Clive James, the famous and prolific British critic, is a brilliant writer who, through a collection of 110 biographical essays that are much like a box of chocolates in that you can only read two or three at a time, "plumbs the responsibilities of artists, intellectuals and political readers."
"Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts" (Clive James)
I was most impressed with the persuasive argument Dan McAdams, a " narrative psychologist" makes in The Redemptive Self that Americans really are different because of the stories they tell about their lives. He finds that the highly successful, the best-adjusted, most productive and caring adults describe their lives as overcoming adversity and transforming that adversity as a way of connecting with others with hope in the future which, in the end, is the American story.
"The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By" (Dan P. McAdams)