| Best of 2005 |
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These are the books that have
inspired us during the past 12 months. If you have any comments
about our selection of books or want us to add a book that
you feel is good enough to make it onto this list then please
get in touch. here.
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| Top Books of the last 12 months: |
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The Year of Magical Thinking
: Many will greet this taut, clear-eyed memoir of grief
as a long-awaited return to the terrain of Didion's venerated,
increasingly rare personal essays.
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:
Oskar Schell, hero of this brilliant follow-up to Foer's bestselling
Everything Is Illuminated, is a nine-year-old amateur inventor,
jewelry designer, astrophysicist, tambourine player and pacifist.
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist
Explores the Hidden Side of Everything: Economics is not
widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences.
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary
Life: "I have not survived against all odds. I have not
lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This
is my story."
My Friend Leonard: In
the bold and heartbreaking My Friend Leonard, James Frey picks
up the story of his extraordinary life pretty much where things
left off in his breakout bestseller and Amazon.com Best Book
of 2003, A Million Little Pieces, the fierce, in-your-face
memoir about Frey's kamikaze run of...
Oh the Glory of It All: "A memoir,
at its heart, is written in order to figure out who you are,"
writes Sean Wilsey, and indeed, Oh the Glory of it All is
compelling proof of his exhaustive personal quest.
Never Let Me Go: All children
should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham,
an elite school in the English countryside, are so special
that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional
fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional
origins and strange destiny.
The History of Love: A Novel:
Nicole Krauss's The History of Love is a hauntingly beautiful
novel about two characters whose lives are woven together
in such complex ways that even after the last page is turned,
the reader is left to wonder what really happened. In the
hands of a less gifted writer, unraveling this tangled web...
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes:
An Excerpt from Bill Watterson's Introduction: "I’ve loved
comic strips as long as I can remember. As a kid, I knew I
wanted to be either a cartoonist or an astronaut. The latter
was never much of a possibility, as I don’t even like riding
in elevators.
The World Is Flat: A Brief History
of the Twenty-first Century: Thomas L. Friedman is not
so much a futurist, which he is sometimes called, as a presentist.
His aim, in his new book, The World Is Flat, as in his earlier,
influential Lexus and the Olive Tree, is not to give you a
speculative preview of the wonders that are sure to come in
your lifetime, but...
A Man without a Country: In
his first book since 1999, it's just like old times as Vonnegut
(now 82) makes with the deeply black humor in this collection
of articles written over the last five years, many from the
alternative magazine In These Times.
The Tender Bar : A Memoir: "Long
before it legally served me, the bar saved me," asserts J.R.
Moehringer, and his compelling memoir The Tender Bar is the
story of how and why. A Pulitzer-Prize winning writer for
the Los Angeles Times, Moehringer grew up fatherless in pub-heavy
Manhasset, New York, in a ramshackle house...
No Country for Old Men:
Starred Review. Seven years after Cities of the Plain brought
his acclaimed Border Trilogy to a close, McCarthy returns
with a mesmerizing modern-day western. In 1980 southwest Texas,
Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles
across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4...
On Beauty: In an author's note
at the end of On Beauty, Zadie Smith writes: "My largest structural
debt should be obvious to any E.M. Forster fan; suffice it
to say he gave me a classy old frame, which I covered with
new material as best I could."
Encyclopedia Prehistorica
Dinosaurs: The Definitive Pop-Up: Kindergarten-Grade 4–Informational
tidbits appear alongside exquisitely designed pop-up constructions
in this visually stunning overview of all things dinosaur.
Each spread features a spectacular paper sculpture of a particular
species (e.g., Ankylosaurus or Triceratops) along with a brief...
The Glass Castle : A Memoir:
Jeannette Walls's father always called her "Mountain Goat"
and there's perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated
a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically.
In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the
hands of eccentric, nomadic parents--Rose Mary,..
Kafka on the Shore: The opening
pages of a Haruki Murakami novel can be like the view out
an airplane window onto tarmac.
Black Hole: The first issues
of Charles Burns's comics series Black Hole began appearing
in 1995, and long before it was completed a decade later,
readers and fellow artists were speaking of it in tones of
awe and comparing it to recent classics of the form like Chris
Ware's Jimmy Corrigan and Daniel Clowes's ...
1491 : New Revelations of
the Americas Before Columbus : 1491 is not so much the
story of a year, as of what that year stands for: the long-debated
(and often-dismissed) question of what human civilization
in the Americas was like before the Europeans crashed the
party.
Saturday: In the predawn sky on
a Saturday morning, London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne sees
a plane with a wing afire streaking toward Heathrow. His first
thought is terrorism--especially since this is the day of
a public demonstration against the pending Iraq war.
The Historian: If your pulse
flutters at the thought of castle ruins and descents into
crypts by moonlight, you will savor every creepy page of Elizabeth
Kostova's long but beautifully structured thriller The Historian.
Mao : The Unknown Story: In
the epilogue to her biography of Mao Tse-tung, Jung Chang
and her husband and cowriter Jon Halliday lament that, "Today,
Mao's portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square
in the heart of the Chinese capital." For Chang, author of
Wild Swans, this fact is an affront, not just to...
1776: Esteemed historian David McCullough
covers the military side of the momentous year of 1776 with
characteristic insight and a gripping narrative, adding new
scholarship and a fresh perspective to the beginning of the
American Revolution.
Animals in Translation :
Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
: Philosophers and scientists have long wondered what goes
on in the minds of animals, and this fascinating study gives
a wealth of illuminating insights into that mystery. Grandin,
an animal behavior expert specializing in the design of humane
slaughter systems, is autistic, and she...
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood
Prince (Book 6) : The long-awaited, eagerly anticipated,
arguably over-hyped Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
has arrived, and the question on the minds of kids, adults,
fans, and skeptics alike is, "Is it worth the hype?" The answer,
luckily, is simple: yep.
God's Politics : Why the Right
Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It: Secular liberals
and religious conservatives will find things to both comfort
and alarm them in Jim Wallis's God's Politics. That combination
is actually reason enough to recommend the book in a time
when the national political and theological discourse is dominated
by blanket descriptions and...
Lunar Park: Book Description:
Imagine becoming a bestselling novelist, and almost immediately
famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long
seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes
in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your
celebrity drowns in a sea of...
Specimen Days : A Novel: In
each section of Michael Cunningham's bold new novel, his first
since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters:
a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. "In the Machine"
is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial
revolution, as human...
Teacher Man : A Memoir : For
30 years Frank McCourt taught high school English in New York
City and for much of that time he considered himself a fraud.
During these years he danced a delicate jig between engaging
the students, satisfying often bewildered administrators and
parents, and actually enjoying his job.
Blink : The Power of Thinking
Without Thinking: Blink is about the first two seconds
of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant.
Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns
for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating
research into splendid storytelling.
Infrastructure: A Field Guide
to the Industrial Landscape : We are surrounded by the
hardware of the modern world, but how much of it do we even
notice, much less understand? This unique and fascinating
book covers the parts of the landscape that are often overlooked
despite their ubiquity--objects such as utility poles, power
lines, cell phone towers,...
The Complete New Yorker:
Eighty Years of the Nation's Greatest Magazine (Book & 8 DVD-ROMs):
Fans of The New Yorker will be dazzled by The Complete New
Yorker, a collection that includes every page of every issue,
from full-color covers to spot drawings, from poetry to Profiles,
from cartoons to advertisements--all on 8 searchable DVDs.
Veronica : A Novel: Reviewed by
Heidi Julavits Imagine that Edie Sedgwick penned a roman ŕ
clef in her 50s, and that she discovered, in her ugly, diseased
decrepitude, that celebrities and downtown loft spaces and
skuzzy rich hangers-on were the nadir of existence.
Six Bad Things : A Novel:
More than fulfilling the promise of Huston's 2004 debut, Caught
Stealing, this remarkably assured hard-boiled caper has rapid-fire
pacing, dead-on dialogue and a beleaguered protagonist who
just can't get a break.
The Areas of My Expertise:
n this super-literate, ultimately exhausting exercise in literary
parody, New York Times magazine contributor Hodgman has produced
"a compendium of COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE." From sections
titled "What Will Happen in the Future" to "What You Did Not
Know About Hobos," he piles up smart-alecky...
Hip Hotels Atlas: The ultimate
guide to the world's most special places to stay, from the
author of the best-selling Hip Hotels series—featuring eighty
remarkable destinations, many new to this book.Herbert Ypma,
creator of a whole new genre of style and travel books, has
selected a galaxy of destination hotels...
Collapse: How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed: Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed is the glass-half-empty follow-up
to his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. While
Guns, Germs, and Steel explained the geographic and environmental
reasons why some human populations have flourished, Collapse
uses the same...
The March : A Novel: As the Civil
War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General William
Tecumseh Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia
and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death,
destruction, looting, thievery and chaos. In The March, E.L.
Doctorow has put his unique stamp on...
China, Inc. : How the Rise of the
Next Superpower Challenges America and the World: China
has the world's most rapidly changing large economy, and according
to Ted Fishman, it is forcing the world to change along with
it. "No country has ever before made a better run at climbing
every step of economic development all at once," he writes,
in China, Inc.
Saving Fish from Drowning: Amy
Tan, who has an unerring eye for relationships between mothers
and daughters, especially Chinese-American, has departed from
her well-known genre in Saving Fish From Drowning. She would
be well advised to revisit that theme which she writes about
so well.
The Star Wars Poster Book:
One of the very first Star Wars posters had no images at all—just
enormous block letters that announced, "Coming to Your Galaxy
This Summer: Star Wars." The rest is history. Now, 28 years
later, the 350 most amazing Star Wars movie posters are collected
for the first time.
Looking At Los Angeles :
by MARLA HAMBURG KENNEDY (Editor), et al
When I Knew: by Robert Trachtenberg
Mother-Daughter Wisdom : Creating
a Legacy of Physical and Emotional Health: It's a rare
book that delivers so completely on such a broad promise.
Mother-Daughter Wisdom is written to connect the dots between
a number of separate parts: logical and emotional morality,
physical and mental health, friends and family, and in an
overarching sense, the relationship between...
Mother of Sorrows: by Richard
Mccann
The Design of Dissent : Socially
and Politically Driven Graphics: by Milton Glaser, et
al
The Golden Spruce: A True Story
of Myth, Madness, and Greed: by John Vaillant
Eleanor Rigby : A Novel: Liz
Dunn isn't morbid, she's just a lonely woman with a very pragmatic
outlook on life. Overweight, underemployed, and living in
a nondescript condo with nothing but chocolate pudding in
the fridge, she has pretty much given up on anything interesting
ever happening to her.
Arthur Spiderwick's Field
Guide to the Fantastical World Around You (Spiderwick Chronicles):
Spiderwick fans will adore this gorgeous guidebook to the
fantastical creatures featured in Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi's
spectacular series. The superdeluxe, lavishly illustrated
"field guide" features 142 information-packed pages, 41 full-color
plates, 6 spectacular gatefolds, 6 watercolor...
The Algebraist: Banks (Look
to Windward) pulls out all the stops in this gloriously over-the-top,
state-of-the-art space opera, a Hugo nominee in its British
edition. In a galaxy teeming with intelligent life-forms and
dominated by the intensely hierarchical society known as the
Mercatoria, the...
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