NYT's Top Reads for 2007

Stephen King, Christopher Hitchens make the cut

(NEWSER) - If you need a book recommendation for holiday reading, look no further than the New York Times ' list of the 10 best books of the year. Five are fiction and five non-fiction:

• 11/22/63 by Stephen King: A time portal sends an English teacher back to 1958 to try and stop Lee Harvey Oswald. King reflects "on questions of memory, fate, and free will as he richly evokes midcentury America."
• Swamplandia! By Karen Russell: "Exuberantly inventive language" marks this story of "a heroine who is wise beyond her years" as she tries to preserve her family's way of life. Also, an alligator theme park is involved.

Sex, ghosts, long-lost twins, baby monkeys inhabit Salon's picks

(NEWSER) - The frankly subjective list of the year's best fiction from Salon avoids the obvious Wolff Hall, Hillary Mantel's latest and the Man Booker Prize winner. Laura Miller names five others that, too, offered “a sojourn, however brief, into another world”:

• The Children’s Book by AS Byatt: “This is a classic Byatt fusion of fact and uncannily luscious imagery, mixed in the ideal proportions: not too hot, not too cold—just right.”

(NEWSER) - David Foster Wallace declared war on depression and addiction in writing his last, unfinished novel, D. T. Max writes in the New Yorker. The writer's suicide by hanging last year was the culmination of a struggle to live normally, to achieve what he called “adult sanity," without antidepressants or the labyrinthine writing style he had developed in Infinite Jest. His last testament to that struggle, The Pale King, will be published next year. More»

New Novel's protagonist too earnest for a fun read, says Kakutani

(NEWSER) - Unlike the emotionally twisted and tortured heroes of Philip Roth's finer works, the dead 19-year-old narrator of Indignation is an uncomplicated soul—and the novel suffers because of its milquetoast protagonist, writes Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times. "All of Marcus' unrelieved niceness makes for a somewhat pallid narrative," Kakutani says. More»

Genre 'the last place you’d expect to find the truth,' humorist says

(NEWSER) - With his new book of nonfiction essays, Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris finds himself engulfed in questions of truth and accuracy. In America, the recent explosion of memoirs has been followed with one scandal after another, prompting more scrutiny of the humorist’s work. “I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using a nonfiction label," a New Republic writer argued last year. More»