My Top Five Favorite Books from 06
I didn’t mention this in my last post, but I finished “War and Peace” at about 11:15pm on New Year’s Eve. It was the one New Year’s resolutions that I actually kept. And this year I’ve resolved to not come up with resolutions. They are silly things.
As much as I enjoyed the experience of reading it (yes, Ashley, I did enjoy it,) “War and Peace” is not one of my favorite books from 2006. I managed to read several really entertaining and illuminating books this year, but “War and Peace” was neither illuminating nor generally entertaining. Here are my top five favorite books from 2006. I’ll give a quick summary of what the book is about, but I’m not going to bore everyone with reviews… that would take way too much effort. But I would love to hear what books everyone enjoyed last year.
- “1491” by Charles C. Mann – North and South America before Columbus. It’s an incredibly complex look at the people who were here before the Europeans
- “No god but God” by Reza Aslan – a well thought out and rational introduction to Islam.
- “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” by Jonathan Safran Foer – the fictional story of a boy who lost his father on September 11
- “Island in the Center of the World” by Russell Shorto – the Dutch founding of New Amsterdam. It’s part of my self taught New York history course.
- “Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem – a detective story with a tourettic narrator. What a great way for an author to use language to convey subtle meaning.
OK, your turn.
