My Top Ten Books of 2007

(Note: Only one of these books was published in 2007. One will be published in two months.)

10) "Against the Day" - A holdover from my 2006 list. I was somewhere around page 400 when I bravely started 2007 in Maui, nursing something of a hangover. On January 1, 2007, I woke up sometime in the early afternoon, and watched a few episodes of the third season of "The OC" and read some Pynchon - a significant departure from January 1, 2008, when I woke up in the late morning, watched a few episodes of "Gossip Girl" then spent the rest of the day finishing "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles."

9) "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles" - David Thomson is a genius at writing non-fiction like a novel and writing film criticism like philosophy. Makes sense that his best book is about a man who was larger than his own life. To my amazement, alot of people don't seem to like Thomson for any number of reasons - his tendency to distort facts with fictional tangents and personal bemused meandering (he has a schoolboy's fascination with sex, and who was doing it with how many other whos), his overriding thesis that you can critique a life the same way you critique a film. Idiots. Thomson is the only worthwhile film writer today, maybe ever.

8) "The Big Sleep" - David Thomson writes a thin little book about his favorite movie ever. Dare you to read this and not feel the same way about Bogart and Bacall's saucy noir love-fest. Reading this book is like watching an episode of MST3K, with highbrow snark replaced by effervescent, effusive praise.

7) "Waiting for the Barbarians" - John Coetzee writes an allegory about a distant outpost of an Empire so big it doesn't have a name. The mysterious barbarians are preparing to attack. They have been forever. The Empire wants them stopped before they start. It's about the Cold War, the War on Terror, South Africa, Rome, take your pick. All great books should be this short.

6) "The Drawing of the Three" - I've been in the process of re-reading Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series, with an eye towards writing an article about it for "The Believer." The editors turned down my proposal, but still I progress, slowly, having reached the closing three volumes, each more bone-busting epic than the last. Oddly, upon a second reading, it's the second volume that I enjoy the best. The set-up: our cowboy-knight protagonist finds doors on an empty, post-apocalyptic beach. Each door leads to New York at a different point in the latter half of the twentieth century. We meet a heroin runner from the 80s, a legless blacktivist from the Civil Rights 60s, and a serial killer sex fiend from the 70s. Madcap pulp as social history. Stephen King, All-American.

5) "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier" - in which Alan Moore, rebel genius of the comic book world, takes what started out as a loose parody of the Justice League of America and creates the postmodern document of our time, a world in which George Orwell's Big Brother is a former associate of Graham Greene's Harry Lime, who commands James Bond to hunt down a pair of Victorian-era characters, all but forgotten and oddly immortal. An appendix, an encyclopedia, a history of fiction, incorporating Shakespeare, Lovecraft, Beowulf, Kerouac, and everything that was ever in between anything else in the human imagination. For many people, this will be unreadable. For a certain type of person, this is the frothy post-modern meta-fictional beta version of every great fantasy story every told. Don't forget your 3-D glasses.

4) "Against the Day" - Because it's the first time since high school that I've made it so far into a book that I barely understand. Because it is a genuine quest. Because I could set the book aside for almost half a year, and not open it once, and still have it there, in the back of my mind, taking up the space of three other, slimmer, easier books on my bookshelf (I might have read all of Philip Roth and most of Ian McEwan by now, if not for this monster). And because every few pages I reach a paragraph like this:

He looked for Umeki among the crowds on the platform, even among subsets that would not possibly include her, wondering at the protocols of destiny, of being led, of turning away, of knowing where he did and didn't belong. She wasn't there, she wouldn't be. The more she wasn't there, the more she was. Kit supposed there was something in the theory of sets that covered this, but the train was moving, his brain was numb, his heart was incommunicado, the dunes slipped by, then the Bruges Canal and the larks swept upward from the stubble of the fields, gathering into a defensive front against the autumn.

Because Thomas Pynchon is a genius.

3) "Cerebus" - A 6000 page, 300 issue comic book, three decades in the making, the longest work of its sort (its closest competitor in the comics world is scarcely half as long). It begins as a parody of "Conan the Barbarian," featuring an Aardvark who talks in the third person; it becomes political satire, moves past religious transcendance, segues without pause into high melodrama, dips into amateur philosophy, becomes magnificent, becomes grotesque, dies with its main character, not with a bang but a whimper. This was my summer of 2007 - waiting for the next step of my life to start. The writer, Dave Sim, went crazy somewhere around issue 175 - and began to blame women in particular and the rest of mankind in general for how awful all of reality is. By the end, "Cerebus" is unbearable. And yet it is worth it - to see the steady ascension and then decline of one of the true mad artists of our generation. And to follow the sad, epic, wonderful, terrible story of Cerebus the Aardvark, betrayed by everyone including himself and his own creator. Majestic. Disgusting. Impossible to put down when you've started it. Impossible to pick up once you've finished it.

2) "Arkansas" - Working as an unpaid intern is a constant offense to my profound pride. But god does it have benefits. "Arkansas," by John Brandon, isn't just the funniest, best-written, most original book I have read in forever. It's a book to read more than once. It's a book where every single sentence has the same wonderful air of being entirely casual and perfectly cast. It's as if advanced scientists merged the brains of Joseph Heller and Elmore Leonard at their finest. John Brandon is a genius. Buy this book immediately. Here, or here. Order it. You want it. Yes, I am shilling for company product. Because you want to read this book so you can be the person to tell everyone else to read it.

1) "Against the Day" - Because I'm still reading it.