Is more of a magazine article than a book. Oh it's entertaining. Especially when you realize that every single TV and radio interview including the many many interviews on NPR never got past page 25. But the best nonfiction of 2007?

C'mon you can read the whole book in 2 hrs.

Double thumbs up for The World without Us and Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games - two fantastic books.

William Gibson's Spook Country was a great read in 2007. It's a punky tip of the hat to the joys and wonder of globalization, technology and the Pacific Northwest. The heroine is a fascinating character - a semi-notable singer from a decent flash-in-the-pan 90s guitar band who now, years later, has to work for a living. She's a champ as she's thrust into a whirlwind of cutting edge art, misbehaving anti-terror agents and beautiful, racially ambiguous cold war-era spies.

I couldn't put this one down - I read it through in hardly more than a sitting or two.

Your blurb about the book asks:

"What would it mean to be a Jew in a world where the Holocaust never happened and the state of Israel didn't exist?"

-- but actually, the holocaust did happen in the alternate history of Chabon's book, though many details appear to have been different.

what's with the poor gender representation? Were the women writers just not making their sentences jump through hoops this year? Were they just writing plain old good stories that didn't try to beat Joyce at his own game?

Alas, where is Marisha Pessl when we need her to wow the critics with some overwrought, showoffy prose and join the ranks of the big boys wielding their mighty pens?

But Laura Miller would have had to be willing to read in the genres, rather than only so-called literary books written to save the genres from themselves. For example, Laura Lippman, Val McDermid, and newcomers Patry Francis and Laura Benedict released marvelous books this year, but they mostly get ignored by the literati establishment because, well, you know why.

Far better of choices for fiction would have been to include Water For Elephants - stirring and an affirmation of being human, instead of the damnable hatred of being human, as expressed in that truly fictional account of 'life as if there were no humans'....

Could not agree more with your criteria:

"Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning."-LM

Weisman's World Without Us was great, but I don't rec. reading it just before McCarthy's The Road. By the time I got to the translucent creature drinking at the edge of a contaminated pool, I lost it. Got all emo and couldn't function well that week.

Where is Eat Pray Love? I thought for sure you'd add that to your list.

May we remember our future generation of readers---Children!

For each of us as well as those who read to their children, I highly recommend "What Color Is Your Dream?" by Kittie Nesius Beletic.

This luminiferous illustrated book with a rhythm of sing-song verses, is a work encouraging us to inspire ourselves and our chidren to de-limit our imaginations and open ourselves to unlimited possibilites.

The polychromatic beauty of this book is life-affirming in encouraging all to know that we can achieve our dreams, and to broaden our consciousnesses "that each dream is aready a possible realization."

"The Rest is Noise" by Alex Ross. A sweeping, engrossing history of 20th century classical music, which encapsulates the history of the century itself. How could you have overlooked this?

As a single parent whose reading habits have returned great dividends in the life of his only child — at 10-years-old, she is now a voracious reader, I sure would like to see a list of the best children's and teen's books for 2007!

I'm very pleased to see the wonderful "World Without Us" on your list of the years 10 best. I devoured it in one sitting and found the idea of a world free of humans to be both intriguing and frightening. We are capable of so much wonder and such imaginiative thinking and yet we do so many stupid things. Despite our visions of grandeur, it's clear that the world would little miss us nor long mourn us. Perhaps we can find some way to change that in the decades ahead.

I completely agree with Then We Came to the End, I couldn't get into Oscar Wao and I'd like to add to the lists of overlooked women - check out Lionel Shriver (yes, she's a she and a brilliant writer).

PS Eat Pray Love came out in hardcover last year.

I can't read American fiction much anymore. It's all so airheaded and contrived I lose it after the first or second page.

A biography, however, by Jonathan Spence of a Ming aristocrat, RETURN TO DRAGON MOUNTAIN fulfilled the criteria. Zhang Dai lost everything at the age of 49 when the Mongols tookover, but still his life remained devoted to books and a way of life that retained its purpose. Though Mr. Spence's prose is a little wooden, he left me wanting to know more about one of the oldest and greatest civilizations on earth.

Another is "Rousseau's Dog" by David Edmonds and John Eidinow. The story of the relationship between Hume and Rousseau that does a very good job on the philosophy, the times, and the personalities.

I wish you'd cite the "best" poetry of the year but have an editor do it who brings in the new voices. There is an audience, they just have to be pointed in the right direction.

May I ask you all for a recommendation? Every year, I give my three adult children a book, usually a piece of contemporary fiction. In June, my youngest gave birth to twin boys and has temporarily departed the reading pool. I'm looking for something light but compelling that would fit into her chaotic schedule. I'm even thinking a graphic novel might be a good fit, but don't know where to start looking.

Any thoughts/insights/recommendations will be much appreciated. Thanks!