Following up and renaming this past fall's “Best Recommended List,” this morning the NBCC launched a list of book recommendations now called “NBCC’s Good Reads.” Hoping to provide an alternative to sales-based bestsellers lists, the NBCC polled its membership along with former NBCC award winners and finalists in order to, as the NBCC blog claims, create a list that represents, “what…smart readers [are] not just buying, but reading and recommending to their friends, roommates, coworkers and anyone they can collar.”
Over 600 of those polled voted—including Nick Hornby and Robert Pinsky—answering the question, “What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?” The NBCC tallied the votes and put the five most popular titles in fiction, nonfiction and poetry on this list.
While many of the picks are hardly surprising, having been popular books over the last several months—Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke and Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying are both listed—a few, like Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia, are just beginning to garner attention.
The complete list in all three categories follows. Extended lists and further information is available at the NBCC blog Critical Mass.
Fiction
1. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
2. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
3. J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking)
4. Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book (Viking)
5. Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa)
Nonfiction
1. The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
2. Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
3. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
4. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)*
5. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)*
Poetry
1. Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
2. Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)*
3. Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)*
4. The Collected Poems, 1956—1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
5. Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)
*There was a tie for fourth in nonfiction, and for second in poetry
