“I read your post on the NBCC best recommended list and it said everything that I have been thinking about all of these end of year lists,” emails Colleen Mondor of the Chasing Ray blog (as well as a regular contributor to Bookslut and Booklist). “I am so tired of having the same books listed again and again and again. I pretty much resigned myself to ‘this is how it is and I have to suck it up’ until I saw what [C. Max Magee] was doing over at The Millions.”
At the beginning of December, Magee, declaring that “a lucky reader is one surrounded by many other readers,” started posting notes from authors and book critics who, instead of recapping the “best” new books of 2007, simply (and, for the most part, unostentatiously) talked about the books they’d read this year. National Book Award nominee Joshua Ferris, for example, received Joan Didion‘s Play It As It Lays as a gift, while Slate editor Meghan O’Rourke discovered A High Wind in Jamaica. David Leavitt recommended a more recent book—How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read—and Mark Sarvas is big on the new Coetzee, but even when somebody recommends one of this year’s “it books,” as Zachary Lazar does with Tree of Smoke, there’s a real sense of engagement rather than a feeling that one is simply chasing after received opinion.
Mondor wanted more suggestions that didn’t skew so heavily towards literary fiction, though, so she recruited her own bookish types, starting with Nicholas Christopher, who discovered Jan Potocki‘s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, and Firebird editor Sharyn November, whose five recommendations range from modern classics (The Short-Timers) to current releases like Elizabeth Hand‘s Generation Loss. Several more guest stars are promised, many drawn from the worlds of genre fiction. “It’s all very diverse, very cool and very original, which was my goal and is exactly what The Millions has accomplished as well,” Mordor promises. “All of this makes me think that perhaps part of the reason why all these established book reviewers and editors keep coming with similar lists is that they all think too much alike… another reason why many book review pages have suffered from irrelevance. Why care what happens to one page when we can find so much of the same thing elsewhere?” That’s certainly a question worth hashing out, and somehow I doubt “can’t you see the work we do is important?” is going to be a sufficient response.