What About the Losers?

In the wake of a bazillion “best books of the year” lists--yes, yes: ours included--on his Big Red’s Blog, Steve Hockensmith complains quite rationally about the one that got away:

When someone lists their top 10 books of the year, the implication is they’ve read 40 or 50. I mean, what good’s a top 10 list when you’ve read 11 books? I’d actually be more interested in knowing which one didn’t make the list.

Then he riffs on--quite engagingly--about the nature of “best” lists and his place in them, before actually giving us his reading rundown:

The Best Books I [Can Remember] Read[ing] in 2007
A Useless List by Steve ... uhhhh ... Hocken ... something

* Citizen Vince by Jess Walter
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
* The books I was up against for the Best First Novel Edgar ... dammit (yes, I read them all)
* That novel with the guy who has to find the thing before those people do something awful to those other people over in that place
* Lamb by Christopher Moore
* And just to show you how long it can take me to get around to a worthy book: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, which I can only imagine graced more than one top 10 list when it was published ... in 1868.

Here’s hoping it won’t take me 150 years to get around to What the Dead Know or The Tin Roof Blowdown ...

Hockensmith’s next novel--his third “Holmes on the Range Mystery” (following this year’s On the Wrong Track)--will be The Black Dove, coming to bookstores in February.