Instant nostalgia

Every time someone asks us to recommend a book we’ve recently read, we go blank. How do people remember these things? So when it came time to assemble our annual best-of list, we were shocked by the number of great books we’d consumed during the past year, including one that was so good it forced us to cheat.

Best novel of the year that didn’t actually come out this year
We thought we’d kick off this year’s best-of list with a rebellion against the idea itself. Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan (Overlook, $13.95) was published at the end of 2006, but we didn’t get our hands on this stunning, disquieting novel until January. The protagonist, a recluse in the Maine woods, goes on a systematic killing spree when an unseen hunter shoots his dog. Still, it’s not as gruesome as that description makes it sound, and is actually a careful insight into loss, loneliness and revenge. This is still the novel we remember best of 2007, even if it came out in 2006. And why should we be such slaves to the calendar? What are we, music critics?—Jonathan Messinger

Best book by a Chicago author
It’s not fair at all to the rest of the crop, but when a living legend publishes his first memoir at the age of 95, he wins. Touch and Go (The New Press, $24.95) by Studs Terkel is an effortlessly charming, slow-rolling tour of the oral historian’s life, complete with anecdotes from throughout the 20th century. If we had to pick a favorite moment, it wouldn’t be easy, but it’d probably be the part where a young Studs attends a union rally and is nearly bored to tears by…Carl Sandburg.—JM

Book that is better than that Augusten Burroughs you got last Christmas
It will never attract the kind of cult following the pseudomemoirists du jour get, but Ander Monson’s Neck Deep (Graywolf, $15) stands up against any of the books of personal essays we’re told to read. Our favorites include an essay on winter weather that includes long ellipses that function as snowdrifts, and another about the author’s fear of tooth decay, “On Dentistry.” And Monson’s true tale of his college computer crimes alone puts most memoirs to shame.—JM

Best novel that doesn’t read like a novel
Considering the number of books churned out weekly on the War on Terror, we’re baffled that German author Dorothea Dieckmann’s novel Guantanamo, which dramatizes rendition to the titular prison in all of its grotesque detail, hasn’t attracted more attention. Then again, it’s a brutal and honest portrayal of America’s wartime prison system, so maybe we shouldn’t be so baffled after all.—JM

Best book that deserves better than a clever headline
Novelist Edwidge Danticat turned her gaze inward for her first book of nonfiction, the story of her life as a Haitian-born American immigrant, Brother, I’m Dying. She sets up a natural push-and-pull of happiness and sorrow by relating how her father was dying from pulmonary fibrosis in New York at the same time she found out she was pregnant.—Beth Dugan

Best novel that didn’t live up to its title
Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was wondrous but not brief, and not all that much about Oscar Wao. The debut novel featured titular Oscar, an obese “ghettonerd” who downs role-playing games, sci-fi novels, and movies like french fries and Coke, and who is ostracized by his New Jersey neighborhood for lacking any game when it comes to women. Though supposedly the protagonist, Oscar really is just the latest in the line to be tormented by a fukú, a curse his family has lived with for generations. And Oscar is just one of many characters whom Díaz dives into like a familiar swimming hole. But the history of the Dominican Republic, and its diaspora, is the story Díaz is telling, and the history lessons—rapid-fire and hilarious accounts of some of the Caribbean’s worst offenders—are slung from the narrator’s college-groomed street tongue.—JM