To anyone still listing!

 We've been wondering here whether we should reform our Books of the Year feature.

Show we have more offerings or fewer? Should our editors give their own choices or should we ask only a selection of our distinguished contributors? And so on - through various more complex permutations befitting our about-to-go-on-holiday team.

Unlike other papers, we didn't ask for  Books of the Decade this year. It would have taken too much argument at the TLS to decide when the decade ended. Maybe next year.

Someone did ask me for  my own Books of the Noughties. Another asked for a single book of the Noughties.

The one book was easy.

Richard A. Talbert (ed): The Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World;  the most beautiful pink-and green guide to antiquity, accurate maps of emptiness, showing only what was there at the time, not what we have come to think of as important.

 I couldn't have gone On the Spartacus Road, or even had the idea of writing that book (see previous post)  without its help.

The others - for anyone still listing - were:

Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong?: Islam vs the modern world explained.

Michael Moore: Stupid White Men: the book they tried to ban after 9-11

Ian McEwan: Saturday: a novel of brain damage and other protests

Philip Roth: The Plot Against America: fictional appeasement in the White House

Linda Colley: Captives: how the British Empire became a prison for the British

Mary Beard: The Roman Triumph: ambiguous celebrations of victory and defeat 

Tom Holland: Rubicon; a Julius Caesar for the Noughtie decade

J.N. Adams: Bilingualism and the Latin language: why Romans wrote like their enemies

Barack Obama: Dreams From My Father: the new President can write. We learnt that before he was elected. But what else can he do?

Happy Holidays to all.

Comments

[Madeleine]

Just for this reader, I'd like to hear the editors' picks, as well as those of contributors.

(Michael Moore! I gasp.)

[Terence Hale]

Hi,
Book of the year is very much in the opinion of the reader. In many ways like the Swiss referendums which happen every five minutes. If the sun is shining people go swimming and not voting and thus a minority win and the loser win a noble prise.
Regards Dr. Terence Hale

[Clayton Burns]

Thanks to Sir Peter for the "Saturday" suggestion, and a Happy New Year to all! I happened to meet someone this morning in Vancouver who had read the novel and strongly recommended it.

The New Yorker seems to be dominating on McEwan, with its excellent article by Daniel Zalewski ('The Background Hum'), and the reading from the author "The Use of Poetry."

What I found most striking about "Saturday" was the account of the Baxter operation in part Five. What I found most puzzling was Henry Perowne's opinion of Henry James, "the fussy brother who would rather run round a thing a dozen different ways than call it by its name" (paperback, 58). Perowne's aversion to late James parallels the reference to the "tortured" syntax of "The Ambassadors" in Alexis's "Asylum" (paperback, 205).

Even though Zalewski interviewed Neil Kitchen, the neurosurgeon McEwan observed over two years, and McEwan himself, he did not try to refine our understanding of how the author came to assign such an anti-Jamesian position to his protagonist. Did the issue come up in the discussions between McEwan and Kitchen? Does Kitchen read James?

[Bruce Krajewski]

Certainly keep the recommendations from known authors. I like your suggestion that you might include editors' suggestions, and you might think about choosing some non-Times bloggers who write about books, as well as one or two random people (e.g., the workers at the printing plant) who might provide items that would interrupt the expected.