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Bookmarks For Everyone: The Best Books of 2005
[3 January 2006]
Editor: Nikki Tranter
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Amid the big questions floating about again this year on the so-called looming death of the novel, some pretty astonishing things happened in Book World. Publishing companies and techie giants battled over who owns and should own what, and Turkish author Orhan Pamuk continued to fight for his creative rights in one of the most perplexing censorship struggles in history. We lost too many legends, including John Fowles, Yvonne Vera, Liu Binyan, Andre Norton, Margaret Hodges, and Robert Sheckley. And our favorite writers gave us their best work to date. Upcoming book brats couldn't be kept down either, delivering work of such high standards it's an even greater tragedy to think publishing companies are slicing fiction budgets seemingly by the week. If the novel is indeed dying, it's certainly not the fault of the writers.
If, however, there's a bonus to be had from publishers' cutting their fiction budgets, it's that more and better non-fiction is filling the shelves. Which is to say, at least we've something to fill the gap until readers get their senses back. This year we shared some right non-fiction doozies of social and political import -- David Rakoff's Don't Get Too Comfortable and Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country among the more rousing.
Fiction or non-fiction, censored, scorned or adored, we at PopMatters were captivated and seduced by 2005's offerings, from a surprise death in the new Harry Potter to the "truth" of the afterlife in Mary Roach's Spook. We were just as thrilled reading short story collections and graphic novels, as we were memoirs, political rants, and literary exegeses. So, without further ado, here are our favorite books for the year that was; a fabulous year indeed.
— Nikki Tranter
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The Best Fiction Books of 2005
Saturday by Ian McEwan, Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, Eleanor Rigby by Douglas Coupland, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and many more (in three parts).
[on to the picks]
The Best Non-Fiction Books of 2005
A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut, The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate's Deep Throat by Bob Woodward, Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni and many more (in three parts).
[on to the picks]
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:. Altman on Altman by David Thompson
:. American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin Einhorn
:. The Anti-Oedipus Papers by Felix Guattari
:. Apex Hides the Hurt by Colson Whitehead
:. The Beatles by Bob Spitz
:. BOFFO!: How I Learned to Love the Blockbuster and Fear the Bomb by Peter Bart
:. Book of Longing by Leonard Cohen
:. The Book of Trouble by Ann Marlowe
:. Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster by Michael Eric Dyson
:. Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald
:. The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information by Richard Lanham
:. Empire of Dirt: The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music by Wendy Fonarow
:. Everyman by Philip Roth
:. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel by Jonathan Safran Foer
:. Family and Other Accidents by Shari Goldhagen
:. The Gang That Wouldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion, and the New Journalism by Marc Weingarten
:. Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion by Mark Ames
:. The Good Life by Jay McInerney
:. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley
:. Hong Kong Connections by Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, Stephen Chan Ching-kiu
:. The Husband by Dean Koontz
:. I Hate Myself And Want To Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard by Tom Reynolds
:. In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami
:. JPod by Douglas Coupland
:. Kamikaze Diaries by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
:. King Dork by Frank Portman
:. Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 by Tim Brooks
:. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording by Tim J. Anderson
:. March by Geraldine Brooks
:. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America by Andreas Killen
:. Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos by Gavin Newsham
:. The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind
:. The People's Republic of Desire by Annie Wang
:. Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture by T.L. Taylor
:. Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America by Matthew Frye Jacobson
:. Seaworthy by T.R. Pearson
:. Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
:. The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout, PhD
:. Sprawl: A Compact History by Robert Bruegmann
:. Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, Conqueror of the World by Justin Marozzi
:. White Money/Black Power by Noliwe M. Rooks
:. Yann Andrea Steiner by Marguerite Duras
:. You're Not You by Michelle Wildgen
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