Best of 2005 - Books

Unlike music, movies, or television, my criteria for best books of the year is slightly different. No, strike that. My criteria for best books is the same -- it's simply my favorite one of the year. However, my criteria for being "nominated" for best book of the year is radically different. With music, movies, and TV, I stayed exclusively with works that were first released/broadcast during the year 2005. My list of books to chose from is simply a list of the books I read in 2005. Most of them were not published in 2005 -- in fact, only a few of them were. You see, I don't normally read new books. I love books. I love reading books. My downfall over the last couple of decades is the one thing I loved more than reading books was buying books. I bought books by the sackful (quite literally). If you were to glance around my house, you would see shelves and shelves of books, and piles and piles of books, mostly unread. For years, I added to this ever-increasing pile of books, until I finally decided not to buy any new book unless I planned to read it right away. A few times I've done that. I continued to buy used books (which is my preferred method of purchasing books) and those stacks of books continued to grow. (Unfortunately I don't find nearly the time to read like I used to, or want to. I didn't take any college courses this year, either, which was always a source of lots of interesting literature for me.) Finally I decided to stop buying most used books (for myself) until I had greatly narrowed down the stack of several hundred unread books I had built up. In addition, as some of you know, I've been trying to make my way through the list of "100 greatest English language novels of the 20th century" published a decade or so ago by the editors of Random House. Most of those books I've been getting from my local library. (I'm currently reading #38, Howards End by E.M. Forster.) So, anyway, that's all a roundabout way of saying that the books on my "2005 books" list are not necessarily books published in 2005, but ones I read in 2005. I read a lot (or at least a handful) of non-fiction books this year, which is very unusual for me, so I decided to split this year's best of into two separate categories.

Best book (fiction): Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Surprise, surprise, a book that was published in 2005. Honorable mentions: Requiem by Graham Joyce; As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (I'm changing my long-held disregard for Faulkner.)

Best book (non-fiction): Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (it'll change the way you think about food). Honorable Mention: Superstud, or How I Became a 24-Year Old Virgin by Paul Feig (I literally had to leave a room at one point while reading this memoir of Feig's early dating so that my laughter wouldn't disturb other people).

Tomorrow: what you've all been waiting for, the best comic books of 2005.