Best of 2006 - Books

About a third of the books I read this year, I read for my grad class in adolescent literature. Some of them were very good, and only a couple weren't really worth my time. My book of the year comes from that class: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. Stories of the Vietnam War, but much, much more than that. There's lots about storytelling in general, how to write, and the stories themselves were mostly riveting. I had a bit of trouble getting into the book at the first, until I got to the story where the narrator spends a week up north on the Rainy River on the border between Minnesota and Canada after receiving his draft notice, trying to decide whether to go to Canada or to the army and the war. In the end, he says he took "the coward's way" out; he went back home, went to the army and the war. Very powerful stuff.

My runner-up is a book of a completely different type: 10th Grade by Joseph Weisberg is told from the perspective of a sophomore in high school, and chronicles his year. Nothing very relevatory happens; he learns no great lessons; he just makes it through a year in high school. It's very realistic, and it's one of the funniest things I've ever read. At one point I put the book aside because I was laughing too hard to continue. When I picked it back up, I had to set it down again to regain my composure before continuing. The book reads like it was written by your typical high school sophomore, too: chock full of run-on sentences, pages-long digressions that go nowhere, and severely lacking in punctuation. I loved it.