American Libraries

Keir Graff: Every year in the January issue of Booklist we publish the Editor's Choice List—five of them—which are the best books we've reviewed the previous year. And we also publish a shorter list called The Top of the List, which are the best of the best. And on the back page we also have a traditional list where Editor-in-Chief Bill Ott polls us on our personal reading for the year, which is sometimes a bit of challenge because some of our editors review hundreds of books in a given year and they don't necessarily have time for personally reading. So sometimes a lot of the choices are kind of eclectic, let's say. My favorite piece of personal reading was Don't Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli, if I'm saying it right. I was on vacation in Montana in August and I was in a small bookstore called Shakespeare & Co., one of the world's many bookstores called Shakespeare & Co. And I needed some vacation reading, lake reading. And I was taken in by the blurb on the front cover: Julian Barnes says that, "This book promises a rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness." And it's kind of hard to do better than that.

Laura Tillotson: The book I read this year was The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. And I was actually on maternity leave when I got to read a little bit for fun. I was going to read the new Harry Potter book, but it was so heavy—the hard cover—that I kept kind of bonking my new baby on the head and that didn't work out so well. So instead I went with a nice, thick Penguin Classic, but much more light weight. You know, I read kids' books all the time for fun and for work, when I do just get to read totally of my own choice, I like to something that's nice and thick and meaty and usually by a dead person is nice.

Gillian Engberg: The book that I chose as my favorite personal reading is actually personal listening; it was Crescent by Diana Abu-Jaber. It's read by Nike Doukas and Marcelo Tubert. And normally when I listen to an audiobook, I do other things: I chop vegetables, I drive to IKEA. This audiobook was so compelling that it just kept me bolted down in place until the last disc was through.

Brad Hooper: My book is entitled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. It's a collection stories by Alice Munro. So first of all, I didn't pick it because I love the title. I hate the title. It is the most cumbersome title ever given to a book. A little background here: the last two years I had been working on a critical study of Alice Munro, so that's pretty much all I have read outside of what I review for Booklist. So this is what I read this past year and I really think despite the title, it's my favorite of all her collections, simply because it has more stories in it that I just happen to like, that I think are close to masterpieces. So people out there who have not read Alice Munro: Shame on you.

Donna Seaman: I chose The God of Hell by Sam Shepherd because I love Sam Shepherd's work, because I read so much that reading a play was a good thing but it was shorter. But also it's a hilarious political satire. It's really quite wicked, set in one of the last family farms of Wisconsin involving an intrusive and lying government, torture, nuclear experiments. It's very cheerful.

Ray Olsen: This is Ruslan and Lyudmila, which is my favorite book that I read -- not for work -- last year by Alexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet. It is a poem. In this edition, it's in Syrillic and English alphabet. So it's the original and the translation. Anyway, the reason I read it was I noticed that there was going to be a showing of Ruslan and Lyudmila: The Movie, which is the last—and most delightful maybe—film by Aleksandr Ptushko, who is a Russian filmmaker who specialized in fantasy films.

Ilene Cooper: I was shocked to find out this year that I hadn't read one book that wasn't associated with work. Now, I do spend a lot of time on the Internet—Drudge and Daily Kos, and Huffington Post. They take up a lot of time. And I suppose I could have been reading a book while I was on the Internet so much, but then I would have to choose one and I didn't really have time to choose one because I'm on the Internet too much.