Somewhere Towards the End
by Diana Athill (Granta)

Age is not a popular topic in literature. When young, it seems too distant, once old it looms too near, so it is sparingly used, the full picture being perceived as too grim and too painful for prolonged attention. There is also the distinct likelihood that being caught up in the process, one is rendered incapable of annotating the experience.

A Dose of Rock 'n' Roll
by Nancy Lee Andrews (Dalton Watson Fine Books)

In 1969, Nancy Lee Andrews worked for the world renowned Ford Modeling Agency. “I was the tall, All-American dark girl, different from Penelope Tree, my contemporary, who was edgy.” Andrews’ entry into the music business soon followed. The Fillmore East had just opened in the East Village, featuring acts like The Association, Mad Dogs and Englishmen, Leon Russell, Freddy King, The Cream, Hendrix, and a close friend mentioned they could gain access to the club through the back door.

The Fall of France
by Julian Jackson (Oxford University Press)

History tends to be written by the winners. How interesting and how poignant it is, then, to read a history of loss, specifically the way that France – glorious, democratic, politically and artistically advanced France – folded in three weeks time to the Nazis during the first half of the first year of World War II. Julian Jackson’s The Fall of France, while not written with the style of a Nabokov or the wit of a Wodehouse, has the power to shake you to the pit of your stomach, and to make you ask questions that reverberate to the bottom of your soul. And keep turning the pages in a blur all the while.

Joe Gould's Secret
by Joseph Mitchell (Vintage)

Some characters are a writer's once-in-a-lifetime gift. In Joseph Mitchell's case, his came in the bedraggled guise of Joe Gould, a Harvard-educated Bowery bum and panhandler. At times a likeable rogue, at others a Grade A pain in the ass, Gould was served well by the generous attention that Mitchell afforded him.

Twenty-five hundred pages or so later, I sit at the end of the year dumbfounded as to how I’m supposed to concoct a best of 2007 list. I’m obsessed with the best of 1868 or of 1873 or 1855 – or, should I say, of ever. And I’m not alone. By dint of Kismet, it seems I wasn’t the only one having a Tolstoy year in 2007. Something about the soundbiting and youtubing of our collective sensibility sent others to the Count. This fall marked the publication of a massive, drum roll please, lauded, heralded, dissected and mightily worthy, translation of War and Peace by the indefatigable husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Touch: Naked Girls Home Alone
by Peter Gorman (Goliath)

In his latest book, Peter Gorman's camera is a voyeur figuratively hidden inside a mirror. He has an extraordinary eye for capturing the day-to-day life of real New York women who aren't huffed and puffed and all airbrushed up. Their surroundings are real, not phony sets with lighting and make-up and an attending entourage of distracting assistants. As you can guess, this is not your Girl Next Door coffee table anthology.

Dear Jack—

Hey, man, 50 years, and On the Road is still going, still selling, still talking in your own special bebop prose to the young at heart. It’s a classic. And you, of course, have long gone to the great beyond with Janis and Jimi and Elvis, and all the other cool lost souls of excess—too much talent, too little control.

Life is so filled with ironies. It took you years to sell that book that has now sold in the millions.

The lion silenced.

Norman Mailer roared over the literary scene forever and now he's gone. He spat out words like the boxers he so loved sprayed punches, but no more. He ran for mayor of New York City, and he could have been mayor of the world. He talked shit and wrote like an angel. A son of Harvard he enlisted to be a combat grunt in WWII so he could get material, and it worked.

Skin Lane
by Neil Bartlett (Serpent's Tail, paperback)

Neil Bartlett's new novel is a strange elegy to a lost city, a lost trade, and in many ways the manner in which time tramples all that was once important to the lived and spent. We are all destined to leave detritus. All that mattered will mean little to future eyes. The loves, the losses, the passions that burned so fiercely, become invisible with the savage progress of existence.

Catherine James has lived eight lives in 57 short years and her Dandelion: Memoir of a Free Spirit (St. Martin's Press) devastates with emotional sabotages that seem so outrageous that you swear you must be reading fiction. I read the advance copy in one sitting, blown away by the poignancy and ease with which Miss James shares her years of perilous plight. The abuse she suffers at the hands of her Hollywood femme fatale mother Diana reads like Mommy Dearest meets Piper Laurie’s character in the movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie. Chapter after chapter she is left pummeled by another emotional battering from someone close to her. Even when she’s able to finally run away from tortuous reality, which is one of her early blessings, she encounters emotional hardships that rival any I’ve read or seen in film.

Song Without Words: The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy
by Leah Bendavid-Val (National Geographic Society)

Count Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace, Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and so many other masterpieces (to use an overused, but totally apt word) seems like he should have lived in another eon. Surely he must have hung out with Socrates, or Aeschylus, or, at the very least, Shakespeare. But he didn't. If not quite of our time, he did manage to live into the 20th century (1910 to be exact), and there are films and photographs of him.

The House That George Built: With a Little Help from Irving, Cole, and a Crew of About Fifty
by Wilfred Sheed (Random House)

There's a story towards the end of this crackling essay cum history that could sum up the bittersweet but ballyhooing tonality of the entire glorious screed. We see an aging but still-in-fighting-trim Yip Harburg, leftie songsmith of the golden age, the Gershwin age, as he's regaling the '60s radical Father Berrigan and his gang with a rousing rendition of his "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime."

I Love You, Beth Cooper
by Larry Doyle (Ecco)

The big question any writer attempting a tome on secondary school must face: is high school more pathetic or more hilarious? The fact is, it is pathetic when you're going through it – a hormonally exploding biology experiment in an all-expense-paid cage. But afterward, when as an adult humor writer you tackle it, is it funny?

The incessant "I, I, I," of the essay form, not to say the memoir tsunami that has washed over reading for the past ten years or so, has created a din that can make one hunger for some good old third-person omniscient narration (hello Dickens, hello Tolstoy) -- but more on that in another post. The fact is, I have enough dirty -- and slightly soiled -- laundry of my own to keep me busy. (And there I go, using the dreaded "I" -- it can't be helped. Mea culpa.) But having said that, when writers uses their own experiences as a window to subjects beyond how their parents used to beat them with heroin syringes while they were converting to fundamentalist Christianity and performing root canals on themselves, the form can't be beat.

Mark Harris, who died Wednesday from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease, made his mark on American literature with four baseball novels. The most famous of them, the second in the series, Bang the Drum Slowly, was filmed twice. First came a television performance in 1956 (the year the novel was published) on The U.S. Steel Hour, with Paul Newman playing the role of Henry “Author” Wiggen, star pitcher of the NY Mammoths and narrator of the series. (Wiggen anticipates the real-life ballplayer/authors Jim Brosnan and Jim Bouton.)

Then in 1973 came the movie (screenplay by Harris), with Robert DeNiro – in just his tenth role – as terminally ill catcher Bruce Pearson, a part that, along with DeNiro’s appearance in Mean Streets the same year, established him as an acting force. (Danny Aiello makes his first film appearance in a minor role.)

The Unified Field – the deepest level of transcendental bliss – far below the shallow waters of everyday life. This is where the biggest fish can be caught and where Mr. Lynch mines his creativity. And though he is catching big fish, his new book - Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Tarcher/Penquin) - is packaged in short, neat chapters.

It’s as if he collected his thoughts randomly and then arranged them in linear order after the fact. Although, if you know anything about Mr. Lynch’s world, you know that linear is not part of the equation.

If you know Alexei Sayle, you know him as one of the loonies in the early '80s shaggy dog English sitcom The Young Ones. And don't worry, if you haven't seen it, today's erstwhile comedy writers who try to craft sitcoms that will stave off the Internet have seen the program. But whether or not you've seen this cauldron of anarchy -- punker, hippie, businessman, etc., squatting together in Thatcherite angst -- you wouldn't necessarily have pegged Sayle, one of its stalwarts, as a writer of books. And not just a writer of books, a writer of fiction books, and good ones.

Overtaken , his novel from last year, is a prime example. Yes, it's funny. But more than that, it's real. And sad.

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday from brain injuries sustained after a fall. So it goes. He was initially filed under science fiction. He wrote in The New York Times in 1965, “…I learned from the reviewers that I was a science-fiction writer. I didn't know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town, awkwardly set in the gruesome now. I have been a sore-headed occupant of a file-drawer labeled 'science fiction' ever since, and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a tall white fixture in a comfort station.

Talk about high concept -- how about a photography book by blind photographers? You read that correctly, people who can't see (or are substantially sight-impaired) taking pictures. Not just people, teenagers -- the most perceptive stage of being known to man (and woman.) Needless to say, when Tony Deifell, the author/curator of the essential book Seeing Beyond Sight, broached the topic with the outreach director of the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in 1992, she thought he was pulling a prank. The results are anything but.

One of the more important and timely books of last year, The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Harvard Business School Press) doesn't seem to be coming out in paperback. In fact, you can grab the hardcover for $6.62 on Amazon. Where's the fairness in that? The masses should be in an uproar.