December Book Club

This month's book club recommendations are a combination of the New York Times Best New Books of 2007 (announced this weekend) and 10linksaday's favorites for the year. We've made it super easy for you to shop this list if you are interested in giving any of these books as gifts for the holidays.

Today's 10linksaday: December Book Club

Fiction

1. Man Gone Down
   By Michael Thomas. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.
   
   
2. Out Stealing Horses
   By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.
   
   
3. The Savage Detectives
   By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.
   
   
4. Then We Came to the End
   By Joshua Ferris. Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.
   
   
5. Tree of Smoke
   By Denis Johnson. The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.
   
   Nonfiction
6. Imperial Life In The Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone
   By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.
   
   
7. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
   By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.
   
   
8. The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court
   By Jeffrey Toobin. An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.
   
   
9. The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History
   By Linda Colley. Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.
   
   
10. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
    By Alex Ross. In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.
    
    Bonus Book
11. 65 Poor Life DecisionsBy Ryan Zeinert. Ryan Zeinert has collected some of his most hilarious, quirky and downright uncomfortable essays spotlighting those choices we make in life that just don't make the grade.

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