Before I take a break from blogging--and from just about everything else--for the holidays, I thought I might post a list of my favorite books from this past year. Just to be clear, not all of the books on this list were published in 2006. They just happened to be among the books I read over the course of the past twelve months.
- James Carroll, House of War
- George Packer, The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
- Chris Hedges, War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
- Moisés Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
- Philippe Sands, Lawless World
- Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
- Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
- Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By
- Stephen Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy
There's not a lot of pleasure reading on this list. Two books that ranked high in my "just for fun" category were a brief and very readable work by historian Paul Johnson, The Renaissance, and a trip back to Charlottesville via the words of Garry Wills, Mr. Jefferson's University.
I think I'll need to work a little more fiction into my reading diet in 2007.