Best Recommended List

I thought this was an interesting list worth sharing. The new list will update monthly in 2008.

From today's Shelf Awareness e-mail:

NBCC Creates 'Best Recommended List'
The National Book Critics Circle is creating a monthly Best Recommended List based on a poll of its 800 members and the finalists and winners of its books prizes about which books they have read that they love. The aim is to come up with a list that reflects not which books have sold best but which books have been read and enjoyed most.

To start the list, NBCC polled members about the books published in 2007 that they read and loved. Monthly lists start in January. For more information about the voters and titles, see NBCC's Critical Mass blog. Winners are:

Fiction

1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (Riverhead)
2. Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (FSG)
3. The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
4. Exit Ghost by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin)
5. Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (Graywolf)

Nonfiction

1. Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
2. The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (St. Martin's)
3. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)
4. Schulz and the Peanuts by David Michaelis (HarperCollins)
5. Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner (Doubleday)

Poetry

1. Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass (Ecco)
1. Collected Poems: 1956-1998 by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
1. Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky (FSG)
4. Next Life by Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan)
5. Elegy by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)