I found this article in the online magazine, Slate. Below is the first pick by Michael Agger. For the rest of the article, click on the link below.
"The Year in Books
Slate picks the best books of 2006.
Posted Thursday, Dec. 7, 2006, at 1:31 PM ET
Michael Agger, associate editor
Like all good liberal arts majors, I used to read The Great Gatsby every year. That got old, though, and I switched to Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, the 1985 novel that introduced Frank Bascombe, a failed novelist adrift in a fog of suburban detachment. As a character, Bascombe is a charming paradox: a thoughtful guy trying to fit himself into a thoughtless existence. (In New Jersey, no less.) He's an Everyman in a particular sense: the modern male's often fumbling attempts to embrace normalcy. The Lay of the Land is the third Bascombe book, with Frank reappearing in fine, ruminative form. The novel spills over with drive-by philosophy, conjecture, and bullshitting. Despite a few Iron John moments, you bounce off Ford's prose as though it were a backyard trampoline: feeling weightless and alive. "
LibraryThing, the site where truly obsessive bibiophiles with time on their hands can catalog their own book collection, has a list of the "25 Most Reviewed Books" and the "Top 75 Authors" on their site. There are other lists of lists and categories of categories or classifications of obsessions on this page if you have some time to zone out in the bibliosphere (my word, will it be as popular as "truthiness"?)
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