2007 Books 6 - 10

6. The Road by Cormac McCarthy - An amazing story of the strength of love between a father and son in a bleak, dark, truly hopeless world. At face value, this is a very sad story, but the moments when the real story shine through, the positive story of "carrying the fire", those are the part of the book that I will remember for a long time.

7. The Diamond Age; or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson - In the not so distant future of this book, pretty much everything you need can be replicated synthetically through nanotechnology. Information is shared through nanotechnology. People bind together culturally, based on their ability and desire to produce and use that technology. An extremely wealthy "neo-Victorian" has a book created that will allow his daughter to learn to take care of herself, and it is that book that touches the lives of all the characters in this book. It's the characters that kept me reading this story when I became hopelessly lost in what they were all seeking. I may not have understood where they were going, but I wanted to keep following them.

8. What Was She Thinking (Notes On A Scandal) by Zoe Heller - What I enjoyed most about this book is that I know people that are just a few shades short of being these characters. My second favorite thing was that the narrator is an intelligent female villain. There are so few of those, even fewer in books that are as well written as this one is.

9. Music Through The Floor by Eric Puchner - A collection of ten short stories that all show there's humor in the saddest situations, and tragedy in the best of times. My favorite is Essay #3: Leda and the Swan, a story written in the form of an English Lit assignment by a young woman in high school who has a more pressing need to work through her own problems than a Keats poem.

10. A Game Of Thrones by George R.R. Martin - Absolutely amazing! I haven't fallen so deeply into the world of a fantasy novel since I first read Lord of the Rings (and that was a long, long time ago!). I'm so glad there are three more books already published, and more planned. I'm not ready to leave these characters or their world yet.