I thought I would at least recap some of the books I’ve read so far this year. I’ve managed to finish 8 books so far in 2007. Here’s the list:

• Mergers and Acquisitions by Dana Vachon—I hate to say it, but this book seemed like a Bret Easton Ellis knock-off.
• Third Girl From the Left by Martha Southgate—I really liked this book. It’s told in three parts, each from a different characters perspectives. Good writing and good story.
• Bento Box in the Heartland by Linda Furiya—Memoir of growing up the only Asian people in the 60s in Indiana. Not bad, a little bland.
• Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee—Great debut novel told from the perspective of first generation immigrants from Korea. The main character graduates from Princeton, but has trouble finding a “real” job that pleases her parents.
• Mistress of the Art of Death by Arianna Franklin—I liked this historical mystery set in Medieval Cambridge. It was a fun read.
• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah—This one was not so fun, more in the heartbreaking category. You might have read the excerpt in the NYT Magazine a few weeks ago. It’s also the next Starbuck’s pick or something.
• Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux—It took me a while to finish this book, not because I didn’t like it, but because I kept getting interrupted. It’s Paul Theroux at his crankiest. I like the guy, at least he knows he’s a crank, right?
• Twins by Marcy Dermansky—Man, this book is crazy. I loved it. Each chapter alternates between the twins’ perspectives. One appears good and one appears bad, but that’s all surface. It’s a fucked up story and I finished it in a day.

Bat Segundo has some new interviews available. The first is with Richard Ford. The second is with LBC nominee Valerie Trueblood.

Speaking of the LBC, this week we’re discussing Demon Theory by Stephen Graham Jones. This was an interesting book. I doubt I would have read it if it were not an LBC pick, but I am glad I finished it.

Valerie Trueblood, author of Seven Loves has kindly agreed to write on the LBC blog today.

Nonfiction

• Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
• Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
• Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
• Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
• Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
• Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
• Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
• Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
• Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography

• Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
• Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
• Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
• Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

The Winter Read This! has been announced over at the LBC. The discussion begins on all three books next week I believe. Go look at the winner and read the essay. It’s definitely one of the best books we’ve chosen and one of the best books I read last year (it was in fact the last book I read in 2006).

I hate being sick. I felt so much better on Wednesday and then yesterday, I had to go home sick again. I’m feeling better today luckily, but I don’t have much for you, dear readers.

• Robert Birnbaum has posted several of his most recent interviews. Here he talks with Heidi Julavits about her new novel The Uses of Enchantment. He conducted an email interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, author of the wonderful Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million for Mendelsohn’s new website Jewcy.
• Five Chapters has a story by Anthony Swofford, whose Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicles of the Gulf War and Other Battles vividly portrayed life in the army and his struggle during the war with the nature of killing.
• Anne Roiphe tries to balance the yearnings of her older and younger selves in her essay Balancing Act.
• On Nextbook, David Rakoff, of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, watches 28 Woody Allen movies in 21 days and posts about it.

I returned to my office, not having been here since Wednesday afternoon, to find my desk laden with packages. It’s the beginning of a new buying season, so I’m getting lots of new galleys and books each day. Here’s a glimpse of what I got and plan on reading:

• Roma by Steven Saylor—This is an epic novel of Rome, not another book in his historical mystery series.
• Deep Economy by Bill McKibben—A book on economy and how we value the things we purchase.
• The Savage Detectives by Robert Bolano—New Directions and FSG are making sure that the works of this Chilean writer are kept in print. This is his first novel about two detectives tracking down a poet.
• Medicus by Ruth Downie—Another historical novel set in Roman Britain.
• Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski— A first novel from a former journalist in Thailand about a suicide, anthropology, demon possession and the taboo. Exciting!
• Taj Mahal by Diana and Michael Preston—A book that examines the building of the great wonder and also the history of the Moghul Empire itself.
• The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark—I never read her first book The Great Stink, but heard good things about it. This one is set in the early Eighteenth Century, we follow a pregnant apothecary’s maid as she investigates her masters odd experiments.
• Aya by Marguerite Abouet & Clement Oubrerie—Another Drawn & Quarterly book—I love all of their books. This one is centers on several overlapping love stories in the Ivory Coast.
• Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell—Bell turned her back on the Victorian society and made her own rules. This bio promises an “impeccably researched” and “richly compelling portrait” of this interesting woman.
• The Darker Nations by Vijay Prashad—An alternative history of the cold war from the perspective of the Third World.
• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall—Hard to say what this book is about. It’s got some blurbs comparing it to Memento and Murakami. We’ll see.

I can’t wait to see what I get tomorrow!

I’m participating in a roundtable discussion of Pynchon’s new novel Against the Day. The first post is up both at Ed’s and at MetaxuCafe. Carolyn asks what it would be like it Pynchon took his novel to an MFA workshop. Seeing as the book is 1120 pages, it might take us a while to discuss the whole thing.