Books of the year

The Economist and The New York Times (password required) have put out their "best books of the year" lists.  Each list is at the respective link, the common elements are:

Philip Roth – The Plot Against America

Anne Tyler – The Amateur Marriage

Colm Toibin – The Master

Alan Hollinghurst – Line of Beauty

David Mitchell – Cloud Atlas

Orhan Pamuk – Snow

Moving on to non-fiction, we have:

Ron Chernow – Alexander Hamilton

Seymour Hersh – Chain of Command

The 9-11 Commission Report, and

Stephen Greenblatt – Will in the World

As for my favorites in fiction, Susannah Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is my clear pick, with nods to Garcia Marquez and Alice Munro.  For non-fiction, my memory summons up Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, and Bart Schulz’s Henry Sidgwick: An Intellectual Biography.  For science I’ll nominate Brian Greene’s Fabric of the Cosmos.  I’m leaving off everything that has made our "Books we Recommend" list over the months.

My apologies if I forget your book.  No, I haven’t forgotten its content (yet), I simply have no idea whether it came out this last year.  Age has compressed my sense of time into two rather gross categories: "my plans for the future" and "the distant past."