How time does fly when you're having fun! I started a new job in early December, which kept me from joining you readers for most of the month, but I couldn't let the last day of the year pass without giving you one last opinion about the good and the bad. My "best of the year" is comprised not of books published in 2007, though there are a number of them on the list, but books I read in 2007. It was a very good year for reading -- I made it through more than 100 books, which unemployment made possible (2008 will not be as kind to me when it comes to time for reading, though it will be kinder to my pocket book when it comes to money with which to purchase books; isn't it funny how that works?).

And so, without further ado, and in only approximate order from the very best to the best:

The Great Man by Kate Christensen -- a wonderful novel about the three women in the life of a so-called "great man" as they move about their lives in the years following his death. Were I the cynical sort, I'd say that this novel hasn't gotten more mainstream attention because it's by a woman, about women, and about elderly women at that. But it's gorgeously written, and it's a fine story. Highly recommended. (My full review is here.)

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly -- this disturbing fairy tale is so far removed from Connolly's usual crime novel that you'd hardly recognize it as being the work of the same author. Which means that you might have missed it if you're hooked on his excellent Charlie Parker series. It's a deficiency you should quickly correct.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace -- Wallace is, well, quirky. Half the fun of his essays is in the footnotes, half in the skillful writing, and half in the wondering tone Wallace assumes no matter the subject (yes, I know that's three halves, but Wallace deserves them all). I don't read much nonfiction, but I'm very glad I picked this one up this year.

Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert -- the most inspiring book I read this year, Eat, Pray, Love saw me through some dark moments. Gilbert describes her year spent in Italy (where she ate), India (where she prayed) and Indonesia (where she fell in love), and how this year helped her recover from a broken marriage. It was a balm for my own heart, broken when I fell out of love with my career.

Red Cat by Peter Spiegelman -- hands down the best mystery I read in 2007. It led me to read all the rest of Spiegelman's work, and he's now on my auto-buy list. Great modern noir.

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss -- a terrific fantasy debut. To say I'm disappointed that the next chapter in this trilogy doesn't come out until 2009 hardly begins to tell the tale -- I want more, NOW. That's how good this story is. (My full review is here.)

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch -- the picaresque novel returns with full force in this highly readable and very enjoyable fantasy that is fully the equal of Rothfuss's debut.

A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans -- in a year full of books with unreliable narrators, this was perhaps the strangest. Is the child narrator possessed or is he just bad? It is hard to figure out what's going on, and that is the greatest charm of this imaginative book.

The Ghost Writer by John Harwood -- a book with multiple plot lines and tales within tales, an Arabian Nights tale for the England and Australia of not all that long ago, a book to talk about and puzzle over. I loved it.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke -- I know I'm well behind the curve with this one, and I don't know why, because it's a wonderful book. I loved the faux scholarliness of it, with footnotes lending it a sort of verisimilitude, as if I were reading a history as well as a novel. The tale never seemed to lag throughout the entire 1006 pages. Indeed, I found it difficult to get anything else done while I was reading the book. Carve out some real time for this one.

Greatest disappointments:

Mister B. Gone by Clive Barker -- whatever was Barker thinking? This is a book in which the most interesting thing is literally the paper on which it is printed, which is prematurely aged to give the book a look of antiquity. I'm glad I borrowed this one from the library instead of buying it.

Lady Friday by Garth Nix -- it feels as if Nix has lost his way with this series. Perhaps if I'd reread everything from Monday on, I could have made sense of it, but standing alone, this was difficult to make heads or tails of.

The Reincarnationist by M.J. Rose -- this was a disappointment only in comparison to Rose's wonderful sex therapist series of mysteries. It didn't have a narrative oomph that I've come to expect from her. Which doesn't mean I won't read her next book, because I know she's got what it takes!

Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay -- another book that falls into this category only because I have such high expectations for this writer. I think his decision to set his book in the read world in the modern day didn't quite work; I've come to expect fantastic worlds with complex plots and characters, and Ysabel just didn't deliver.

Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl -- I was expecting something that was itself sublime, and the book didn't deliver. While there are some passages that were eye-opening, this didn't have the punch of books like Alexander Theroux's Primary Colors, which was what I'd been hoping for.

American libraries are unusual institutions. Provided you’ve got that little plastic library card, you can check out almost any book. Sometimes you can request any book at any library in the county or beyond, including books in the local public colleges. Even the smallest library usually contains more books than any one person could read in a lifetime, on any subject. You’ll find books written by people you agree with and books written by people with whom you vehemently disagree, books of which you disapprove and books you wish everyone would read because they’re so indisputably correct, books you love and books you hate. And even the books you hate are books you also love because they’re books!

A recent period of disability forced me to cut back on my usual habit of buying a dozen or more new books every month. The truth is, my personal library contains enough unread volumes to last me until I die, but the truth also is that there are new books being published every month that I really must read. Of course, I’m being completely irrational, but I don’t care. I only know that nothing makes me happier than a new book (except, of course, my husband, who loves books as much as I do). I cannot live without a constant new supply.

So my financial circumstances forced me to the public library for the first time in a decade. I was pleased to find that my city had just built a lovely new library, and had not made the mistake many cities make in doing so: it had remembered that libraries need books as well as computers. The library is nicely designed for the 21st century, with special attention to computer stations, areas for use exclusively by young people, and even an outdoor reading area, but it also has stacks and stacks and stacks of actual books, with plenty of room for growth.

I visit my library several times a week. Usually I don’t get past the new fiction section on the first floor, where I’ll often find some literary fiction and science fiction that I want to read (new mysteries are harder to get your hands on, and usually require placing a hold, paying $.75, and waiting – I still haven’t gotten Jeff Lindsay’s new entry in his Dexter series, Dexter in the Dark, even though I requested it almost two months ago). The new nonfiction is one floor up, and sometimes I get lucky there; most recently, I picked up a copy of The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King, as soon as it came out.

Just today I picked up Robert McCammon’s new horror novel, The Queen of Bedlam. Michael Palin’s well-received Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years also awaits my perusal. In fact, I’ve got some 40 books here at home awaiting my attention. No, I probably won’t get to all of them before they’re due. I’ll return them to the library for a time, and then check them out again after everyone else has had about a week to go after them and hasn’t.

I probably appreciate libraries a bit more than most people because I know a little something about what goes into running them. In the mid-1990s, I served on the Board of Trustees of the Omaha Public Library. It was an exhilarating and sobering task. Patrons constantly complain that you do have this book on the shelves, or you don’t have that book – sometimes even the people serving on the board. Censorship isn’t a joke to librarians, it’s a reality. Arguments with local governments over who really runs the library, the government or the librarians, are constant and have real consequences. Dealing with the homeless who use the library as a warm place to pass a cold winter afternoon is another huge problem. So are unattended children, especially those who are sent to the library to fill up that time between when school lets out and their parents return home from work. Add to these somewhat prosaic but very real problems the additional technical problems of booming technologies and the explosion of information and you find that librarianship has become a very challenging profession.

There’s an old story, probably apocryphal, about an adult in the late 1940s showing a new young German immigrant to this country that a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf was on the library shelves. This is what freedom means, said the adult; freedom means that ideas are free, even the ideas of your enemies. When you understand those ideas, you can fight them, and you can win. The free availability of knowledge is something basically American, as valuable as our freedom of speech and religion. While it may seem that my use of the library to read mysteries, horror novels and short stories fails to live up to these great ideals, I would argue only that I have Susan Faludi’s new book, The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post 9/11 America on hold – and it’s got quite the waiting list. So here’s my special thanks to libraries and librarians. I couldn’t have made it through this past summer without you. Please keep up the good work!

When I was a child, I was fascinated by tales of the childhoods of famous people. It seemed most of them had read every book in their local libraries, starting with the first book on the top shelf, and finishing with a book written by someone whose name began with "Zz." I decided to do that myself once or twice, but inevitably I found that there were a lot of books on that top shelf that didn't interest me at all. And there wasn't time to read bad books. Heck, there wasn't time to read good books. I was told to "get your nose out of that book and run outside and play," or, even more puzzlingly, to "put down that book and come watch TV with the family." Never enough time to read.

As I grew older, I found ways to fit reading into my day. I always carried a book with me, and read for the few minutes after I got to a classroom but before class started. I read walking to and from school. I finished in-class assignments as quickly as I could, and then read my novels. I read under the guise of doing homework, thus avoiding those family nights around the television. Still, never enough time to read.

Things got better in college, where I was an English major and it was actually my job to read. But it's astonishing to me now how little reading I actually did, even though the volume of reading was enormous. I never read classics like George Eliot's Middlemarch, never made it through Moby-Dick (and haven't to this day), never tackled a novel in translation by a Spanish, French or Russian novelist. Between the debate team and my pre-law attempt to study a little of everything, there was never enough time to read.

Time disappeared entirely in law school and during the years I practiced law, it seemed. I read on my commute, I read at lunch (when I was able to stop for lunch), I read in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles and while waiting for doctors' appointments and on (rare) vacations. Evenings were short (and sometimes nonexistent outside the office), but I read then when I wasn't so tired I had no energy for anything more than -- you guessed it -- television. Never enough time to read.

Right now I'm on a leave of absence from my career. I have every day, all day, all night, to read as much as I'd like. Aside from four to six hours a week for various appointments, a few more hours to fix my husband a home-cooked meal occasionally, and another few for errands and the like, I am allowed to do nothing but read.

And yet -- and yet -- there's still never enough time to read. I will probably not be able to read all the books in my personal library (about 8000 volumes strong and growing almost daily) before I die, even if I live to be 100. And my library doesn't include a number of books I want to read -- my Amazon wish list is 700+ items strong, for instance. I use the local library, too, but more times than not I wind up returning books before I've read them, because of course I can't really read 45 books in three weeks. There is still not enough time.

I hope desperately that Jorge Luis Borges was right, and that heaven is a type of library. I want to spend all of time and beyond time reading everything written and to be written, side by side with my husband. I can think of no better way to spend eternity.