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This has been a banner year for books, with 2006 yielding the strongest offerings in several years. What follows, in the usual top-10 ranking, are the best books read by this critic in 2006:
1. Strange Piece of Paradise
By Terri Jentz (Farrar, Strauss, 535 pages, $27)
This breathtaking memoir deserves a place on the shelf of essential books about the American West. Jentz, the victim of horrific violence in Oregon along with her cycling partner, returns 15 years later to Redmond, Ore., in hopes of finding the perpetrator. This is an epic story of courage and heroism, as well as a chilling portrait of small-town life and complicity.
2. Death of a Writer
By Michael Collins (Bloomsbury, 307 pages, $24.95)
This stunning novel by the Bellingham writer from Ireland does a remarkable dance through many genres -- page-turning thriller, campus farce, love story, murder mystery, publishing industry satire, psychological study, disturbing noir. Collins uses the incapacitation of a professor and the discovery of his scandalous early novel to showcase his highly original and maturing talents.
3. Eat, Pray, Love
By Elizabeth Gilbert (Viking, 331 pages, $24.95)
What may seem to be a trite subject for a memoir -- a woman's search for meaning after the collapse of her eight-year marriage -- is transformed into a powerful reading experience by a globe-trotting journalist. Gilbert devotes a year to three separate pursuits in three separate places (pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, love in Indonesia) and produces an account that is always entertaining, frequently enlightening, but also one with an undercurrent of genuine seriousness.
4. The Lay of the Land
By Richard Ford (Alfred A. Knopf, 485 pages, $25.95)
This is the final installment in Ford's remarkable trio of books detailing the life transitions and travails of Frank Bascombe, which began with "The Sportswriter" and continued with "Independence Day," winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The New Jersey real estate agent is facing advancing age and prostate cancer in this last volume, which, although overly long, impresses greatly with its ambition, its scope and its brilliant observations on the malaise of American life today.
5. Big Box Swindle
By Stacy Mitchell (Beacon Press, 258 pages, $24.95)
In the muckraking tradition of "Fast Food Nation" and "Nickel and Dimed," this is a searing indictment of the impact of behemoth retailers (Wal-Mart, Costco, Best Buy, et al.) on this country, its landscape and small towns, as well as the global marketplace. An independent business activist from Maine fills this urgent book with eye-openers on every page, including many trenchant examples from the Northwest.
6. The Whistling Season
By Ivan Doig (Harcourt, 345 pages, $25)
This resonant novel about unexpected drama in a Montana one-room schoolhouse in 1910 is the best work in years by the renowned Seattle author of "This House of Sky." Doig's evocative portrait of bygone times and strong frontier characters succeeds on many fronts despite some predictable, even trite, plot elements. It is an amiable yarn of yore too seldom seen these days.
7. The Weather Makers
By Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 192 pages, $22.95)
Climate change rose to new prominence in 2006, as it is likely do each successive year in the future. An Australian scientist -- long a skeptic of the advancing phenomenon -- pens the year's best single volume on the subject, a book that has been a best-seller in Great Britain, Canada and Australia. Although its title is needlessly oblique, Flannery's book is approachable, convincing and downright scary, a signal call to urgent action.
8. Cross Country
By Robert Sullivan (Bloomsbury, 372 pages, $24.95)
A Brooklyn-based literary journalist crafts this irresistible hymn to the all-American road trip, drawing upon his 30 transcontinental treks. Sullivan is no easy rider and his cranky recollections make for some laugh-out-loud reading. But he also is a relentless researcher who enlivens his definitive trip narrative with tasty historical tidbits about other travelers on the American road stretching back to Lewis and Clark.
9. Rise and Shine
By Anna Quindlen (Random House, 269 pages, $24.95)
The much-beloved writer and commentator had her first No. 1 best-seller with this New York novel that examines the much-different lives of two sisters -- a Katie Couric-like star of a morning TV show and a social worker at a homeless women's shelter in the poorest section of the Bronx. Never have Quindlen's considerable talents as a social critic been more evident than they are in this novel's passages about New York life. But this also is a powerful meditation on family, especially sisterhood.
10. CrazyBusy
By Dr. Edward M. Hallowell (Balantine Books, 229 pages, $24.95)
A longtime teacher at Harvard, whose specialty is attention deficit disorder, provides this helpful, jargon-free self-help guidebook that examines one of the greatest problems of American life today -- excessive demands and media consuming more and more of a person's time. Hallowell argues the problem has reached such epic proportions that many Americans are exhibiting the same symptoms as those afflicted with ADD. He offers a wealth of practical solutions in this slim yet invaluable volume.
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