The Best Nonfiction (I Read) in 2006

Since everybody else is coming out with their year’s best lists right about now, I thought I’d put in my two cents. Since I review a lot of nonfiction for Publishers Weekly, and don’t get quite as much time to read fiction for fun as I’d like, for the moment I feel a bit more comfortable talking about nonfiction, but I’ll try to remember to tell you about my favorite novels from this year later on.

Keeping in mind that I certainly didn’t have time to read everything, in my experience the best nonfiction book published this year was Joe Miller’s Cross-X, an amazing piece of “embedded journalism” in which Miller observes an inner-city high school debate team as they fight their way into the ranks of the nation’s best. There may have been more powerful books about race, more powerful books about class, more powerful books about education published this year… but I’m willing to bet that no book takes on all three subjects with this kind of passion and intensity. I’m glad to see that some of the major book review sections are starting to realize how important this book is, and I hope more will catch on so Joe’s reportage can get the audience it deserves. (Yeah, tiny disclosure: I’ve met Joe since my first rounds of praise for his work.)

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4 December 2006 | read this |

Read This: Ron Hogan’s SF Debut: Free!

Subterranean Press has just created a free PDF download of John Scalzi’s special cliché-driven issue of Subterranean, the science fiction magazine that includes the short story “In Search of…Eileen Siriosa,” an untold tale from my research for The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane!. As Scalzi says:

“Just about every writer out there has a story they would dearly love to do but could never justify actually writing, because its very beating heart is a cliché so old and worn out that there would be no chance of actually selling it—clichés so advanced in years that even Hugo Gernsback would send back the story with a handwritten note: ‘Look, kid. It’s been done.’ And now, finally, an excuse to bang that story out! It’s like Christmas!”

13 November 2006 | read this |