Stephen King has jumped into the fray with his list of the best books of 2006. The list shows up in Entertainment Weekly. Since a few of these don’t even cause a flicker of recognition on my part, I decided to reprint the list in its entirety. Yes, I’m lazy. So what. But I did keep the suspenseful, dramatic countdown order…you know, if that counts for anything. Here are the King’s choices:

10. Dispatch, Bentley Little - Little is the horror poet of ordinary things. In this surreal novel, a lonely young man discovers his letters to the editor — and to the famous — bring actual results. Of course he eventually finds out he’s working in Satan’s own office pool, but that’s the fun of the damned thing.

9. The Egyptologist, Arthur Phillips - Pathological liar of dubious identity goes bonkers while looking for a hidden tomb in the Egyptian desert after World War I. Tragic, pathetic, blackly funny…and with a strange, growing undercurrent of horror. You have never read a novel like it.

8. Night Mowing, Chard deNiord - This is a slim book of poems, mostly pastoral. There’s little narrative clarity, but deNiord evokes rural scenes with undertones of violence and a breathless, calm clarity that’s close to déjà vu.

7. The People’s Act of Love, James Meek - Samarin is an escaped Russian political prisoner who turns up in the village of Yazyk during the Russian Revolution, only to discover he’s fallen into a deadly struggle between religious fanatics (the men have all castrated themselves), a lost troop of Czech legionnaires, and an officer descending into homicidal mania. The narrative drive is amazing. So is the cold clarity of Meek’s imagination.

6. Crooked River Burning, Mark Winegardner - A great American novel about…Cleveland? Yes, children, this is the real deal — by the man who has revived Mario Puzo’s Godfather characters with such wit and élan.

5. The Ruins, Scott Smith - Americans caught in an escalating nightmare on a Mexican hilltop in the best horror novel of the new century.

4. The Night Gardener, George Pelecanos - Pelecanos, best known for his work on HBO’s The Wire, is perhaps the greatest living American crime writer. He proves it again in this story of how 20 years changes three cops when an old serial killer of teens seems to become active again. The ending is guaranteed to tear your heart out.

3. One Mississippi, Mark Childress - Great novels of adolescence should provide belly laughs and tragedy. This story, in which young Daniel Musgrove moves to Mississippi from Indiana in 1973 (his salesman father is transferred), delivers both. It also provides a priceless picture of the ’70s and why we must never go there again. Suffice it to say that the high school’s first black prom queen is hit by a car and wakes up thinking she’s white, and the local church puts on a play called Christ! The Musical!

2. American Pastoral, Philip Roth - I keep thinking I must have seen all of Roth’s talent, and I keep being wrong. This 1997 novel of an essentially simple, good-hearted man (Swede Levov) and his desperate attempt to understand how the radical movement of the late 1960s has seduced his daughter into madness and murder is probably Roth’s finest book. There are no answers here, only a great story winding its way into the heart of American darkness.

1. The Road, Cormac McCarthy - Simple, stripped to the bare bones, this story of a man’s effort to keep his son alive and to find any place of refuge in the wake of a great disaster is the finest achievement of McCarthy’s career. I thought it was almost the perfect narrative — spare in its beauty and constantly driven forward by its own interior urgency. Impossible to put down, in other words.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2006 at 6:00 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.