Best Books of the Year

It was a wild year in book publishing: the fake memoir scandal, the OJ scandal, the plagiarism charges when Opal Mehta got kissed. But it was some year for reading, too.

Non-fiction on war and Iraq that made you want to go to the streets, or get under the covers and hide. Fiction, on life and love and small wonders, that made you want to get under the same covers and read all night.

Pynchon was back. Cormac McCarthy went post-nuclear. Lynn Cox swam with a whale. Alice McDermott stayed Irish-Catholic. Richard Ford took "The Lay of the Land," Irene Nemirovsky spoke from the grave, in "Suite Francaise."

This hour On Point: we'll look at the best books and big books of 2006.

SOME OF CHARLOTTE ABBOTT'S FAVORITES:
1) Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
2) Grayson, Lynn Cox
3) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
4) Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back, Norah Vincent
5) Suite Francaise, Irene Nemirovsky

SOME OF OSCAR VILLALON'S FAVORITES
1) The Road, Cormac McCarthy
2) All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories, Edward P. Jones
3) The Lay of the Land, Richard Ford
4) One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson
5) Everyman, Philip Roth
6) Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Ian Buruma
7) The Paris Review Interviews, 1 (edited by Philip Gourevitch)
8) Home Ground, Language for An American Landscape, by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney
9) The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
10) Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Daniel Dennett

Guests:

Charlotte Abbott, Senior Editor at Publisher's Weekly

Oscar Villalon, Book Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle

Francine Prose, author of Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and For Those Who Want to Write Them

and David Nasaw, author of Andrew Carnegie.