Since I’ve only read about five books that were first printed in 2007, I expanded my field of choice to all the books I read through the course of this year for this list. Mea culpa.

In no particular order…

 

**Michael Moorcock : Behold the Man

During my evangelical childhood I often daydreamed about traveling back in time to meet Jesus and witness the crucifixion. I don’t think I had the same sexual hang-ups as the crucificially aroused main character of this novel, Karl Glogauer. Glogauer is able to capitalize on his neuroses and obsessions about the crucifixion by traveling back to 28 C.E. in a time machine and meeting John the Baptist, Jesus, and the whole cast from The Gospel of John. He finds some things as one would image, and other things wholly different. I feel that I can’t say more without divulging all the narrative delights of this short but pensive novel of faith (?).

**Scott Smith : The Ruins

I put this book in the hands of a customer recently after asking him, “Do you like to see yuppies tortured and punished?” “Yes,” he said. So I ask you, dear reader, do you like to see yuppies tortured and punished?

**Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra : Y: The Last Man, Volumes 1-9

With the coming denouement of Vaughan and Guerra’s series (#60 in comic form, Volume 10 in trade), I worked my way through the previously collected trades for a second time. They’re still a joy. Y covers the life and times of the last man and last male monkey left on the face of the earth. See, everything with a Y chromosome just died out one day. The world’s population is now made up solely of women. And that’s just as wonderful, messed up, and complicated as you’d expect. On top of that, Yorick (the last man) is a nerdy, immature escape artist who has pledged his fidelity to a girlfriend lost in the Australian Outback. Ain’t she lucky?

**Ursula K. LeGuin : The Lathe of Heaven

LeGuin beautifully pens a swirling narrative about the powers of the mind, bleak and optimistic possibilities for the future, and Taoism. The main character, George Orr, can control reality through his dreams. He wants that ability to stop; his psychiatrist, Dr. Haber, narcissistically wants to use these powers for “good.” But the best laid plans…

**John Christopher : Death of Grass (aka No Blade of Grass)

British novelist John Christopher (nee Christopher Samuel Youd) sets the scene of another British disaster novel (a la John Wyndham) in The Death of Grass, but departs greatly from Wyndham in execution. After a brief prologue about two brothers, John and David, the novel begins a few years after the nasty “Chung-Li virus” has ravaged the rice fields of Asia–most heavily in China. Western and British reaction is typically racist: these “Asiatics” don’t know how to handle emergencies and govern themselves, so naturally all hell breaks loose when the staple of their diet disappears. Of course, the noble Brits wouldn’t react in such way. No, according to Christopher, they’d be much worse.