Best Books of 2007: The Final Word

After a week of rolling it out, all of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2007 feature is now in place and collected here. We had a lot of fun putting this feature together for you, but now we are tired and we’re glad we don’t have to think of the best of anything again for another 11 months or so!

We review from almost all branches of the book industry and, as a result, our choices run the gamut. The January Best of the Year list is not a popularity contest. Our choices reflect what our writers and editors liked best of the books they read and enjoyed throughout the year. They don’t need to qualify their choices. There is no board or panel. No quotas from certain publishers, no authors that had to be included. And though some of the books mentioned here were reviewed for January Magazine in 2007, that’s not part of the criterion. These are, quite simply, the books that our well read eyes and hearts liked best, listed in alphabetical order within the loose category in which they fall:

• children's books • fiction • non-fiction • art & culture

crime fiction from A-I, by title • crime fiction from J-Z