Best of the Month

We've introduced, somewhat quietly, a newish feature on the Amazon books pages called Best of the Month. It's an expanded version of the Significant Seven, the monthly editors' picks we started last spring, with more of our favorites highlighted (in the Seven on the Side), former editors' picks now out in paperback, leaderboards for the bestsellers of the month so far, and a very quiet (so far) discussion board (maybe I should say something about Ron Paul there and get things rolling...). We're planning to add a lot more features to the page in coming months: more of our editors' recommendations, but also ways to feature the busiest and most helpful customer reviews and discussions alongside our own. If you have anything you'd like to see on that page, please let us know, either in the discussion board on the page, or right here. We'd like it to become a one-stop shop where you can quickly get a look at the best books being released right now, and the best customer discussion going on on the site now too.

My pick for the Significant Seven this month was Hari Kunzru's My Revolutions.  I'll crib from my comments on the discussion board to say a little about why:

It wasn't the kind of book that I had in mind for months ahead of time (unlike, say, Richard Price's Lush Life, which has been a contender for next month for me since way back in the fall), but I put it in my vacation pile on a whim and it ended up being the one I got caught up in with great pleasure. That made curious my I hadn't heard more about it, since it had been out in the UK for months and Kunzru's first book, The Impressionist, made a giant splash over there. No awards shortlists, not much buzz for this one. And it's not a flashy book, unlike his others (apparently--this is the first of his I've read). But I just found it incredibly well made--nearly every scene and character given their individual, idiosyncratic due. It seems a very grownup book to me--Kunzru is willing to step back and do some old-fashioned realist storytelling and follow character and circumstance where they lead, even in the middle of a flashy tale-of-a-generation plot. It's the kind of story (60s radical reckons with past) that's been told a hundred times recently, but it seemed fresh and authentic to me.

It's not out yet in the US, but if anyone has seen an advance version or read it when it came out in the UK--or has read any of his other work--I'd love to hear what you think. I looked up the UK reviews for it: some thought it was too familiar a story, some felt like I did. David Mattin's rave in The Independent came the closest to my own thinking.

Meanwhile, I also nominated two books for Seven on the Side: Sudhir Venkatesh's Gang Leader for the Day and David Goldblatt's The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer. Venkatesh is the sociologist profiled in one of the best-known chapters in Freakonomics (about the economics of crack dealing)--as a grad student at the University of Chicago, he began spending time at the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago's giant housing projects that have since been leveled, much of it by the side of "JT," the local-leader of a crack-dealing gang called the Black Kings. He's written more academic books about his research into the urban underground economy (like last year's Off the Books), but this is a very non-academic memoir of his seven years of research, and all the political and personal complications it caused. It's in many ways a Chicago version of the Baltimore stories in The Wire, except that Venkatesh comes across as wide-eyed and almost willfully naive compared to David Simon's proud cynicism. (It's as if Det. Pryzbylewski went into academia.)

The Ball Is Round, meanwhile, is a gigantic and fascinating history of a subject that deserves (but has never gotten) such a thing. I expect to be posting a Q&A with the author here before too long, so I'll save further commentary until then.

January was a good month for books, but I think February is looking even better. I'm taking home an armload of candidates for the next Best of the Month tonight: we'll see... --Tom