Benjamin Schwartz weighed in on what he thought the best books of the year were in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. He selected three fiction and three nonfiction books, two were short story collections by James Lasdun and Alice Munro and the third was The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, which was nominated for a Booker Prize. The nonfiction books were a biography of Lincoln, a look at Virginia Woolf and her servants and a book about the Third Reich. Six is kind of an odd number, I wonder why he didn’t pick ten? I think James Lasdun was good a choice, he got some attention for The Horned Man and it’s always great to see talented writers recognized.
