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I read this in the Sunday Paper

2007: Are we turning the page on reading?

By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Which got me thinking, as we look back on 2007 and consider the year in books, has print finally turned a corner?

Two of 2007's biggest publishing events left a wildly divergent picture of the future: On the positive side, the year's unquestionable blockbuster was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - which sold 10 million copies in 24 hours and left wags wagging about how Harry created a generation of readers. On the negative, the National Endowment for the Arts released a study, that America is reading less for pleasure than ever before - particularly young America. But don't feel bad: The French published How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read, which became a hit over here, too. (I bought this book for my roommate)

What you saw less of this year, thankfully, were bitter polemics - though Stephen Colbert had a huge hit with a parody of one. One could argue, however, that O.J. Simpson's If I Did It, finally released, is bitter and polemical; it's also a hit, having sold more than 100,000 copies since October. That said, so concerned are we that kids are overly obsessed with celebrity and not getting out from behind computers that another hit of 2007, The Dangerous Book for Boys, was more or less a manual for being a child.

My favorite book of 2007?

They asked me to pick one.

Three books come to mind: Alex Ross' The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, an unlikely, engrossing history of classical music and how it shaped rock and hip-hop and how we hear in general; Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End, a moving first novel with a keen understanding of hive mentalities (written in the cultish "We") that, after The Office and Office Space, rescues office novels from the usual satire.

And the best:

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a buzzsaw of an immigrant novel that skips from high culture to low, from its hero's family legacy in the Dominican Republic, back to his pitiful life in the States as a fat, virginal, Lord-of-the-Rings loser. Funny and moving, told in a zippy combination of Spanglish, pop-culture shorthand, and literary flourish, Diaz's first book in a decade is so vibrant it's likely to force a reconsideration of the immigrant saga - and America.