Wordcandy's Year in Books: 2007 Edition

10. From the elegant new edition of Strunk and White's Elements of Style to the lovely Annotated Secret Garden, 2007 was a great year for beautifully-designed reprints of classic novels. We were particularly impressed by Penguin's edition of The Three Musketeers.








9. As longtime Buffy the Vampire Slayer devotees, we were totally stoked when Joss Whedon announced that he would be continuing his story in comic book format. We've been a little underwhelmed by the artwork for this series, but the storylines are great.








8. 2007 was full of solid film adaptations. We haven't had a chance to see the coolest-looking one of all (the just-released Persepolis), but we did enjoy the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix movie, the Nancy Drew movie, and the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Stardust.








7. There have been a number of highly effective fantasy, sci-fi, and horror releases in the past year. William Gibson’s Spook Country, Kat Richardson's Poltergeist, and Dan Simmons's The Terror were all outstanding, and we were thrilled to finally get our hands on Sergei Lukyanenko's Nightwatch trilogy. (Note: While the first book in the trilogy allegedly came out in 2006, it only seemed to turn up in bookstores in 2007.)





6. There were a ton of great picture books released in 2007, sure to appeal to both children and adults. We were particularly impressed by Peter Sis's The Wall and Brian Selsnick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.









5. 2007 saw a number of excellent romance releases. Lisa Kleypas released Sugar Daddy, her first non-historical romance, and started a new series, Jennifer Echols wrote another great teen romance (The Boys Next Door), and Nora Roberts's new Sign of Seven series kicked off with a bang.








4. It isn't available in English yet, but plenty of Internet-savvy anime geeks watched 2007's wonderful animated adaptation of Tomoko Ninomiya's Nodame Cantabile.









3. 2007 was a great year for entertaining and informative non-fiction. We were particularly impressed by Michael A. Stusser's The Dead Guy Interviews, Tina Gromberg's Out of Line, and Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.








2. Suzanne Collins' Underland Chronicles and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series both ended with more of a whimper than a bang. Luckily for us, 2007 still produced a towering pile of excellent, wildly creative YA fiction, including the aforementioned The Boys Next Door, Ysabeau S. Wilce's Flora Segunda, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Catherine Jink's Evil Genius, Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy, and Cynthia Leitich Smith's Tantalize.



And...

1. Our #1 Wordcandy-approved happening for 2007 was the massively overdue release of the fourth volume of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!. This series was put on hiatus for the better part of two years, and offered a textbook example of why it can be so frustrating to read manga: it's very unpleasant to invest time and money in a series, and then discover that the English publishers have put it on hold indefinitely. We were thrilled when ADV brought this delightfully bizarre series back from the dead.