The NYT's 10 Best Books of 2006

There's nothing worse than wasting time reading a bad book. Now that I have two lil fellas, my annual book consumption has been cut in about in half.

Over the years, I have found that the best resource for locating good books is the New York Time's Editors' choices that drops on the first weekend of December annually.

Here's this year's list:

FICTION
Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel
The Emperor's Children by Claude Messud
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

NONFICTION
Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
Mayflower by Nathan Philbrick
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

I'll read about half of these. The one I find most intriguing is The Places in Between, and here's how the NYT describes it:

"You are the first tourist in Afghanistan," Stewart, a young Scotsman, was warned by an Afghan official before commencing the journey recounted in this splendid book. "It is mid-winter - there are three meters of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is a war. You will die, I can guarantee." Stewart, thankfully, did not die, and his report on his adventures - walking across Afghanistan in January of 2002, shortly after the fall of the Taliban - belongs with the masterpieces of the travel genre. Stewart may be foolhardy, but on the page he is a terrific companion: smart, compassionate and human. His book cracks open a fascinating, blasted world miles away from the newspaper headlines.