Barack Obama being sworn in as the 44th President of the United States

No promises on how soon I’ll post the 2008 version, but before I do so, I thought I should at least get this out of the way....

My favorite albums of 2007

1. The National - Boxer
2. The Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
3. Radiohead - In Rainbows
4. Joe Henry - Civilians
5. Andrew Bird - Armchair Apocrypha
6. Over the Rhine - The Trumpet Child
7. Club 8 - The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Dreaming
8. Beirut - The Flying Club Cup
9. Original Soundtrack - I’m Not There
10. Feist - The Reminder
11. Menomena - Friend and Foe
12. Spoon - Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
13. Wilco - Sky Blue Sky
14. Bettye LaVette - The Scene of the Crime
15. Mary Gauthier - Between Daylight and Dark
16. Okkervil River - The Stage Names
17. The Weakerthans - Reunion Tour
18. The New Pornographers - Challengers
19. Mavis Staples - We’ll Never Turn Back
20. Iron & Wine - The Shepherd’s Dog

For grins:
Best albums of 2006
Best albums of 2005

It’s nothing big, but I’m at least updating it consistently, which is more than I can say for my contributions here.

Which means that we’ll have the chance to be here tomorrow night:

Happy fourth, everyone.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead is easily the best book I’ve read in the past few years, full of richly precise prose and just brimming with grace.

I’ve been meaning to revisit it, but realistically I won’t be able to make time for that until after our move in early fall.

Today I discovered that Mrs. Robinson has something even better planned for early fall: a new book. And not just any new book, but a companion to Gilead.

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

(via Looking Closer)

As for the quiz, I think I was slowed by my typing skills more than anything else:

What was I singing the whole time?