Alias Grace By Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier Atlantic Monthly Press Because They Wanted To By Mary Gaitskill Simon & Schuster Mason & Dixon By Thomas Pynchon Henry Holt The Reader By Bernhard Schlink Pantheon - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How Proust Can Change Your Life By Alain de Botton Pantheon The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down By Anne Fadiman Farrar Straus & Giroux Into Thin Air By Jon Krakauer Villard Echoes of a Native Land By Serge Schmemann Knopf Close to the Machine By Ellen Ullman City Lights Books - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Reader's choice awards Your best books of 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - Sneak Peeks Salon's daily book review Win a free Salon mousepad. Sign up for our newsletter. Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - - SALON home page

___T H E__S E C O N D__A N N U A L salon book awards SALON SALUTES OUR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 1997 - - - - - - - - - - - - | F I C T I O N | ALIAS GRACE By Margaret Atwood COLD MOUNTAIN By Charles Frazier BECAUSE THEY WANTED TO By Mary Gaitskill MASON & DIXON By Thomas Pynchon THE READER By Bernhard Schlink | N O N F I C T I O N | HOW PROUST CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE By Alain de Botton THE SPIRIT CATCHES YOU AND YOU FALL DOWN By Anne Fadiman INTO THIN AIR By Jon Krakauer ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND By Serge Schmemann CLOSE TO THE MACHINE By Ellen Ullman - - - - - - - - - - - - BY DWIGHT GARNER AND LAURA MILLER | The publishing industry spent most of 1997 bemoaning flat book sales and airing its dirty laundry like a big dysfunctional family in the latest it's-all-my-mother's-fault memoir, but as readers we simply wallowed in terrific books this year. Choosing Salon's five favorite works of fiction proved a particularly daunting challenge -- anyone eavesdropping on the flurry of transcontinental phone calls that preceded the announcement of our final list would have heard plenty of agonized groans as we winnowed it down to the selection you see here. Among other things, the year saw new books from such éminences grise as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Saul Bellow, plus dazzling first novels from Charles Frazier and Arundhati Roy. In a less stellar year, Rick Moody's "Purple America" and Cynthia Ozick's "The Puttermesser Papers" would have been shoo-ins, and with regret we weren't able to honor top-drawer literary entertainments like Diane Johnson's "Le Divorce" and Alex Garland's "The Beach." Nonfiction beguiled us in 1997, rather than knocking us out (even if Jon Krakauer's nail-biter "Into Thin Air" kept us up until the wee hours), but the effects were just as lasting. For us, memoir mania hasn't so much dissipated as moved on. We'd much rather read about an author's work life than her childhood these days -- and Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents" struck us as one of the most original books we read all year. (Thomas Lynch's "The Undertaking," about his own adventures in "the grim trade," made us -- briefly -- consider extending the list of nonfiction winners to six titles.) You won't, however, find weighty histories and biographies among our winners -- those books receive honors elsewhere. We've chosen to spotlight nonfiction titles that read like great stories, the kind of books you rush home from work to read, rather than definitive studies. For that reason, we've made it a policy to steer clear of miscellaneous essay collections in favor of unified works, but two remarkable books -- David Foster Wallace's often brilliant "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" and film critic David Thomson's "Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts" -- also tested our resolve. After days of wincing and wheedling, we finally arrived at this list, 10 books whose praises we'd gladly sing to total strangers, but more importantly, books we're pressing into the hands of family and friends. Excuse us -- we're print-addled, sleep-deprived and nearly cross-eyed -- but from where we stand (knee-deep in books, of course), 1997 was a very good year. N E X T+P A G E+| Fiction Awards | Nonfiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY SCOTT LAUMANN