Time Magazines Top 10 Books of 2006, 6-10

#6 The Lay of the Land- Richard Ford After more than a decade, Richard Ford revives Frank Bascombe, the beloved protagonist from The Sportswriter and Independence Day. Fans will be scrambling for The Lay of the Land, a novel that finds Bascombe contending with health, marital, and familial issues wake of the 2000 presidential election. We asked Richard Ford to tell us a little more about what it's like to create (and share so much time with) a character like Frank. Read his short essay below. --Daphne Durham

#7 Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart The narrator, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, is Misha Vainberg, a 30-year-old "incorrigible fatso" with an unrestrained appetite for whiskey, women and sturgeon. He was sent to the United States "to become a normal prosperous American at Accidental College." But during a trip back to Russia, his Mafioso father is charged with having murdered an Oklahoma businessman and then assassinated himself. Under those circumstances, Misha can't obtain a visa to return to his beloved USA.

#8 Blood and Thunder: AN Epic of the American West “Kit Carson’s role in the conquest of the Navajo during and after the Civil War remains one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in the history of the American West. Hampton Sides portrays Carson in the larger context of the conquest of the entire West, including his frequent and often lethal encounters with hostile Native Americans. Unusually, Sides gives full voice to Indian leaders themselves about their trials and tribulations in their dealings with the whites. Here is a national hero on the level of Daniel Boone, presented with all of his flaws and virtues, in the context of American people’s belief that it was their Manifest Destiny to occupy the entire West.”

#9 Black Swan Green by David Mitchell For his fourth novel, two-time Booker Prize finalist Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, etc.) turns to material most writers plumb in their first: the semiautobiographical, first-person coming-of-age story.

#10 What is the Want by Dave Eggers Valentino Achak Deng, real-life hero of this engrossing epic, was a refugee from the Sudanese civil war-the bloodbath before the current Darfur bloodbath-of the 1980s and 90s. In this fictionalized memoir, Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) makes him an icon of globalization.

An article about Seth Godin's Permission Marketing