Books of the year features can seem pretty pointless, ladling hype on books that have already been fulsomely praised. In order to elicit livelier responses, Prospect asked a range of contributors to nominate their "most overrated and underrated books of 2006." Some interpreted the words "of 2006" to mean "read by me in 2006," and chose books written in previous years. In a way, they had a point—why bother with new stuff when there are so many older (and often better) books out there? Others ignored any notion of a critical consensus and simply chose books they liked or disliked—hence the inclusion of a few titles (Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma, Bob Woodward's State of Denial) in both categories.
We thought we could detect one or two schools of thought at work—Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom's anti-postmodernism polemic Why Truth Matters struck a chord with liberal neocons such as Johann Hari and Oliver Kamm; the sternest criticism of The God Delusion came from Richard Dawkins's fellow non-believers. Here we print a selection of choices and comments, as well as a "top three" in each category.
William Skidelsky
Paul Barker writer & journalist
Depths, Henning Mankell (Harvill Secker). Gloomy Scandinavian switches his grey-on-grey technique from Inspector Wallander's dreary quests to a subfusc corner of Swedish history.
Anthony Barnett political writer
Everyman, Philip Roth (Jonathan Cape). A slickly written, shallow and predictable novel of American self-regard and deserved decline.
Don Berry journalist
Saturday, Ian McEwan (Vintage). A preposterous plot written in grossly sub-Tom Wolfe prose.
Vernon Bogdanor academic
The Blunkett Tapes, David Blunkett (Bloomsbury). Wins unequivocal first prize for the most boring book of the year.
Andrew Brown writer & journalist
Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (Bantam), obviously.
Ian Christie academic
How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, Bjørn Lomborg (CUP). A professional contrarian's intellectual stunt, shedding pseudo-light on a false choice about the world's biggest problems. A waste of time for all concerned.
Disconnected: Why our Kids are Turning their Backs on Everything We Thought We Knew (Ebury). Atrociously written and researched, this wretched book purports to tell the truth about youth in modern Britain. The author's methodology is as follows: "hang out" with a selection of nihilistic, inarticulate, drug-addled, alcoholic, sexoholic and narcissistic teenagers; claim they are representative of "kids today"; believe everything they say; write it all down; "celebrate" it.
Nick Cohen journalist
The Blunkett Tapes. No revelations, no insights into New Labour and nothing on the private life which was to bring him down.
Harvey Cole economist
The Blunkett Tapes. Although they must have broken the record for the highest ratio of unread pages to cost, they still attracted some favourable comment.
Robert Colls historian
Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan (Simon and Schuster) The entire reviewing establishment got up on its hind legs and applauded this book. In fact, apart from the odd thunder flash thrown in to keep you awake, it's mainly rambling rubbish. Bob just strums along as usual telling you what you don't really want to know. The Union Jack: a Biography, Nick Groom (Atlantic). At its best before the flag is invented, when Groom deals with the signs and symbols of medieval power. After 1707 he strains to make his history "relevant"—always the kiss of death.
Mark Cousins film critic
Bollywood, Mihir Bose (Tempus Publishing). Contains the line, "he was so nervous that he was a bundle of nerves," which, when I read it on the train, made me laugh so much that people got impatient.
Tyler Cowen academic & blogger
The Road, Cormac McCarthy (Picador). Critics loved it, but it is a slightly more earnest version of good genre fiction.
David Cox broadcaster
The Night Watch, Sarah Waters (Virago). An imitation Catherine Cookson for dim but pretentious lesbians. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai (Hamish Hamilton). A typically box-ticking, offence-avoiding Booker winner whose supposedly innovative structure is more sensibly viewed as narrative incompetence.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dreary rant by anti-religious fanatic lacking any grasp of all but a minor aspect of the subject he purports to address.
Diane Coyle economist
Freakonomics, Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner (Penguin). Economics as freak show. Depressingly, this seems to be the only way to gain a wider audience for the empress of the social sciences, other than multinational bashing.
The World is Flatby Thomas Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Less breathless and more thoughtful about globalisation than the earlier "The Lexus and The Olive Tree." But not as good as its author thinks and tending towards the banal.
William Dalrymple travel writer
Londonistan, Melanie Phillips (Gibson Square) and Celsius 7/7, Michael Gove (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). A pair of ridiculous and ill-informed displays of crudely Islamophobic prejudice, written by people who show no evidence of having spent any time in Muslim company, or of having set foot within the Muslim world.
Samantha Ellis playwright
On Beauty, Zadie Smith (Penguin). Massively overrated. Why read a tribute to Forster when you can just read him?
Michel Faber novelist
The Blunkett Tapes. It gives me joy that this book, despite huge publicity and serialisations in two newspapers, has sold miserably. Every time anything significant happens in the world of politics, some self-important bureaucrat unleashes his memoirs, replete with astonishing details about the calibre of wine at crucial lunches and the hurtful remarks of peevish colleagues. Oblivion is the deserved state of most politicians. If a book can speed the process, hurrah!
Duncan Fallowell writer
Overrated, both generally and particularly this year: Norman Davies, Michel Houellebecq, Alain de Botton, London A-Z, Zadie Smith, the Bible, the Koran, Philip Roth.
Eamonn Fingleton writer
State of Denial, Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster). It is a bit late to be exposing the Bush administration's incompetence over the war.
Suzanne Franks writer & broadcaster
Snow, Orhan Pamuk (Faber). One should not say this when he has just won the Nobel prize and survived state harassment, but I found it tedious.
Johann Hari journalist
After the Neocons, Francis Fukuyama (Profile). Fukuyama has been living off a soundbite for a decade—and a wrong one at that. His latest book is a trite wander through the history of neoconservatism.
David Herman writer & producer
Everyman. Late Roth is the most overrated body of fiction of the last decade. Paul Auster's Travels in the Scriptorium (Faber) was also overrated—the title tells it all.
Nicholas Humphrey scientist
The God Delusion. Overrated not because it isn't a powerful argument for rejecting religion (it is), but because critics have responded as if these arguments are news.
Pico Iyer writer
American Prometheus, Martin J Sherwin and Kai Bird (Random House). To take J Robert Oppenheimer, the most titanic and tormented American of the last century, and to bury him in more than 500 pages of laborious discussion of whether he once joined the Communist party is almost a parody of cold war pedantry. Imagine Othello discussed in terms of his dating history, or King Lear examined on the basis of his bank statements. The book won both the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Circle award for the best American biography of the year.
Oliver Kamm columnist & blogger
Nonviolence, Mark Kurlansky (Jonathan Cape). Its espousal of pacifism is historically illiterate and ethically foul. In a just world, a book like this would consign its author to the political fringe and the vanity press.
Jytte Klausen academic
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer (Random House).
This book was rightly panned by many reviewers for pervasive misrepresentation of facts and fearmongering, but Bawer spoke to the yearnings of neocons who want to describe Europeans as "collaborationists" and Muslims as evildoers.
Angela Lambert novelist
Untold Stories, Alan Bennett (Faber/Profile). Plods over familiar ground and only the public avowal of his homosexuality and bowel cancer are new, contradicting his claim to be a very private man.
Denis MacShane MP
State of Denial. Like reading an unedited transcript of Waroholics Anonymous.
Allan Massie writer
I've always found Philip Roth's novels tiresomely self-indulgent. Everyman (Jonathan Cape) is no exception. It reeks of self-pity, like so much of his work. Anthony Powell once wrote that "an immense self-pity is an almost invariable adjunct of the bestseller"; so perhaps that explains it.
Kamran Nazeer writer
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney (Faber). A book that people use to prove that they "dig" poetry, but there have been many better poetry books this year.
Philip Oltermann writer
Be Near Me, Andrew O'Hagan (Faber). Not a bad novel; O'Hagan is just so terribly in control of his own prose that he forgets to take risks with it.
Jonathan Rée philosopher
The God Delusion. So puffed up with rationalistic zeal that it fails to recognise the concerns of intelligent believers or, for that matter, doubters or unbelievers.
Matt Ridley science writer
Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?: Volume Two, Steve Lowe and Alan MacArthur (Little, Brown). Yes, it is just you.
David Rose journalist
Saturday, Ian McEwan (Vintage). Among many absurdities, the plot turns on a neurosurgeon making an instant diagnosis of the rare condition afflicting a man about to assault him. As for the hero's oh-so-perfect family, they are nauseating.
David Walker journalist
Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma (Atlantic). Some reviewers called it a masterpiece. In fact, Buruma slips and slides around the question of whether what's happened to the Netherlands (read Britain and elsewhere) is good or bad. Enough equivocation: what a failed opportunity.
Alan Wolfe academic
The God Delusion. Written with so little tolerance and so much fervour that fundamentalists will recognise Dawkins as one of their own.
TOP THREE
1 The God Delusion Richard Dawkins
2 The Blunkett Tapes David Blunkett
3 Everyman Philip Roth
Lisa Appignanesi writer & broadcaster
Justice Under Siege, Eva Joly (Citizen Press). The story of a French magistrate's investigation into fraud among politicians and oil industrialists, which shows how rich world corruption helps to induce it elsewhere. Howard Jacobson's riotous Kalooki Nights (Cape) should have made it to the Booker shortlist.
Arthur Aughey academic
Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda Pt 2 by Michael Burleigh (Harper Press). A great book of moral intensity that challenges the secular assumptions of a generation of scholarly history. The British Moment: Democratic Geopolitics in the 21st Century (Social Affairs Unit). From the Henry Jackson Society at Cambridge, a book that possibly makes Cambridge the home for lost causes. A defence of political intervention in the name of democracy.
Michael Axworthy writer
Ali Ansari's Confronting Iran (C Hurst). The best book to read on the tangled follies and villainies of both sides in the US/Iran non-relationship.
Paul Barker writer & journalist
Murder in Amsterdam. Vivid exploration—with no cheap, easy answers—of how, in ultra-liberal Holland, the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, great-grandnephew of the painter, came to be assassinated.
Anthony Barnett political writer
The Mission Song, John Le Carré (Hodder & Stoughton). Creates, in Salvo, a new character who is a step up from Smiley, and brings the energy and trauma of central Africa into accessible fiction.
Vernon Bogdanor academic
David Brown's single-volume distillation of his four-volume biography— Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music (Faber 2006)—is a wonderful example of intelligent writing about music that is also accessible to the layman. It will be read with pleasure and profit both by the novice and by the expert.
Mihir Bose journalist
The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, David Goldblatt (Viking). For the first time, someone has provided a history of the game in its social and political context. Forget biographies of Lampard, Rooney and so on: settle down with this one after Match of the Day.
Andrew Brown writer & journalist
Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness, Nicholas Humphrey (Belknap Press). Quite possibly completely wrong, but original, important, and short. Tony Judt's marvellous Postwar (Heinemann) . I am not sure if this was in fact underrated; anything short of "excellent" does, though, underrate it.
Bartle Bull writer & journalist
The Naked Tourist, Lawrence Osborne (North Point Press). Rescues travel writing from the ghetto of nostalgia and emulation perpetuated by writers like William Dalrymple by investigating why we travel in a world in which everything seems to be melting into "Whereverness."
Ian Christie academic
New Elites by George Walden (Gibson Square). Reviewed well but deserved to make a bigger splash. Very funny, elegantly bitter and sardonic, and right on the money about the well-paid professional elites doing well by embracing populist "anti-elitism" in the media, education and politics.
Nick Cohen journalist
Power and the Idealists, Paul Berman (Soft Skull Press). Barely reviewed, probably because it examined the awkward question of why the radicals of the 1968 generation have become so tolerant of movements of the extreme right.
Robert Colls historian
Best and Edwards by Gordon Burn (Faber). A very sharp and timely incision into the bloated belly of metropolitan England. In what is in effect a cultural history of Manchester United, Burn tracks the changes through the very different lives of Duncan Edwards and George Best. Burn doesn't give a damn about "relevance," but is relevant all the same.
Tyler Cowen academic & blogger
Stumbling on Happiness byDaniel Gilbert (HarperCollins ). We have very little idea what will actually make us happy, or what made us happy in the past. A fascinating and discomforting book.
David Cox broadcaster
State of Denial. Though turgid and unreflective, it nevertheless distills unequalled insight into the workings of the Bush regime from research of a thoroughness unimaginable on this side of the Atlantic. Beyond Words by John Humphrys (Hodder and Stoughton). Outburst from a grumpy old middlebrow easily caught out committing the crimes he excoriates which nonetheless assembles a glorious bouquet of the affectations of contemporary English. Why Birds Sing, David Rothenberg (Penguin). Clumsily put-together but still enthralling account of one man's quest to fathom an ancient mystery by deploying a breathtaking mix of ethology, physics, neurology, musicology and philosophy.
Diane Coyle economist
The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford (Little, Brown)—economics for the discerning reader. In a just world this would have been the runaway bestseller on all the 3 for 2 tables in bookstores. Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins (Plume)—marketed with an off-puttingly downmarket cover, but a very interesting angle on the aid business, even if only half the anecdotes are true.
Theodore Dalrymple doctor
The Man Who Went into the West, Byron Rogers (4th Estate). A highly amusing and appropriately quirky biography of the great poet RS Thomas, who was much misunderstood. His supposed misanthropy was actually disillusionment with men in a materialistic age, and the fact that so few people understood this only confirmed him in his disillusion.
William Dalrymple travel writer
A Royal Affair: George III and His Troublesome Siblings by Stella Tillyard (Chatto and Windus) was as beautifully written, minutely researched, humane and and sympathetic as its predecessor Aristocrats, and should have won every history prize going. Tillyard's prose is as graceful and stylish as that of any historian working today. Three other books which did not get as widely or as prominently reviewed as they might have done were In Spite of the Gods by Edward Luce (Little, Brown), without doubt the best book yet written on the rise of the new India; Emma Williams's brilliant It's Easier to Reach Heaven than the End of the Street (Bloomsbury), one of the most moving of recent books about Israel and Palestine; and Pankaj Mishra's hugely accomplished collection of essays Temptations of the West (Picador).
Patrick Diamond policy adviser
The Challenge of Affluence, Avner Offer (OUP). A brilliantly argued book, highlighting that a sense of wellbeing has lagged behind affluence in most industrialised countries, and how social and personal commitment have been undermined by the desire for novelty.
Samantha Ellis playwright
Patrick Marnham's biography of Mary Wesley, Wild Mary (Chatto and Windus), wasn't rated highly enough. It's partly a have-your-cake-and-eat-it book for writers; you can have affairs and a wild life and start publishing in your seventies. But it also contains a biography within a biography; Wesley's husband, Eric Siepmann, was a failed writer who would never have got his own biography, and if Wesley's life is the story of a last-minute save, Siepmann's life is a sort of cautionary tale of what happens if you don't rescue your career at the eleventh hour.
Eamonn Fingleton writer
Blind into Baghdad, James Fallows (Vintage Books US). Shows that as early as the summer of 2002, the preponderance of expert, non-partisan opinion in both the US and Britain was that the then proposed war would end in fiasco.
Suzanne Franks writer & broadcaster
The Blunkett Tapes sold disappointingly and was much mocked for not including those key Blunkett moments. Yet it was nevertheless a gripping read and full of insights about how contemporary government operates. The absence of hindsight gives extra authenticity.
Carlo Gébler writer
In the Blood, Andrew Motion (Faber). One hears a lot nowadays about how the English don't have a culture. This extraordinary, moving account of Motion's upper middle-class upbringing shows what a magnificent culture they have—it made him the poet he is.
Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland by Carmen Callil (Jonathan Cape). A scholarly yet compelling account of the life and times of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Vichy "Commissioner for Jewish Affairs," one of the few Frenchmen to gain weight during the German occupation of France, an antisemite, a liar, a swindler and a monster. Horrors always make great copy, but Callil's book is also a warning against the way those self-serving politicians who cause calamity always argue that they do what they do for our good and we stupidly always believe them.
Johann Hari journalist
Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (Continuum). A wonderfully fresh and funny primer on why postmodernism, "alternative medicine" and various other anti-Enlightenment nonsenses are in fact a gift to the right. After reason and evidence have been stripped away by postmodernists, what remains? Tradition, religion, instinct, blood and soil, the nation, the fatherland.
David Herman writer
The Singer on the Shore: Essays, 1991-2004by Gabriel Josipovici (Carcanet) . Superb collection of essays by one of the greatest critics of the last 30 years. Worth it just for the first essay on the Bible.
The Culture of the Europeans by Donald Sassoon (HarperCollins). Magisterial, ambitious overview of 200 years of modern European culture.
Nicholas Humphrey scientist
Why Birds Sing, David Rothenberg (Penguin). Underrated by evolutionary biologists, who are offended by Rothenberg's suggestion that birdsong may have no other function than to be beautiful. Rothenberg, a jazz clarinetist, jams with lyre birds. Listen, and think again! A real challenge to adaptationist biology.
Pico Iyer writer
The most underrated book of the year is surely Alentejo Blues by Monica Ali (Doubleday). It is not a great novel, and it lacks most of the depth and almost uncanny wisdom of Ali's debut Brick Lane. But it shows that she is a writer and not just a talented south Asian—that she has the wisdom to refuse to typecast herself, and the courage to establish herself as a real craftsman and explorer of human beings. By "unexoticising" herself like this—writing a book about Portugal, with none of the Bangladeshi themes that made her famous—she shows herself to be as fearless as her fellow young master David Mitchell.
Oliver Kamm columnist & blogger
Why Truth Matters, Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom (Continuum). In every generation, intelligent people insist on embracing the irrational. Postmodernism, identity politics and pseudoscience are easy to criticise, but hard to scorn to anything like the extent they merit. Benson and Stangroom do a heroic job of trying, and their defence of the Enlightenment ought to be better known.
Jytte Klausen academic
The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future, by Vali Nasr (WW Norton). Nasr's sensible and forthright explanation of the Sunni-Shia conflict and the theological differences between the two does not sit well with reviwers and readers who want to be either scared or confirmed in their pre-conceived notions.
Adam Kuper academic
Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam has the pace of a thriller, the psychological insights of a good novel and the fascination of the best political journalism. It lays bear the troubled heart of contemporary Europe.
Niki Lacey academic
My impression is that Stefan Collini's Absent Minds hasn't had the attention it deserves. Apart from explaining the roots of English ambivalence about intellectuals,and roundly debunking the myth that there aren't any, the dry humour which speaks through regular witty asides makes the book a particular pleasure.
Angela Lambert novelist
My biography The Lost Life of Eva Braun (Century) was published after a seizure left me paralysed in a hospital bed, so it limped into the world without the crutch of publicity and was barely noticed. Pity, because it's full of interesting stuff.
Denis MacShane MP
City of Oranges by Adam LeBor (Bloomsbury) about Jews and Arabs in Jaffa. Honest, direct narrative, based on scrupulous reporting with real historical depth. Shows what could happen if only the fundies and zealots would try peace.
Allan Massie writer
William McIlvanney is the finest Scottish novelist of my generation, but Weekend (Sceptre), his first novel for ten years, received less attention than it deserved. This account of a university study-group meeting at a faux-baronial castle on a Scottish island, is wise, funny and often moving.
Jonathan Meades journalist
The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme by Gavin Stamp (Profile) steps beyond the bounds of elegiac architectural history into a denunciation of the political caste's perennial enthusiasm for sending "ordinary" people to their pointless death.
In The Passenger (Simon & Schuster), Chris Petit works back and forwards from the in-flight destruction of a transatlantic airliner, conjuring a maze of conspiracies, false identities and disappearances. He is particularly good on the way that the "security community" treats treachery and duplicity as everyday professional attributes.
The Moldavian Pimp (Harvill) is the second work of fiction by Edgardo Cozarinsky, a Paris-based Argentinian documentarist. Cozarinsky is consistently oblique. He writes about Jewish sex traffickers in the era of the tango with detached intensity. He affects to be contaminated by the memories of those who have previously delved into this occluded subject. It is as though sad, vicious, forgotten lives of almost a century ago have been posthumously impasted with the curiosity of those who have visited them.
Kamran Nazeer writer
Alentejo Blue, Monica Ali (Doubleday). So it doesn't contain a young immigrant woman's rites of passage. So it's not a study of urban alienation. It's harder to have something quick to say about it, but it's a really good novel.
Philip Oltermann writer
Remainder by Tom McCarthy (Alma Books). Big, difficult ideas barely contained within a crazy, idiosyncratic structure. A novel that could only have been written by someone from outside conventional literary circles. More original than anything on the Booker longlist.
Frederic Raphael, writer
The White Man's Burden by William Easterly (OUP) exemplifies what marksmen call "aiming off." Without directly firing at the futile vanity of seeking to implant western fiscal and political accountability on bandit states, Easterly hits the bullshit of pretending that the west has not wasted almost all of its money on economic aid and the misguided macro-mindedness of Gordon Brown and his like.
Jonathan Rée philosopher
The Human Touch, Michael Frayn (Faber). The author is no less of a secularist than Dawkins, but he is alive to the real indeterminacies that haunt the world, striking fear into the hearts of dogmatists: this lovely essay has not yet been welcomed anything like as warmly as it deserves.
Matt Ridley science writer
The God Delusion. The reviews have been dreadful—snobbish and inaccurate drivel from fans of superstition.
David Rose journalist
And Still I Rise, Doreen Lawrence (Faber). A very moving autobiography. Perhaps because it was serialised by the Daily Mail, it did not get the attention it deserves. Historians who want to know what life was like for first-generation immigrants in 20th-century Britain will be reading this book in 200 years.
Alexei Sayle comedian & writer
I don't want to start insulting people in publishing by choosing an overrated book, but a seriously underrated one is Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell (Sceptre). A novel with a truly original story and heroine, set in the modern-day Ozark mountains.
Paul Skidmore policy adviser
Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America, Morris P Fiorina, Samuel J Abrams and Jeremy C Pope (Pearson/ Longman). Comprehensively debunks the idea that the modern US is a hopelessly polarised country. Shows that on most issues, Americans are moderate—the parties have vacated the centre ground, forcing voters to choose between ideologically extreme candidates.
Francis Wheen writer & journalist
Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs: Waste and Blundering in the Armed Forces, Lewis Page (Heinemann) and Plundering the Public Sector, David Craig and Richard Brooks (Constable & Robinson). These devastating exposés of public sector boondoggles show how easy it is for jargon-spouting snake-oil vendors to extract vast sums of taxpayers' money from incompetent or infatuated ministers and mandarins.
TOP THREE
1 Why Truth Matters Ophelia Benson & Jeremy Stangroom
2 Alentejo Blue Monica Ali
3 The Human Touch Michael Frayn
