NEIL PEART
RUSH
1974 PRESENT
NEIL PEART — Favorite book of 2004

Among many favorites this year, from John Barth’s Ten Nights and a Night to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, I would have to choose The Big Year, by Mark Obmascik (Free Press, 2004), a non-fiction tale of epic sweep and depth about a competition among, of all people, birdwatchers. In the birding Olympics, their quest i… Mores to list the highest number of bird species ever seen in North America in one calendar year, and their obstacles are many, both human and natural, woven into a surprisingly compelling drama of obsession, competition, strategy, resourcefulness, and human nobility and fallibility. The competitors strain themselves, their resources, and their jobs and families to catch even a momentary glimpse of a feathered rarity, as they race around the continent from the Aleutian Islands to Dry Tortugas, to the Colorado Rockies, to a garbage dump in a Texas border town.
A few others I can’t resist recommending: Louis Riel, by Chester Brown, French Revolutions, by Tim Moore, The Inner Circle, by T. C. Boyle, and Middlemarch, by George Eliot Less