Some books that have me excited about 2008

I hope everyone had a lovely New Year's Eve. I normally abstain, but Camper Van Beethoven was playing, and we couldn't miss that.

It being the New Year it is a fine time to look at some fine sounding books that are to be published in 2008.

The Better Angels by Charles McCarry. This is cheating, I suppose, as this is a re-issue of an out of print book from 1979. It is interesting for two reasons: Charles McCarry writes stupendously good spy novels and this particular one involves a bitter Arabian aristocrat who decides to wage a war on the United States using passenger airplanes as missiles. This OpinionJournal article has a nice round-up of McCarry's books.

Marching Towards Hell: America and Islam After Iraq by Michael Scheuer. This one would earn points for the title alone, but it is the author that really caught my eye. Scheuer is a former CIA operations officer who ran the CIA's hunt for Bin Laden and has been fiercely critical of the Bush Administration on the air and in books like Imperial Hubris. He also made an appearance in the Looming Tower.

Blasphemy by Douglas Preston. Part of the Preston and Child writing duo, Preston goes it alone in this thriller about a supercollider that may reveal how the world was created. And lots of people don't like it. Preston will release another book about a real life murder in Florence.

Six Degrees by Mark Lynas. This looks like a doom-laden account of what a tip in average temperature could do to the world.