With the new year fast approaching, I now have a pretty good excuse to annihilate my liver tonight. In fact, I’ve gathered all the materials for a night of beer barrels and a painful beginning to 2007, with a twelve-pack of Heineken, two liter bottles of schnapps—cinnamon and root beer, respectively—and a bottle of wine that will likely go untouched by my buddies and I. And I’ll keep Ernest Hemingway’s wise words in mind: “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut.”

As per usual, we have something bookish to talk about: the Guardian and the Melbourne Age are looking forward to 2007, with both of them mentioning forthcoming titles by Norman Mailer, Michael Ondaatje, Ian McEwan, and Khaled Hosseini. (Out of those four authors, I’m only interested in Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest.) But Justin Cartwright’s The Song Before It Is Sung, about a 1944 attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, sounds interesting, despite its awful title. Michael Chabon gets marks for having one of the strangest plots I’ve heard about in a while: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union “proposes a world in which Alaska rather than Israel becomes the Jewish homeland in the 1940s.” There are also a few comebacks to look forward to: Toni Morrison returns with Mercy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Children of Hurin will finally be published. And on a bittersweet note, Philip Roth will publish his final Nathan Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost, in October, which is, fittingly, “a wintry end to what looks to be a particularly fertile year for fiction.”