3/1: Portsmouth’s own independent bookseller, RiverRun Bookstore, celebrates its fifth birthday.

4/11: Prolific and legendary writer Kurt Vonnegut, author of “Slaughterhouse-Five” and “Cat’s Cradle,” among dozens of other books, dies at 84.

4/17: “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

4/23: Reporter and novelist David Halberstam dies at 73.

6/5: Cormac McCarthy, the most famous recluse since Salinger, appears on “Oprah.”

7/21: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh and final installment in the Potter series, is released, selling more than 11 million copies in 24 hours.

8/2: N.H. poet Charles Simic is announced as Donald Hall’s successor as the nation’s poet laureate.

9/5: “On the Road” celebrates its 50th anniversary, with a subsequent tour for the original scroll on which Jack Kerouc typed the manuscript.

9/6: Fiction writer Madeline L’Engle, best-known for “A Wrinkle in Time,” dies at 88.

10/11: Doris Lessing, author of such books as “The Grass is Singing” and “The Golden Notebook,” becomes the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, at 88.

10/16: “The Gathering,” by Anne Enright, wins the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

10/19: Margaret Atwood and her husband Graeme Gibson bring a bagged lunch to the prestigious Giller Awards dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel to protest the hotel’s massive resort in Grenada, the construction of which threatens an endangered species—the Grenada dove.

11/10: Provocative and inflammatory author Norman Mailer, best known for “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Executioner’s Song,” dies at 84.

11/14: “Trees of Smoke” by Denis Johnson wins the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction.

11/19 Amazon releases the Kindle, a wireless reading device that, among other things, allows you to purchase and download books and browse newspapers and magazines.

11/21: HarperCollins pulls the plug on O.J. Simpson’s “confessional” book, “If I Did It,” and fires publisher Judith Regan over the $3.5 million deal. The family of Ron Goldman later starts proceedings, on Dec. 18, to sue Simpson for any advance money he may have received.

11/21: Richard Leigh, one of the authors who sued Dan Brown for allegedly stealing ideas from “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” and inserting them in “The Da Vinci Code,” dies at 64.

12/13: One of seven handwritten copies of J.K. Rowling’s “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” is auctioned off at Christie’s to Amazon.com for almost $4 million.

12/21: Films adapted from books, including “I Am Legend,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Sweeney Todd,” “Atonement” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” capture the box office and Golden Globe nominations.