Salon Book Awards

The result is, as always, a list of favorites, books we loved even if they seem like long shots for making it onto any future Ivy League syllabi. (Nevertheless, we won’t be surprised if some of them do just that.) We had a weakness for books that made us laugh this year — and who can blame us? — but also books that wrestled with eternal questions, from the nature of philosophy to relations between the sexes. The best books do some of both, and here is our list of the ones that did it for us.

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FICTION

Austerlitz
By W.G. Sebald
300 pages
Random House

In a year filled to the brim with pointless deaths, the loss of W.G. Sebald in an automobile accident in December seems a cruelly excessive final note. It has become common to describe his much-praised novels as indescribable, but they are actually very much like having hours of the loveliest, most fascinating conversation of your life with a soft-spoken gentlemen met by chance on a train traveling from Vienna to Paris. Only after he gets off at his stop and leaves you to lean back in your seat and contemplate the seemingly aimless wanderings of his talk do the pieces fall into place and you realize he’s given you a portrait of a man, his life and, in some miraculous way, the soul of Europe itself. “Austerlitz,” which traces the friendship of two men who meet in just such a way, unspools the history of its title character, an art professor of mysterious parentage raised in Britain. That Austerlitz’s investigation into the riddle of his past leads him into the darkness at the center of his lost homeland doesn’t keep the novel from being suffused with an uncanny and unforgettable light.

Salon’s original review | More on W.G. Sebald

Bel Canto
By Ann Patchett
318 pages
HarperCollins

Never underestimate the skill required to execute a perfect entertainment. And don’t think that’s all Ann Patchett has done in writing “Bel Canto.” It’s the story of a motley international group — 57 men plus one woman, an operatic soprano with an incandescent voice — and the guerrillas who hold them hostage for months in the vice-presidential mansion of an unnamed Latin American nation, and in it Patchett weds a preposterously extravagant plot to her own mordant view of human nature. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and the alchemy found in the combination of opera’s overblown passions with the kind of sensibility that can’t ignore such practical matters as the need for clean underwear gives “Bel Canto” a glimmering tartness. Even the novel’s unlikeliest minor characters — a music-mad priest, a cranky Swiss hostage negotiator, the homebodyish vice president — breathe. With opera mixed up in the proceedings there has to be love here, and death as well, but the sum of those two elements is heartbreakingly unpredictable to the very end.

Salon’s original review

The Corrections
By Jonathan Franzen
566 pages
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The Lamberts sont nous, if by “us” you mean the average American family trying to figure out a way to live honorably in a world of leveraged buyouts, pharmaceutically engineered moods, dot-com scams, mix-and-match lifestyles and sexual identities, and the cult of Christmas. In this saga of a befuddled Midwestern family, Franzen manages to achieve something remarkable and possibly unprecedented: a merciless satirical look at contemporary life that’s also fundamentally generous and human. Epic yet intimate, smart but not cold, “The Corrections” is also a piece of mesmerizing prose, virtuosic enough to cause a reader to pause in admiration of a sentence or passage, but never so flashy that you feel the book is slowing down to let the author show off. Sure, we’ve heard cranky skeptics complain about the publicity surrounding this novel, but aside from a little contretemps with a certain talk show host, the “hype” mostly consists of lots and lots of radiant reviews. Why so many good reviews, the suspicious ask? Um, get over yourselves. The reason why so many people love this book is simple enough: It’s terrific.

Salon’s original review | An interview with Jonathan Franzen | More on Jonathan Franzen

John Henry Days
By Colson Whitehead
389 pages
Doubleday

John Henry was a late 19th-century folk hero, a hammer-wielding railroad worker of towering strength who challenged a steam drill to a steel-driving race and won. J. Sutter is a hack journalist halfheartedly going for the “junketeering” record by racking up the most consecutive days of scamming free food, drink and other perks. John Henry inspired a legendary ballad. J. gets hired by travel Web sites to write up festivals celebrating commemorative stamps — in this case, one honoring John Henry. Colson Whitehead’s brilliant, restless novel is about what happens when a cynical, opportunistic, media-steeped product of the Information Age gets rubbed up against the mythic dignity of America’s past. What does it mean to strive for something bigger than yourself in a world where one of your friends loses his eye to another writer’s finger in “a tragic ironic quotes accident”? The fact that both the old-time hero and the present-day freelancer are black only complicates and enriches the novel’s wit. Yes, Whitehead writes about race in a way that feels entirely fresh, but then, he writes about everything else that way, too.

Salon’s original review | More on Colson Whitehead

Stranger Things Happen
By Kelly Link
266 pages
Small Beer Press

An intrepid young woman described only as the Girl Detective, seeks her long-lost mother by paying a visit to the Underworld. A woman whose boyfriend went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and was last seen getting into the Snow Queen’s sleigh embarks on a bloody-minded journey with the intention of dragging him back — or at least of giving him a piece of her mind. A librarian falls in love with a girl whose parents, between the two of them, have a wooden nose, a wooden leg and a barnful of sinister black dogs. A not very good husband who can’t quite remember his wife’s name writes her woebegone letters from the deserted seaside hotel he’s beginning to suspect might be a waystop on the path to the next world. Besotted newlyweds watch a televised beauty pageant whose contestants seem not entirely human (especially Miss New Jersey, who has horns and a tail). Kelly Link’s exquisite stories mix the aggravations and epiphanies of everyday life with the stuff that myths, dreams and nightmares are made of. Some of them are very scary, others are immensely sad, many are funny and all of them are written in prose so flawless you almost forget how much elemental human chaos they contain.

Salon’s original review | An interview with Kelly Link

NONFICTION

Borrowed Finery
By Paula Fox
212 pages
Henry Holt

It’s a hard-knock life novelist Paula Fox recounts in this memoir, from being farmed out to a series of foster homes (in New York, Cuba, Hollywood) by her feckless parents to enduring the implacable enmity of her baffling mother to struggling as a young woman to survive in crummy jobs during the 1940s and ’50s, but this is no tale of woe. In fact, the tale is almost beside the point; “Borrowed Finery” consists of some of the most perfect prose published last year, as pristine and silvery as a mountain brook in the moonlight. It’s sometimes tempting just to let Fox’s pure sentences wash over you and rinse away the trashy, ephemeral jangle of contemporary life, but then you’d miss the author’s sly, ruthless wit and the way the young Paula’s subterranean rages build slowly to a conclusion all the more terrible for its understatement.

More on Paula Fox

John Adams
By David McCullough
751 pages
Simon & Schuster

The unlikely runaway success of this biography has drawn a host of quibblers and revisionists out of the woodwork. So be it; when it comes to interpreting the facts, history is really a matter of dueling stories, and whether or not our second president can be fairly called a “hypercritical pedant” or “narcissist” as some have claimed, without a doubt David McCullough tells the best story. He picks a tough row to hoe, seeking to make an appealing hero out of a rotund little Puritan who preferred his Massachusetts farm to the hurly-burly of the city. Even the celebrated matrimonial devotion of Adams and his wife, Abigail, while endearing and inspiring to some, lacks the tortured romanticism that makes the emotional lives of leaders like Jefferson so fascinating. Fortunately, Adams was right at the center of the greatest adventure of the past 300 years — the founding of the American republic — and McCullough makes you feel the precarious nature of the whole enterprise: the crushing odds, the desperate military retreats, the hazardous journeys by sea and land, the seeming impossibility of getting all the squabbling colonial ducks in a row, the vision demanded of those who seek to invent a government from scratch.

Seabiscuit: An American Legend
By Laura Hillenbrand
399 pages
Random House

Everyone had more or less given up on him, this homely racehorse with stubby legs from the wrong side of the Mississippi, and the two men who pledged to make a champion out of him were a couple of hard-luck cases themselves. By the time all three were done, Seabiscuit was the most famous living creature in America; in 1938 his name was mentioned more frequently in the newspapers than FDR’s. Damned if this isn’t about the corniest story in the world, but just try to resist Hillenbrand’s tale of the triumph of sheer equine gumption over adversity and the hoity-toity East Coast racing establishment with its favorite thoroughbred, the exquisitely beautiful War Admiral. (War Admiral’s contest with Seabiscuit is generally considered one of the greatest horse races of all time.) A dash of realism comes in the form of bleak tales of the grueling, risky lives of jockeys as well as their phenomenal athleticism. And then there are Hillenbrand’s accounts of the races themselves, fleet, lean and thrilling. You can almost feel your toes in the stirrups as the unstoppable Seabiscuit makes his fierce bid for the finish line.

Salon’s original review

Strip City
By Lily Burana
330 pages
Talk/Miramax Books

With a premise that makes it sound like one of publishing’s typical throwaway books about a sexy topic — a former stripper about to be wed makes one final ecdysiastic road trip across America — this memoir never stoops to clichés or easy choices. Burana keeps pushing herself to unearth the fundamental nature of her mercurial love-hate relationship with the work that helped her survive in her first years away from home, gave her a renegade subculture to satisfy her yen for rebellion and rattled her to the core by exposing her to the raw edge of human neediness. Like all rigorously honest works, “Strip City” is unlikely to suit anyone’s political agenda, but it’s so full of rowdy energy and unaffected soul-searching that only a hopeless ideologue could object to it. Furthermore, Burana can really write — her descriptions of the truck stops, dives and swank joints she travels through have all the slangy eloquence required by great American road stories.And she’s hilarious, a brainy, brassy dame with a penchant for heavy metal who sheds wisecracks left and right with an insouciance the rest of us can only envy.

Salon’s original review | An interview with Lily Burana

Wittgenstein’s Poker
By David Edmonds & John Eidinow
340 pages
HarperCollins

An account, as its subtitle explains, of a 10-minute argument between two great thinkers, this elegant little volume compresses a remarkable amount of history, psychology and philosophy into its 340 petite pages. The quarrel, between Karl Popper and Ludwig Wittgenstein, took place in a meeting room in Cambridge, England, in 1946, and Wittgenstein may or may not have shaken a fireplace poker at his adversary (eyewitnesses differ on this point). It’s the personalities of the two men — the preoccupied, quasi-aristocratic Wittgenstein and the scrappy, ambitious Popper; one worshipped by his followers, the other perceiving himself as snubbed — that leave the most powerful impression. Edmonds and Eidinow show us how the two men rose out of the peculiar milieu of assimilated Jewry in pre-War Vienna, a world of dizzying brilliance and culture now irretreivably lost. As for the subject of their fight — the question “Are there philosophical problems?” — the authors use it to limn one of the fundamental philosophical divides of the day with crystal clarity. While those who find reading Wittgenstein’s notoriously difficult “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” a snap may scorn this little exposition as unforgivably simplistic, for the rest of us it offers a delightful entrie into daunting territory, and perhaps an invitation to venture further in, as well.

There’s no doubt that escapism pays, especially when there’s plenty to escape from, but great books continue to be published and read, and many of these also provide welcome respite for jittery readers. Remember what it was like to slow down, take the phone off the hook and immerse yourself in a story, true or invented, that made the world around you disappear for hours on end? Or to give yourself the time to understand some important aspect of this world in a deeper and more comprehensive way than any newspaper or magazine can offer? Here is our annual list of 10 books — five fiction, five nonfiction — that brought us back to that experience.

In this distracted, anxious and superficial age, getting lost in a good book has begun to look like the very best way to get away from it all.

FICTION

2666 by Roberto Bolaño
An elusive German writer and the murders of hundreds of girls and women in a bleak town on the Mexican-U.S. border are the two mysteries at the core of this expansive, mesmerizing novel in five parts. The critical reputation of Bolaño, who died in 2003 at the age of 50, got a massive boost in the English-speaking world with the publication of “The Savage Detectives” last year; we were skeptics when it came to that novel, but “2666″ has made believers out of us. Bolaño pursues, with suave implacability, questions of art and evil through an immense web of stories, some humorously mundane, others as resonant and enigmatic as the great myths. On any page, you might be reminded of Borges or Melville or David Foster Wallace, but the totality is utterly original. Are the worst brutalities that humanity perpetrates redeemed or ameliorated to the slightest degree by our most sublime achievements? That’s the puzzle this novel circles as it winds through academic conferences and coroner’s reports, romantic triangles and gang killings, cafes and battlefields, with a light-footed and mournful curiosity that seems, despite the author’s abbreviated life, nothing less than infinite.

A Person of Interest by Susan Choi
In Choi’s Hitchcockian premise, an undistinguished Midwestern math professor finds himself the object of rumors and suspicion when a more celebrated colleague is killed by a mail bomber. Dr. Lee, a refugee of aristocratic descent from an unnamed Asian country, may be innocent of that crime, but he holds himself guilty of other, less actionable transgressions, and his pervasive discomfort with himself and everyone around him causes him to sink further and further into confusion and disgrace. A nuanced consideration of what it means to fit in, and of what we owe to the people around us, “A Person of Interest” eschews obvious answers. At once a tragedy of character and a tale of suspense, this novel is a seamless integration of the political and the personal, beautifully written and impeccably unsentimental.

The Likeness by Tana French
Ostensibly a detective novel, French’s follow-up to her 2007 novel, “In the Woods,” is, like that earlier book, willfully disobedient to the dictates of genre; French refuses to offer complete resolutions or strictly realistic scenarios. Cassie Maddox, the partner of the self-destructing detective who narrated “In the Woods,” is drawn into a ménage à cinq of college students living a seeming charmed existence in an Irish country house. One of the five, a girl who is Cassie’s doppelgänger and has been living under an alias Cassie once used as an undercover narcotics agent, turns up murdered in a ruined cottage. Cassie is given the unlikely task of pretending to be a woman who was pretending to be a woman whom Cassie once pretended to be. As you might expect, “The Likeness” wrestles with matters of identity and intimacy as its heroine comes to prefer this triply false life to her real one. The hypnotic prose and eerie atmosphere conspire to make this ostensible mystery novel much, much more than it appears to be.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen
Perhaps it’s some subtle shift in the zeitgeist, but “The Likeness” is not the only novel of complicated identity on our list this year. In Galchen’s wryly elegant tale, Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist, suddenly decides that his beloved wife, Rema, has been replaced by a near-perfect impostor. After sparring with the “false” Rema, he embarks on a continent-spanning search for the real one, winding up in Argentina, where the notion of disappearing loved ones acquires an even more painful resonance. In his quest, Leo is assisted by one of his own patients — a delusional fellow who claims to be on the lam from a cabal that manipulates the weather — and is guided by cryptic messages apparently sent by a distinguished meteorologist. If Tana French writes of the impossibility of understanding the full truth about ourselves, Galchen marvels over the hubris in thinking that we can ever really know those we love — and suggests that authenticity is more a matter of faith than of facts.

The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
This sprawling, satirical novel of intersecting suburban families is set in Sheffield, England, from 1974 to the mid-’90s, and its author is firmly committed to reproducing the textures of that world, from the pretentious hors d’oeuvres served by an aspiring middle-class housewife (“mushroom vol-au-vents”) to the white formica and smoked brown glass of a neighbor’s furniture “unit.” Yet somehow the very specificity of these details makes Hensher’s suburbia seem all the more universal, an archetypal field of dreams, seething with antsy and malign children, distracted husbands and yearning, straying wives who muddle their way from the swinging ’70s through the Thatcher years. American writers tend to approach suburban life with either savage ridicule or stricken solemnity, so Hensher’s humanism, equal parts humor and sympathy and embodied in a restless third-person perspective that gives every character’s viewpoint its due, feels especially welcome. Reading it is a bit like wandering through your old neighborhood, listening in on the thoughts of the residents in each house, finally able to apprehend the hilarious, pitiful and miraculous expanse of it all.

NONFICTION

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
Film critic Harris takes the five nominees for the best picture Oscar of 1967, and uses them as lenses to examine the tectonic changes that were taking place in the movie industry and American society as a whole. “Doctor Dolittle” represented the irrelevant bloat of the doomed studio system; “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” stood for right-thinking, middle-of-the-road liberalism; “In the Heat of the Night” showed how much (and how little) an African-American actor like Sidney Poitier could expect in the way of opportunity; “Bonnie and Clyde” embodied the birth of a hip new internationalism; and “The Graduate” spoke for youth culture and its romantic discontents. Harris retraces the very different stories behind the making of all five films, beginning around 1963, when two staffers at Esquire with no experience of Hollywood wrote a screenplay about a couple of Depression-era bank robbers for their idol, François Truffaut, and unwittingly ushered in a new approach to movie production. It seems astonishing that no one hit upon this premise earlier, but as Harris’ execution abundantly illustrates, no one could have done it better.

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer
No other book penetrates further into the black heart of the war on terror than Mayer’s masterly examination of the Bush administration’s erosion of civil liberties and human rights in the prosecution of that so-called war. Tapping published works by other journalists as well as her own reporting for the New Yorker on the administration’s efforts to justify the use of torture on detainees, Mayer makes sure that “The Dark Side” is about much more than just Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. She describes the process by which, after Sept. 11, a toxic combination of fear and arrogance infected the inner circles of the nation’s leadership — most notably Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive advisor David Addington, the architect of the administration’s notorious torture policies — leading to what Mayer persuasively describes as “the most dramatic, sustained and radical challenge to the rule of law in American history.” Though their reign is nearly over, the moral downfall of these men remains a lasting lesson for any leader, an example of the terrible dangers inherent in power and paranoia.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Part true-crime narrative, part cultural history, Summerscale’s exploration of a notorious case of child-murder in 1860 is above all an inquiry into our lasting fascination with detectives and detective stories. Her hero, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of the very first investigators at the newly formed Scotland Yard and a figure of fascination for such writers as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, was called in to solve a killing in a country house that eerily resembles a notorious mystery of our own time: the JonBenet Ramsey murder. What Whicher found out — but was ultimately unable to prove, to his lasting despair — undermined almost everything that nice middle-class families chose to believe about their own way of life. Summerscale uses the case to crack open not only the allure of the detective as a fictional diviner of guilt and innocence, but also the curious details and ugly truths about everyday Victorian life concealed behind the most respectable facades.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker
Much as we may decry and gripe about the phenomenon Walker calls “commercial persuasion,” marketing and advertising are omnipresent aspects of contemporary life, and Americans have a much more complex and ambivalent relationship with them than most of us are willing to admit. “Buying In” explores the bleeding edge of innovative marketing, from undercover shills touting a new line of booze in your local bar to hipsters appropriating a product like Pabst Blue Ribbon to millennial kids whose concept of art is the creation of their own brands. The implications of these examples are wide-ranging. A concept Walker calls “murketing,” in which advertisers refrain from establishing a mass-culture identity for a product and instead encourage various subcultures to project their own meanings onto it, may be the most helpful model for understanding the precedent-busting campaign of Barack Obama. Walker makes an exceptionally insightful and reflective guide to this brave new world, ever prepared to cajole his readers into thinking a little harder about cultural phenomena we take for granted and too all blithely write off as affecting everyone but ourselves.

The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order by Joan Wickersham
Wickersham’s father shot himself in 1991, apparently in despair over an impending business failure, but the real motivations of this Willie Lomanesque figure will never be known. Written in the form of an index, an acknowledgment of Wickersham’s inability to frame her father’s act in any conventionally linear form, this memoir is written in a cool, economical and ultimately piercing style utterly devoid of easy pathos or cliché. Anyone prone to facile dismissals of the memoir as literary high art should be silenced by the perfection of Wickersham’s prose and her ability to hold the facts and her feelings up to the light, turning them again and again to reveal yet another facet of grief, anger, love, pity and guilt.

But if the book world provided relatively little tabloid fodder in 2007, that doesn’t mean that graver problems aren’t afoot. The National Endowment for the Arts just released another of its depressing surveys of American reading habits, revealing that one in four of our fellow citizens had not read a single book in the preceding year. Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle’s Campaign to Save Book Reviews has been tirelessly documenting — and protesting — the withering away of book coverage in our magazines and newspapers.

What fragments can we shore up against this ruin? Well, there’s the single, powerful fact that in 2007, books remained the most consistently refreshing, illuminating, diverting, original and enriching sources of entertainment in our lives. This is Salon’s 11th best-books list, and it was as hard to whittle our short list of hundreds of titles down to just 10 as it has been every year for the past decade. And that’s after conflicts of interest obliged us to eliminate two terrific new books from former Salon editors — “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” by Salon founder David Talbot and Scott Rosenberg’s “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software.”

Our criteria for this list have always been a little idiosyncratic. We leave it to other critics to try to suss out which titles will wind up on college syllabuses or cited in footnotes by future generations. To make our list, a book has to keep us up late and be the first thing we reach for when we open our eyes in the morning. These are the books we thought about on the way to work and rushed through our dinner dates to get back to at night, the books we blocked out whole weekends to read and propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal. However beautiful an author’s prose or important his or her subject matter, it doesn’t go on our list unless we sigh every time we close the cover and just can’t wait to open it again. We hope you’ll agree that these titles fit the bill.

Video: Laura Miller on literary marriages

“The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz

The title character of Díaz’ first novel is an obese Dominican-American geek living in New Jersey, with a baleful, dying mother, a devoted punkette sister and a heart full of thwarted romance. With grace and brio, Díaz conjures a world that encompasses everything from streetwise Spanglish to Dungeons and Dragons, campus politics to immigrant family saga. And guess what? It all fits perfectly, because, as it turns out, there is no better analogy for Rafael Trujillo, the fearsome real-life Dominican dictator, than Tolkien’s Sauron — no matter how far Díaz extends the metaphor, it keeps on working; “What’s more sci-fi than Santo Domingo?” Oscar asks. And what fantasy could be more heartbreaking than the yearning of an oddball “ghetto nerd” (or anyone else for that matter) for perfect love?

“Sacred Games” by Vikram Chandra”

At the beginning of Chandra’s vast, electrifying second novel, Mumbai’s most notorious gangster dies in a strange, cube-shaped bunker after a shootout with the police; the rest of the book tells us why. The man in charge of unearthing the truth is a courtly, middle-aged Sikh police detective named Sartaj Singh, who follows the trail through a dirty, maddening, glorious city that rivals Dickens’ London in ruthlessness and vitality. Mumbai may be violent and trashy, drunk on Bollywood dreams and choking on its own smog, but it’s the real hero of this story; Chandra clearly loves it to distraction even when it horrifies him. The villain is not a criminal, really, but fanaticism in all its forms, and the battle is literally between life and death, between those who understand that this world is necessarily chaotic, flawed and painful and those whose craving for order, calm and purity make them so very, very dangerous.

“Then We Came to the End” by Joshua Ferris

“We, too, thought it would never end,” say a group of ad agency employees in late-20th-century Chicago, speaking of the Internet- fueled economic boom. Joshua Ferris, a former adman himself, has written his first novel entirely in the first-person plural, capturing the way a bunch of mismatched strangers, when thrown together in an office, can learn to function as a single, organic entity. Or not. “Then We Came to the End” is a deeper, sharper, sadder version of that popular Thursday-night sitcom, filled with recognizable types — the office intellectual staying late to work on his novel, the conspiracy theorist, the woman who knows all the gossip, the guy everybody distrusts, the talented boss they all regard with slightly awestruck incomprehension. There are intrigues over Aeron chairs and paranoia once the layoffs begin, as well as intimations of tragedy throughout. Against the odds, and half the time against the will of the people involved, a single, organic entity does emerge, but what to do with it? Ferris has taken one of the unsung experiences of modern life and delicately exposed its complicated, conflicted heart.

“Tree of Smoke” by Denis Johnson

The Vietnam novel to end all Vietnam novels, Denis Johnson’s celebrated (and misunderstood) epic takes all the genre’s clichés, from the dangerously naive CIA officer to the feral tunnel rats to the cigar-chomping colonel who thinks he can win this thing, and runs them through a blender. The result recasts the war not as a tale of American hubris and Cold War skullduggery gone wrong, not even as a tragedy belonging to a specific place or time, but as a titanic clash between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the universe and how it works. That collision plays out through shattering battle scenes and sweaty afternoons in tin-shack bars, through the after-dinner philosophizing of deluded spies and the calculations of villagers just trying to make it to the next planting season. Johnson’s magnificent vision is less tragic than cosmic, the story of history repeating itself not because we don’t understand, but repeating itself whether we understand it or not.

“The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” by Michael Chabon

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration briefly considered resettling Europe’s Jewish refugees in Alaska. Michael Chabon’s soulful alternate-history novel dreams up what the world might have looked like if that scheme had played out. In a bustling, if well-bundled, Yiddish-speaking community in Sitka, a burnt-out homicide cop named Meyer Landsman investigates the death of a junkie chess-player who might have been the promised Messiah, and gets on the bad side of the district’s Hassidim-run organized crime syndicate. The novel offers lots of genre fun — snappy dialogue, action and suspense — yet it’s all seamlessly married to a searching consideration of Jewish identity. What would it mean to be a Jew in a world where the Holocaust never happened and the state of Israel didn’t exist? Are human beings the products of history, or does our essence transcend it? These are weighty questions for a book that’s so entertaining, but Chabon’s themes never overload his frame. Like the very best dancers and magicians, he makes it look easy.

“The Father of All Things” by Tom Bissell

The two books about Vietnam on our list this year prompt a question: When is a war truly over? Can a soldier ever really “get out”? Tom Bissell‘s engrossing memoir about his relationship to his father, a Vietnam veteran, offers a sobering illustration of how a war’s legacy can extend across generations. Tom Bissell wasn’t born until after his father returned from Southeast Asia, yet in his mind the collapse of South Vietnam and the crumbling of his parents’ marriage are “endlessly connected.” At the heart of “The Father of All Things” is a journey the two men took together to Vietnam, 40 years after Bissell’s father last set foot in that country. By turns hilarious, grief-stricken, perplexed and enlightening, Bissell’s account of that trip offers a new understanding of the war, one designed for all those Americans who, though too young to remember it, still live in its shadow.

“Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations” by Georgina Howell

Born into Victorian wealth and propriety in 1860s Britain, Gertrude Bell abandoned convention in her 30s to become a mountain climber and explorer, crisscrossing the Arabian desert on her own in the years before World War I, excavating archaeological sites, befriending chieftains and sheiks and writing best-selling books about her adventures. Her political expertise and influence in the region were so prized by Winston Churchill that after the war she became, with T.E. Lawrence, the chief architect of modern Iraq. Unfortunately, her personal life was less successful; ill-fated love affairs and family tragedies took their toll. A woman of great physical courage, panache and intelligence (she spoke six languages, wrote and translated poetry, drew maps for the British Army and photographed ancient ruins), Bell is a dream subject for any biographer, and Howell turns her story into a ripping yarn, complete with detailed accounts of Bell’s early, life-and-death exploits while mountaineering in the Alps.

“Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA” by Tim Weiner

Before Sept. 11, most Americans (not to mention foreign nationals) would probably have described the Central Intelligence Agency as a puppet-master operation with eyes everywhere, skillfully manipulating world events from behind the scenes. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the revelations of faulty intelligence contributing to the buildup to the Iraq war, we’ve caught a glimpse of a different but equally troubling CIA. Tim Weiner’s fascinating and masterfully reported “Legacy of Ashes” locks this new image in place. It reveals an agency chronically and often disastrously short on solid intelligence, and all too prone to embarking on half-baked covert operations with little concern for the long-term consequences (or even the short-term ones). Weiner, working from impeccable sources, documents that the CIA’s recent bumblings represent more than just a temporary difficulty adjusting to the post-Cold War world; incompetence has been a major problem since the agency’s inception. The implications of this story are scary (America is in desperate need of a decent overseas intelligence service), but the telling is never less than compulsively readable.

“The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved” by Judith Freeman

Raymond Chandler — the supreme master of hard-boiled prose and founder of the bruised-romantic school of noir heroes — is also the poet laureate of the seedy side of Los Angeles. Judith Freeman, a novelist fascinated by the intersection between Chandler’s detective fiction and his real life, became curious about the writer’s unusual marriage to a woman almost 20 years his senior. Material on Cissy Chandler’s life is scarce (her husband burned all her papers after her death), so Freeman decided to exercise her fiction-writer’s skills on the clues that remain: a long inventory Cissy kept of Ray’s collection of glass animals, a remark he made about his wife’s habit of doing housework in the nude, a handful of photographs and poems, etc. Most evocative are the excursions Freeman makes to houses and apartments the Chandlers rented throughout the city (the couple moved a lot), extended wanderings through a city that seems both lost and timeless. Her version of L.A. is as moodily unforgettable as Chandler’s, a fitting tribute to the “new kind of American loneliness” born there and the man who made it his muse.

“The World Without Us” by Alan Weisman

“Imaginative” is not a word customarily applied to environmental reporting, but Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us” deserves that praise. Rather than trying to dent our apathy with dire images of melting glaciers and megahurricanes, he takes the opposite approach, describing how quickly and utterly the planet would be changed if the human race simply vanished. Within days, New York’s subway tunnels would flood, leading to the corrosion of steel supports and the eventual collapse of the streets: Lexington Avenue “becomes a river.” Suburban subdivisions fare no better, shattered by frozen pipes and devoured by mold and termites. Our cats would do just fine, but the dogs … not so much (too dependent on humanity and vulnerable to larger predators). The earth’s air and water would soon sweeten without us around to poison it, but our plastic crap, all those bottles and bags, will be sticking around until some microbe figures out how to turn them into lunch. For some reason, this doomsday scenario is more thrilling than depressing, perhaps because it beguiles us into doing what often seems beyond our power — picturing a much healthier planet — and considering a less drastic way to get there.

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