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Sunday, Oct 12, 2008
Magic is afoot in England, white slaves are held captive in the Sahara, sisters are haunted by a lost sibling -- and more literary feasts.
Dec 7, 2004 | This year, nonfiction books captured the bestseller lists and the headlines, but a particular kind of nonfiction. As urgent and necessary as those political titles felt -- and often were -- at the time, it's hard to imagine them seeming quite so important in a year or two. In the meantime, almost underground, publishers big and small continued to put out books that we eagerly recommend to you, even if you happen to be reading these words months or years from now, at the end of a meandering Web search.
The 10 books listed here were chosen from lists recommended by Salon staffers and friends, stumbled over in teetering stacks of review copies or pressed into our hands by persons with motives unknown. What we do know is that once we started reading them, the real world tended to fall away, the phone went unanswered, magazines and newspapers piled up and our TiVo queues overflowed. That's our first criterion for selection: These books made us want to put everything else on hold.
Though we read some splendid polemics (Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas" springs to mind), we were more taken with books whose authors were willing to tell us things we, and even they, might not want to hear. "The 9/11 Commission Report," surely among the best-written government documents in American history, is as riveting as they say, but in the end its official status gave it strengths (and weaknesses) that made it impossible to compare to other nonfiction books -- if we had a special awards category, that's where we'd put it. Instead, we found ourselves taken with the work of an innovative, independent scholar who shed new light on a much-documented crime and a historian who unearthed a forgotten courtroom drama, among others.
It was not a particularly strong year for American fiction -- some of the most celebrated titles didn't make our list. Fortunately, Brits and other foreigners helped pick up the slack, in novels that leap over boundaries of genre and nationality as well as more intimate divides. The ostensibly serious books on this list are more fun than we anticipated, and the fun ones turned out to rest on unexpected reservoirs of wisdom and emotion. We couldn't ask for anything more, and hope that you'll agree. Happy reading.
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