Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto"

Try as I might to read about other topics, books on food seem to find their way to my bedside table, and 2008 brought a couple of exceptional ones: "Stuffed and Starved" by Raj Patel and "The End of Food" by Paul Roberts both explore the international dimensions of the food issue, and helped me to understand how decisions made about food and farming (and energy) in the U.S. affect eaters all over the world.

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Then again, 2008 was a year when all conventional wisdom went south, and we end it with layoffs in many of the largest publishing companies and an announcement from Houghton/Harcourt, a recently merged fusion of two venerable houses, that, for the time being, they will not be acquiring any new manuscripts. (Publishers have imposed informal buying freezes in the past, but announcing it publicly is almost unprecedented.) On the other hand, the Hachette Book Group, its coffers fattened by the "Twilight" series of teen vampire romance novels and James Patterson’s unnervingly productive thriller-industrial complex, is dishing out bonuses at a time when even hedge fund managers feel lucky to still be getting a paycheck.

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Tom Bissell (author, "The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son and the Legacy of Vietnam")

Book: I read a number of books this year that impressed me (Joshua Ferris' "Then We Came to the End"), frustrated me (Robert Draper's "Dead Certain"), moved me (Dave Eggers' "What Is the What") and delighted me (Jack Pendarvis' "Your Body Is Changing"), but the best book I read this year was Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke." Publishing a book about Vietnam in the same year as Denis Johnson, as I did, leaves one feeling a little like being crucified next to Jesus: in other words, nice try. Not only does it have the most impossibly beautiful and devastating first two and a half pages I've ever read, it creates a world that seems less imagined than opened for entry.

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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.

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"Sweet and Low: A Family Story" by Rich Cohen

Cohen's maternal grandfather, a former short-order cook, invented the sugar packet and Sweet 'n' Low, the artificial sweetener that made him a millionaire. Cohen's mother was disinherited by her own mother, and his Uncle "Marvelous" Marvin, who took over the company, got into trouble with the FBI -- a little thing they call tax evasion and criminal conspiracy. Then there's Aunt Gladys, who hasn't stepped out of the family home in Midwood, Queens since the Nixon administration, yet still manages to pull all the strings. With this book, Cohen aims to nail down what really happened in his clan's highly mythologized saga. His digressions on the history of, say, Brooklyn or sugar or the Walburg banking dynasty, might strike some as padding, but he describes it all with an economical, pugnacious wit that never falters. The heart of the book, though, is a long, complicated and darkly funny family feud encompassing intrigues, sabotage and widely divergent stories about what really happened and when, and of course, who it can all be blamed on.

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She looks familiar. I am almost certain that I saw her in the parking lot an hour ago, when I returned from the convenience store. I saw her standing by the stairs, and I smiled at her. I tell her that I do have a phone.

"My car broke down on the street," she says. Behind her, it is nearly night. I have been studying most of the afternoon. "Can you let me use your phone to call the police?" she asks.

I do not know why she wants to call the police for a car in need of repair, but I consent. She steps inside. I begin to close the door but she holds it open. "I'll just be a second," she says. It does not make sense to me to leave the door open but I do so because she desires it. This is her country and not yet mine.

"Where's the phone?" she asks.

I tell her my cell phone is in my bedroom. Before I finish the sentence, she has rushed past me and down the hall, a hulk of swishing nylon. The door to my room closes, then clicks. She has locked herself in my bedroom. I start to follow her when I hear a voice behind me.

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"What Is the What" by Dave Eggers

The unusual provenance of this novel -- Eggers has written it in the first-person voice of a real man, Valentino Achak Deng, and all of the events in the story are true, although not all of them happened to Deng -- is complicated. The result is sublime simplicity, the ego-less conveyance by Eggers of Deng's plain-spoken, gentle, world-weary but never hopeless voice. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, Deng saw his village destroyed by Arab militiamen as a little boy and fled alone into a chaotic landscape before joining a troupe of similarly dispossessed boys on an epic journey on foot to a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Hunger, thirst, lions, crocodiles and soldiers on both sides of Sudan's civil war harried all of them and killed some. Deng finally made it to the promised land of America, but we know from the start that it proved to be no paradise. The novel's framing device -- Deng imagines telling his life story to thieves who beat and bind him while robbing his house and to the jaded officials who deal with the crime's aftermath -- is inspired; instead of making him pitiful, this silent appeal emphasizes Deng's remarkable, ineradicable dignity.

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Fiction:

"Special Topics in Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl

This year, from the sea of debut literary novels, Marisha Pessl's "Special Topics in Calamity Physics" emerged with all the noise its title portends. A sprawling, ambitious and hilarious coming-of-age story, "Calamity Physics" is narrated by 16-year-old Blue van Meer, a prodigious and precocious young woman who rattles off references to books and movies with the speed of a Gilmore Girl and wins us over with the ever-gimlet eye she casts on school, boys and the confused adults that surround her. "Special Topics" follows Blue through her senior year as the new kid at a private school, where she's swept up with a group of glamorous odd-duck students in the thrall of an eccentric and charismatic film teacher. There's teen stuff (romances, jealousy); grown-up stuff (a terrific send-up of the academy); and mystery stuff (murder, secret societies), all of which combined make for a thrilling ride. But Pessl dazzles most at the end, when she weaves every silken thread in her book together for a surprise ending that marks her not only as a clever entertainer, but a genuine, and talented, new novelist.

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It was a great year for fiction, mostly because of a handful of deep, true, funny and otherwise wonderful books rather than an abundance of pretty darn good ones. Nonfiction, which usually sneaks up and steals our hearts away at the end of the year, offered fewer enthralling page-turners and more substantive fare. Since we've always made it a policy to offer you a 10-best list without spinach -- noble endeavors are welcome but they must be slog-free -- we wound up disqualifying many worthy, important and otherwise influential tomes if we felt they couldn't beguile us through this year's especially unsettled hours of air travel.

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Although almost everything else about Salon.com has changed (including that domain name) since we drew up our very first list in 1996, we're still sticking by the mission we set for ourselves back then. The 10 books we present to you here aren't necessarily the most critically acclaimed, or by the most widely revered authors, and you won't find many bestsellers among them, either. But we loved them, we couldn't put them down; we rifled through their pages like a thief through a jewel box, knowing that we'd found treasure.

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Nonfiction

"Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War" by Mark Bowden

"Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley" by Peter Guralnick

"Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World" by Mark Fritz

"Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette" by Judith Thurman

"Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption" by Lisa Belkin

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Now she was no more than a bundle of preoccupations. She avoided the onset of despair with motiveless shopping and cleaning, improving her grasp of good cuisine and abandoning any trust in Self-Help books.

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Things had deteriorated so badly that up in the C2 bird Harrell was considering just releasing the prisoners, their prize, the supposed point of this mission and of all this carnage. He instructed the Delta units on foot now closing in on the first crash site:

-- As soon as we get you linked up with the Uniform element throw all the precious cargo. We're going to try and get force down to the second crash site.

The voices from various helicopters now trying to steer poor McKnight recorded the frustration of his fruitless twists and turns.

-- Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four. Next right. Next right! Alleyway! Alleyway!

-- They just missed their turn.

-- Take the next available right, Uniform.

-- Be advised they are coming under heavy fire.

-- Uniform Six Four, this is Romeo Six Four.

-- God damn it, stop! God damn it, stop!

-- Right turn! Right turn! You're taking fire! Hurry up!

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Yes. I've noted it.

Because she stays in bed too late. That's one thing.

Maybe they do, Raymond said. Young girls might all do like that, by their natures.

Till nine-thirty in the morning? I went back into the house for something the other day and she was just getting up.

I don't know, Raymond said. He looked out over the rattling hood of the pickup. I reckon she's just getting bored and lonesome.

Maybe, Harold said. But if she is, I don't know if that's good for the baby.

What isn't good for the baby?

Feeling lonesome and sorry like that. That can't be good for him. On top of staying up all manner of hours and sleeping all morning.

Well, Raymond said. She needs her sleep.

She needs her regular sleep. That's what she needs. She needs regular hours.

How do you know that?

I don't know that, Harold said, not for a certified fact. But you take a two-year-old heifer that's carrying a calf. She's not up all night long, restless, moving around, is she.

What are you talking about? Raymond said. How in hell does that apply to anything?

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"Knife," said Minna. "No biggie."

"You're gonna be all right?" Coney was asking and willing it at once.

"Oh, yeah. Great."

"Sorry, Frank."

"Who?" I said. "Who did this?"

Minna smiled. "You know what I want out of you, Freakshow? Tell me a joke. You got one you been saving, you must."

Minna and I had been in a joke-telling contest since I was thirteen years old, primarily because he liked to see me try to get through without ticcing. It was rare that I could.
"Let me think," I said.

"It'll hurt him if he laughs," said Coney to me. "Say one he knows already. Or one that ain't funny."

"Since when do I laugh?" said Minna. "Let him tell it. Couldn't hurt worse than your driving."

"Okay," I said. "Guy walks into a bar." I was watching blood pool on the backseat, at the same time trying to keep Minna from tracking my eyes.

"That's the ticket," rasped Minna. "Best jokes start the same fucking way, don't they, Gilbert? The guy, the bar."

"I guess," said Coney.

"Funny already," said Minna. "We're already in the black here."

"So guy walks into a bar," I said again. "With an octopus. Says to the bartender 'I'll bet a hundred dollars this octopus can play any instrument in the place.'"

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Margaret really messes up his head. When it gets really intolerable, he goes to the latrine (so that the staff will not break in on him at an inopportune moment) and executes a Manual Override. But one thing he learned in Hawaii was that a Manual Override is unfortunately not the same as the real thing. The effect wears off too soon.

While he's waiting for it to wear off, he gets a lot of solid math done. Alan provided him with some notes on redundancy and entropy, relating to the voice encryption work he is currently doing in New York City. Waterhouse works through that stuff and comes up with some nice lemmas which he lamentably cannot send to Alan without violating both common sense and any number of security procedures. This done, he turns his attention to cryptology, pure and raw. He spent enough time at Bletchley Park to realize just how little of this art he really understood.

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He moved into an apartment where a cousin had already holed up. His name was Mursad, and he was twenty-one years old. He was a big guy with a quick temper, and he had a good reason to run: He fought for a while with the Bosnian army that was trying to keep the Serbs from overrunning the country. He had a reputation as a killer of Serbs. He was a wanted man.

Ernad spent six month inside the apartment. In February 1994, he finally went out one afternoon to buy some bread at a bakery that was two minutes away. He got the bread and then went to buy some cigarettes at a place just a short walk from the apartment.

He was standing in a line at this kiosk on the street when he saw a red van roll by. Ernad felt his knees go weak when it pulled up to a curb nearby. Six or seven cops jumped out of the back and strolled up to the people standing in line.

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They came in at dusk to doze by the hearth. "Here I am again," writes Colette, "facing my fire, my solitude, and myself." The snowfall and the dying of a tumultuous year made her pensive, and she gave herself over to reveries of seasons past, "the form of the years," "the winters of the childhood." When she roused herself, she found her shepherd bitch "steaming like a footbath" at her feet, the bulldog and the gray cat sleeping, and she was "astonished," she writes, "to have changed and aged while I was dreaming."

There are many suicides in Colette's work -- a fact she never noticed, she told a friend in the 1930s, until it was pointed out to her by a reader. Juliette's isn't among them, but it sharpened her consciousness of mortality. Sitting by the fire that New Year's Day, she held up her hand mirror and found, in the "dark water of the glass," the first fine "claw marks" of age. What makes them so poignant to her in the French sense of the work -- poindre means to pierce -- was that she could still see beyond them to the "adorable," "velvety," "elastic," "rosy girl" who was gone forever.

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How cheerful to move on your birthday, she thought, with boxes of surprises to unwrap. It didn't matter as much that her only gift for her twenty-second birthday was five dollars from her mother, tucked into a Hallmark card. There was nothing from John, yet, and the children could hardly be expected to shop. So her own belongings would have to do, and she felt a childlike thrill when the newspaper fell away and revealed something that belonged in a bedroom or bathroom, because it meant another sprint up and down the stairs. Seven steps up. Pause. Turn. Six more steps, and you were upstairs. Those thirteen steps made this a real house, not just another apartment. And, just maybe, a real house would lead to a real life, with a man who was home, not in prison, and two children who did something besides try her patience.

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