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.

Read an interview with the author and an excerpt | Read a review | Buy this book

Nonfiction:

“Fun Home” by Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel calls her graphic memoir a “family tragicomic,” though the story in a lesser artist’s hands would probably have come out simply sad. The book is an investigation of her own childhood, spent in the ornate Victorian house her father obsessively restored and maintained, and the way her understanding of that childhood was overturned after she came out to her parents at 19. The return whammy, delivered by her mom, was that her father had a lifelong history of affairs with men, including some of the teenage boys in the small Pennsylvania town where their family had lived for generations. A few weeks later, her father was killed in a highway accident that Bechdel believes was a form of suicide. Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip (the divine “Dykes to Watch Out For”) have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; “Fun Home” shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love — usually all at the same time and never without a pervasive, deeply literary irony about the near-impossible task of staying true to yourself, and to the people who made you who you are.

Read an interview with the author and an excerpt | Read a review | Buy this book

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What was your favorite book of 2006? E-mail us a few sentences about it at bestbooks@salon.com before Thursday and we’ll publish your picks at the end of the week.

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.

To find them, we first gathered recommendations from Salon’s staff, regular critics and friends. Then we sifted through piles of books so vast that Laura hasn’t been able to close her office door for weeks, read until our eyes ached and our heads were numb, picked up each new volume feeling like we’d rather do just about anything else than open it. And in spite of the jaded state of our print-addled minds, a handful of books still had the power to enchant us. They made us forget our neglected friends and family, the tempting movies that came and went unseen, even the madness of the presidential election, and transported us to worlds both fabulous and familiar and introduced us to people we’ll never forget. We hope they’ll do the same for you.

F I C T I O N

Abe: A Novel of the Young Lincoln
By Richard Slotkin
Henry Holt, 478 pages

Cultural historian Richard Slotkin set himself the task of taking the handful of known facts about Abraham Lincoln’s early life and imagining, in novel form, how Lincoln came to transcend the violence, inertia and racism of his “white trash” background. The result is, yes, partly an unstinting account of hardships and racial hatred among the 19th century American rural underclass, but it’s also a grand frontier adventure (with a climactic trip down the Mississippi as a homage to “Huckleberry Finn”), starring the man who comes closer than any figure in American history to being a genuine folk hero brought to life.

For all his titanic inner struggles, his dark rages and his great destiny, Slotkin’s Abe is tremendously endearing. Whatever we’d like to believe, history tells us that poverty and oppression tend to make people mean and small, not noble. Lincoln was one of the rare ones to take a higher path. Because of that, his heritage belongs to the whole of humanity, not just Americans. With this novel, Slotkin wipes the cosmetic sheen of patriotism off Abe’s face, blows off the dust of portentous history and gives him back to us, fresh.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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Being Dead
By Jim Crace
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages

Joseph and Celice, two long-married zoologists in their 50s, are murdered during a romantic moment on an English beach. As their bodies lie decomposing, Joseph’s hand still grasping Celice’s ankle, Jim Crace’s bold and affecting novel begins its work. Crace intertwines several threads: He looks backward over the happy moments, the disappointments and the compromises of Joseph and Celice’s lives, reconstructs the events of the day on which they met their deaths, offers a naturalist’s view of what’s happening to the corpses and tells the story of how their sullen, still-rebellious adult daughter learns that they’ve been killed and reassesses her own life.

Written in an assured, thoughtful, canny voice, “Being Dead” glows with surprising humor, not least in the many zoological details Crace invents to fill out his protagonists’ careers. This unique novel’s focus on two deaths becomes, paradoxically, a way to celebrate life: This life may be all there is, Crace suggests, but if we allow ourselves to love and be loved, and to notice the teeming world around us, we’re part of something larger than ourselves.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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Lying Awake
By Mark Salzman
Alfred A. Knopf, 182 pages

A simple, uncluttered novel about the unfathomable challenges of the spiritual path, “Lying Awake” takes Sister John of the Cross, a Carmelite nun who lives cloistered in a Los Angeles monastery, through the hardest decision of her life. The nun suffers terrible headaches that give way to ecstatic mystical visions and manic bouts of writing. Her poetry and essays have brought her the respect of her fellow sisters and much-needed funds to the monastery itself; her books have become bestsellers. Then she learns that all of it — headaches, visions and creative furor — are the result of a form of epilepsy caused by a small but operable lesion on her brain. Should she agree to surgery that will end her increasingly unmanageable seizures but will also destroy their gifts? Does the bodily source of her visions nullify their spiritual significance?

Salzman sets Sister John’s dilemma against the background of the carefully rendered routine of the cloister and a religious philosophy that views life as a series of often baffling tests. But “Lying Awake,” written by a non-Catholic, is about more than just the trials of faith; it speaks to all who pledge their lives to a mystery — whether it’s art, or justice, or even something as commonplace as marriage — and find themselves transformed as a result.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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The Name of the World
By Denis Johnson
HarperCollins, 129 pages

This slim, nearly perfect novel is narrated by Michael Reed, a man who has been suspended in a state of grief in the four years since his wife and young daughter were killed in a car crash. He’s at the end of a temporary appointment teaching history at a picture-perfect Midwestern university, and it’s slowly sinking in that he’s also at the end of his rope. Alternately drifting, stumbling and crashing through the final days of his brief academic career, he decides to start making contact with the people around him, including a raunchy, free-spirited female student who takes him into some unexpected territory.

Denis Johnson nimbly merges his serious themes — loss, sorrow, the possibility of personal transformation — with a feather-light satire of academic silliness and inertia. “The Name of the World” is so graceful and easygoing, its prose so full of charm and sly humor, that you barely register its great ambition; Johnson’s poignant, devastating gravity sneaks up and taps politely on your shoulder.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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White Teeth
By Zadie Smith
Random House, 448 pages

Zadie Smith’s first novel is an exhilarating, hilarious fictional ride through contemporary London. Smith has created a large and irresistible cast of characters, chief among them the plodding, good-natured Archie and the crafty, proud Samad, a working-class white and a Bengali Muslim who are best friends from their World War II days. Archie’s young Jamaican wife, Clara, who’s escaped a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing, manages to befriend Samad’s fierce, shrewd wife, Alsana. The two couples’ children, the half-black Irie and the Bengali twins Millat and Magid, navigate the social minefields of an adolescence unfolding between cultures, defying their parents’ expectations in continually surprising ways. By turns whimsical, satirical and wise, always generous, “White Teeth” makes multiculturalism seem not just an inevitable outcome of British colonial history but a ticket to the kind of deeper awareness of human nature that makes us want to read novels in the first place.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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N O N F I C T I O N

An American Story
By Debra Dickerson
Pantheon, 279 pages

A brainy, curious black girl growing up poor in the de facto segregation of north St. Louis enlists in the Air Force, becomes an officer and intelligence expert, moves on to Harvard Law School, then becomes a successful journalist: Debra Dickerson has had an “only in America” life, but her remarkable book is much more than a patriotic fairy tale. In a society where blacks and whites so seldom speak frankly about race, Dickerson has a voice you want to keep listening to.

As she details the evolution of her politics from an Ayn Rand-flavored neoconservatism to her current left-leaning stance, Dickerson, a former Salon staff writer, is always sharp, witty and intellectually honest. She says things no one else will say, calling out hypocrisy and self-interest wherever she sees it. She tells her close-knit family’s story with a potent mixture of brutal candor and sympathetic warmth: her father’s toxic blend of love and cruelty, her mother’s struggle to raise six kids with an unstable and domineering husband and her siblings’ battles to break free of the low expectations bequeathed to them as the descendants of sharecroppers. “An American Story” is both a moving account of an extraordinary woman’s life and a deft wide-angle view of the American racial landscape.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams: A Memoir
By Nasdijj
Houghton Mifflin, 216 pages

The story of a mixed-race son of nomadic alcoholic parents, a man who has suffered homelessness and mourns the death of his adoptive Native American son from fetal alcohol syndrome, this memoir sounds like the kind of guiltathon that liberal readers like to flay themselves with periodically. And make no mistake, Nasdijj doesn’t think much of white people — although he’s only half Navajo himself and often finds himself rejected by Native Americans for looking white.

What he is, unquestionably, is a writer of tremendous power who seems to have taken apart the English language and put it back together again to make something rich, strange and utterly unique. There are echoes of ballads here, and fragments of the speeches of long-dead chiefs, but mostly this is a voice that matches the broken, lunar beauty of the Western landscape like no other. The passage in which Nasdijj huddles with his son in a forest cabin while a male grizzly kills a female and cubs nearby (“in the infinite moonglade darkness by the river”) is alone worth the price of admission.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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The Boxer Rebellion
By Diana Preston
Walker & Co., 352 pages

Despite its somewhat utilitarian title, Diana Preston’s story of the siege and rescue of the diplomatic community in Beijing during the Boxer uprising is a nail-biting example of narrative history at its best. The muddled meaning of the peasant-initiated rebellion (partly the result of legitimate fears about foreign-led industrialization, partly inspired by fears that Christian missionaries were stealing Chinese body parts and fetuses) takes a back seat to the race against time as the international relief forces fight ambushes, crippling heat and conflicting political agendas on their way to liberate the captives.

Behind the barricades, cowardice and courage blossom in surprising places as food supplies dwindle (one chapter is called “Horsemeat and Hope”) and the bombardment by the Chinese troops intensifies. The drama includes several memorable historical figures, from the young Herbert Hoover and his fearless wife to the formidably Machiavellian empress dowager, Tzu Hsi. Preston knows precisely which colorful details (the British lady who congratulates herself for not spilling the cup of tea she was handing to a patient when a shell flies right through the hospital, a valiant pony nicknamed “The Torpedo”) will spice up this masterful mix of history, gossip, crystal-clear military strategy and ironic observations about colonial and imperial politicking — and she keeps the pot at an irresistibly lively boil throughout.

Excerpt | Order a copy

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Pontius Pilate
By Ann Wroe
Random House, 384 pages

We’ll probably never know much for certain about the identity of the man who sentenced Jesus to death, but Ann Wroe turns what few clues there are into an intoxicating meditation on an inadvertently colossal figure. She wrests telling details out of the few surviving historical accounts of Pontius Pilate’s undistinguished stint as governor of Judea, and she teases out the essence of his character and personal dilemmas from his few recorded political acts and from his inability to figure out how to please both his Jewish subjects and his Roman superiors.

Her book abounds with small gems of observation, such as the sloppy lettering on a plaque Pilate had engraved with his name, which Wroe makes into an almost touching example of his vulnerability and incompetence. She also coolly and meticulously scrutinizes the biblical accounts of Pilate’s encounter with Jesus, and she weaves into her tale the mythical and literary Pilates who have sprung up over the centuries. Besides shedding light on a fascinating historical mystery, “Pontius Pilate” is a feat of sheer intellectual derring-do: a biography forged from the slenderest material that gives the impression of fullness and amplitude.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Original Salon review

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The Social Lives of Dogs: The Grace of Canine Company
By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Simon & Schuster, 255 pages

We’re not dog owners — in fact, we wouldn’t even call ourselves dog lovers — but a few pages into Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’ account of her “multi-species” household and we were hopelessly enthralled. A patient and intuitive observer, like all great naturalists, Thomas also shows a novelist’s skill with character; her description of each dog that enters her family and negotiates its complex hierarchies blends a generous consideration for their intelligence (she maintains that they can understand jokes) with a respect for the peculiar rules of their tribe (a cardinal dog law: “The elders show the way”).

These canines, under her attentive eye, emerge as full-fledged individuals, each with a fascinating and often conflicted bundle of traits, from the noble foundling Sundog to the insecure purebred Misty to the socially ambitious part-dingo Sheilah. Thomas never forgets that her mission is to justify the ways of Dog to Man, but in the process she makes the differences between the two seem less a source of confusion than of delight.

Excerpt | Order a copy | Salon author profile

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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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We confess we didn’t begin the process of choosing our 10 favorite books of 1999 with quite the enthusiasm we felt in the past three years of the Salon Book Awards. Is it millennial malaise, we wondered, that caused most of the readers we asked for suggestions to murmur listlessly, “I didn’t really read anything that blew me away this year”?

Of course, everyone had at least one exception to that ennui, and many of the books on our final list were the sole bright spot in some readers’ otherwise lackluster ventures between the covers. Others we like to consider our own “discoveries,” books we picked up with a sense of duty and put down with a sigh of profound satisfaction. Some of them, like Lisa Belkin’s “Show Me a Hero” and Mark Fritz’s “Lost on Earth,” went bafflingly unrecognized (in Belkin’s case, even by Salon) when first published. Others, like Stewart O’Nan’s “A Prayer for the Dying,” weren’t greeted with the kind of fanfare we passionately feel they deserve.

This, of course, was the year that J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books took over the bestseller lists with greater tenacity than any student radical occupying a dean’s office ever showed. We loved the “Harry Potter” books, too, and heartily recommend them to adults and children alike — but you didn’t really need us to tell you that, did you?

Each title on our 1999 list is one we wouldn’t hesitate to press into the hands of skeptical friends and relatives with the fevered recommendation of bibliophiles everywhere: “You’ve got to read this.” Some are chilling, some hilarious, others moving, but all of them had us spellbound, reluctantly looking up from their pages after hours of reading with the conviction that books like these are the reason we got into this daft line of work in the first place.

FICTION

Cryptonomicon

By Neal Stephenson

Avon, 928 pages

You don’t have to follow every kink in the Byzantine plot of Stephenson’s tour de force novel (thank God) to enjoy it thoroughly. “Cryptonomicon” juxtaposes a handful of eccentric mathematical geniuses enlisted as cryptographers in World War II with a band of contemporary high-tech entrepreneurs trying to set up a “data haven” in a remote jungle island near the Philippines. And while the book’s primary concern (beyond the allure of secrecy) seems to be the elaborately artful rituals of deceit that both war and business necessitate, Stephenson’s novel is also both a the-way-we-live-now portrait of the new information economy and a ripping World War II adventure that includes a grueling trek through the jungle and a riveting expedition to salvage a sinking submarine. It’s a hell of a ride that throws in, among other delights, theories of cryptography, mathematical charts of the sexual appetite and various famous figures from the birth of computing for good measure.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Author Interview

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Motherless Brooklyn
By Jonathan Lethem
Doubleday, 311 pages

It’s a mystery with a solution that won’t surprise anybody, but months after you’ve read it what you remember is not the outcome but the endearing central character, Lionel “Freakshow” Essrog, a would-be private eye with Tourette’s syndrome. Lionel’s feverish brain sends the standard obscenities spewing out of his helpless mouth, but what fascinates Lethem about Tourette’s is its obsessive-compulsive mauling and molding of language; he turns pathology into poetry and gives his jittery, galumphing narrator a poet’s sensitivity. The story of this lost soul and his hunt for the killer of the penny-ante thug who rescued him from a Brooklyn orphanage is too sad and strange to sit comfortably in the contours of a genre novel, but the originality of Lethem’s hero and the sputtering joy of his tic-pocked language take the book to a level that not many novels, genre or otherwise, can match.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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Original Bliss
By A.L. Kennedy
Alfred A Knopf, 214 pages

An abused wife who’s lost her faith; a brilliant self-help guru addicted to violent porn: Although “Original Bliss” is, deep down, a conventional love story, you never get the feeling that you’ve been there before. In this funny, brutal and wonderfully touching book, Glaswegian novelist A.L. Kennedy doesn’t shy away from the big questions, but under her hard intelligence beats a heart of cotton candy. The book is a page-turner that teases you until the very end with the question: Can these two people, so wildly unlike and so clearly made for each other, escape their demons, spiritual and sexual, in each other’s damaged arms?

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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Plainsong
By Kent Haruf
Alfred A. Knopf, 301 pages

A schoolteacher’s wife leaves him, and their sons (9 and 10) have to learn how to get along with her gone. A pregnant teenager, thrown out of her house, takes refuge with two ornery old bachelor ranchers, whose initial distress gives way in time to helpless, comical love. If Kent Haruf’s profoundly simple and sentimental novel about a few decent people in an unremarkable High Plains town had hit a single false note, the whole delicate structure would have crumbled. But not the least of the book’s miracles is the matter-of-fact lightness with which it sustains its melancholy sweetness; the greatest may be the ease (or seeming ease) with which it reconciles the all but irreconcilable legacies of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon review

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A Prayer for the Dying

By Stewart O’Nan
Henry Holt and Company, 195 pages

Stewart O’Nan’s short novel takes place some years after the Civil War, in the bucolic town of Friendship, Wis., which with little warning finds itself quarantined during a catastrophic diphtheria epidemic and simultaneously threatened by an advancing fire. The narrator and Job-like hero — Friendship’s sheriff, preacher and undertaker all in one — has to make bitter choices, sealing off the town (and, thus, escape) as he watches his friends and loved ones die. And then he is left to learn that even the hardest choices can still be the wrong ones. The beauty and the horror are inextricably, almost obscenely joined; few novelists have gazed as unblinkingly on that union as O’Nan does in this great and shattering book.

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NONFICTION

Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
By Mark Bowden
Atlantic Monthly Press, 356 pages

A real nail-biter, Mark Bowden’s account of the 1993 raid on Mogadishu that resulted in the deaths of 18 American servicemen and more than 500 Somalis has been called one of the most accurate accounts of combat ever. With no experience in battle and little more with battle scenes, we can only testify that it’s a dazzlingly lucid, hair-raising depiction of total chaos. Bowden presents the conflict from dozens of points of view, including those of Somali civilians and of the United States’ elite Delta Force operators. If the ice-and-death adventure of Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” struck you as a bit slow, Bowden’s equally tragic blood-and-dust reporting masterwork will provide an even more potent shot of adrenaline.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley
By Peter Guralnick
Little, Brown and Company, 767 pages

The second and final volume of Guralnick’s massive Elvis project doesn’t hunt for meanings and it doesn’t judge — or at least, it tries not to. The singer’s life from October 1958, when he arrived in Germany to complete his tour of duty with the army, to his ugly and undignified death in the summer of 1977 wasn’t all downhill, and his triumphs — notably his 1968 television special and his first Las Vegas performances the following year — take his biographer just as high as they took his audiences. But for most of this meticulous chronicle of second-rate movies, second-rate recordings and increasingly erratic (to put it euphemistically) concert performances, Guralnick can barely conceal his exasperation and his sadness. Yet he never loses sight of his subject’s talent and generosity, and he answers it with a talent and generosity of his own. Out of his narrowly focused month-by-month record of Elvis Presley’s fall arises a terrible and, in its way, magnificent fable of American excess, arrogance, weakness and waste.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Lost on Earth: Nomads of the New World
By Mark Fritz
Little, Brown and Company, 294 pages

Reporter Mark Fritz lays out his tales of refugees and refugee workers with a short-story master’s feel for character and plot. He has a real talent for affability: Almost without exception he likes the people whose stories he tells, and while their hardships obviously matter to him, what captures his imagination and his skill is their personalities. His portraits of the uprooted encompass natives of lands as diverse as Germany and Iraq and Togo and Bosnia, but no one he writes about seems foreign; he puts us in his subjects’ shoes by showing us how very much like us they are. (And he drives home the point that there is no longer anything anomalous about their experience, reporting that in the mid-1990s, roughly one out of every 100 people on the planet was forcibly uprooted from home.) He also has a gift for making tangled clashes (the Liberian civil war, for instance) easy to follow without talking down in the process. Although Fritz’s subject matter is cruel, his book is strangely delightful — on one level an outcry against acts of inhumanity, but on another a celebration of our common humanity.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette
By Judith Thurman
Alfred A. Knopf, 592 pages

Massive, research-packed biographies are often honored more for their comprehensiveness than for their readability; Thurman’s life of the sensual French writer is a glorious exception. Lushly textured and psychologically shrewd, it deftly digests the existing record and incorporates new material to provide an engrossing account of a fascinating and maddening woman. It helps that Colette’s life teemed with passion, scandal, intrigue (admittedly, some of it rather petty), perversity and celebrities, literary and otherwise. Thurman herself seems alternately dismayed, admiring and philosophical about her subject (“There was not an idea that could carry Colette away, or a sensation that couldn’t”), but her complex response only deepens this exemplary attempt to do justice to the mysteries of a woman’s life.

Excerpt | Order a Copy | Original Salon Review

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Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race and Redemption
By Lisa Belkin
Little, Brown and Company, 311 pages

Belkin’s generous, intuitive story of the forced integration of Yonkers, N.Y., in the late 1980s and early ’90s is the kind of nonfiction book that writers attempting bold social novels (paging Tom Wolfe) might take as a challenge. It’s packed with compelling characters: the stern, idealistic judge who orders the city to build public housing in middle-class white neighborhoods (and nearly bankrupts the municipal government with fines when it defies him); the visionary but cold-blooded planner who believes that townhouses rather than high-rises will solve the chronic ills plaguing such developments; the little old lady in tennis shoes who starts out agitating against the housing and winds up advocating for its residents; the poor, struggling mothers for whom it is their last best hope; and the 29-year-old mayor who stands up to the local demagogues (their followers throw Pampers at him) and pays a terrible price.

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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.

She had been told that her life in its current form represented normality. Existence in the real world was both repetitive and meaningless; these facts were absolute, no one could change them. Ecstasy was neither usual nor useful because of its tendency to distract, or even to produce dependency. Her original bliss had meant she was unbalanced, but now she had the chance to be steady and properly well.

Mrs. Brindle tried to seem contented in her suddenly normal life and to be adaptable for her new world, no matter how hard and cold this made every part of every thing she touched. She allowed herself to betray what she had lost by ceasing to long for it. But when her betrayal became too unbearable and she began to believe she was fatally alone, she tried to pray again.

At first her efforts felt like respectably articulated thought. No more than that. She found she had lost the power of reaching out. Now and again she could force up what felt like a shout, but then know it had fallen back against her face. Finally the phrases she attempted dwindled until they were only a background mumbling mashed in with the timeless times she had asked for help.

So Mrs. Brindle withdrew for consolation into the patterns of her day. She sought out small fulfilments actively. There were check-out assistants to be smiled for, chance encounters with cultivated or random flowers and overheard melodies to appreciate and, every week, she would do her utmost to find at least one new and stimulating, low-cost recipe. It was all bloody and bloody and then more bloody again, but faultlessly polite and inoffensive and there were no other bloody options she could take, but in her case, the path of least resistance was the one that she most wanted to resist.