Our penultimate year is AD 2004, when a tsunami killed a quarter of a million people in Asia, terrorism struck in Spain, Chechnya, Saudi Arabia, and half a dozen other places, same-sex marriage became legal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (and neither the institution of marriage nor the world subsequently ended), and the great Renata Tebaldi, the great Julia Child, and the great and terrible Ronald Reagan all died. But the book-season was as strong as ever, and these were its highlights:

Best Fiction

10 Snow by Orhan Pamuk – By the time I started this novel, as we’ve seen here in the years of the Interregnum, I’d become a fan of this novelist, a circumstance that comes with its own perils in the form of overlooking shortcomings (more on that a little later in this list). But this elegant story – about a poet returning to Turkey from exile and finding himself tangled in a plot involving a group of local suicides – needed no special pleading; it’s as intelligent and introspective as everything I’ve come to expect from Pamuk, this time with an added element of mutedness that’s devilishly hard to accomplish and here done perfectly.

9 Pompeii by Robert Harris – Before this utterly gripping book, I would have said the story of the destruction of the Roman city of Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 was the quintessential exhausted topic, but hoo boy, does Harris prove me wrong – in fact, this novel is a triumphant demonstration of the fact that any story, even the most well-known, can be completely renewed by its teller. Harris pins his plot around a hard-working hydrologist, the one man in the teeming, corrupt world of politics on the Gulf of Naples who comes to suspect the awe-inspiring truth that lies behind the sudden blockage of aqueduct water and the strange sights up on the mountain. Much like the sinking of the Titanic, the conclusion of this story is well-known ahead of time – and yet, Harris makes every page of his novel tense and exciting. Incredible.

8 The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler – The framework of this slim, smart novel is intensely familiar: a group of seemingly mismatched people come together in a book club and grow into a family. SO intensely familiar, in fact, that much like Pompeii, I started it certain I’d encounter nothing new. And much like Pompeii, I in fact didn’t encounter anything new – but it didn’t matter, thanks to the grace and sheer energy with which Karen Joy Fowler told the story (which, unlike Pompeii, was later adapted into a very good movie). And of course the book sent me rabidly back to Jane Austen’s novels, not that I ever need much prodding to do that.

7 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson – Like everyone else, I was enchanted by Housekeeping, and getting this novel from its author, after a quarter-century silence, felt like a great gift. It’s the story of a small-town Iowa preacher named John Ames, told in the voice of Ames as he writes a long, confessional letter to his son, and the whole thing is executed in an enormously changed voice from Housekeeping – more sonorous, more grounded, more angular. Those changes would bode poorly for me in relation to this author in future books, but here they work like a sad, very serious magic.

6 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell – I deeply disliked (and protractedly fulminated against) the assumption I saw as underlying this weird novel with its multiple settings and stories threaded through with similar characters or character-types; I disliked the implication that the straightforward foursquare narrative was somehow now to be considered a quaint Victorian holdover (we didn’t cover Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves in the Interregnum, for very good reason, but even so, it sticks in the mind on this point). I’d go on to have even deeper internal arguments with Mitchell on that point in future books of his, but this one overcame my objections in the way I like best: through Mitchell’s sheer narrative ability and rich invention. It kept me delightedly reading, in other words, when many dozens of more conventional novels this year did not.

5 The Tyrant’s Novel by Thomas Kenneally – I think this may be Thomas Kenneally’s strongest novel, the dark and sometimes bitingly funny story of a successful writer in a bleak autocracy who’s commanded to write a novel stirringly dramatizing how the country’s ruler (the tyrant of the title), “the Great Uncle,” swooped in and saved his people from the degradations of their enemies and created the perfect state. The writer has a strict deadline for this monstrous pack of lies, and they’ve got to be convincing, or else – as a bit of social commentary, the book is remarkably strong, and as a sardonic look at the wavery line between storytelling and lying, it’s flat-out fantastic.

4 I am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe – As mentioned, once you’re a fan of any author, you really have to be more cautious with each succeeding book, not less; your affection for past stories will naturally tempt you to forgive things you ought not to in more recent work. This novel – the college-years coming-of-age of a young girl from the sticks – is a good case in point: despite Wolfe’s usual care and linguistic virtuosity, there are spots where the whole thing creaks just a bit. Not many spots, however, and not nearly bad enough to detract from Wolfe’s acidic portrait of the brain-dead experience of the undergraduate years, a wasteland perfectly suited to his gifts.

3 Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke – This enormous and subtly playful novel gives its readers a conflict of wills between two wizards, but instead of setting it in Middle Earth or the Land or Melnibone, it weaves the whole fantasy story into the Napoleonic era and tells the story with a commendably straight face. The book was given a very warm reception in the penny press (albeit a largely stupid and lazy one – I myself read no fewer than one hundred and fifteen reviews that all quoted the exact same exchange of dialogue from this 1000-page novel, which among other things indicates a higher-than-normal amount of copying) and thoroughly deserved it.

2 Iron Council by China Mieville – One of the questions that just naturally arises when you’re reading a fantasy series about a certain location is: what happens outside that location? What’s going on in the southern deserts of Harad (“where the stars are strange,” Aragorn tells us, though he tells us nothing else) while all that business with the One Ring is happening up north in The Lord of the Rings? What about the rest of the world outside the dreaming city of Viriconium, in M. John Harrison’s great tales of the Afternoon Cultures? And likewise for the grubby city of New Crubuzon, built inside the enormous ribcage of a long-dead monster? In Iron Council, China Mieville sends a handful of fascinating characters on a journey outside New Crubuzon, and the resulting novel is an outstanding feat of imagination even for this hyper-imaginative writer.

1. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst – The best novel of the year – and probably the novel from this year that I’ve re-read most often in the decade since – was this wonderfully-written and carefully-observed novel about the journeys – sexual, political, personal – through the heady world of the well-to-do and powerful in Thatcher’s London. Hollinghurt’s main character, Nick Guest, is equal parts Fielding’s Tom Jones and Powell’s Nicholas Jenkins, only with drugs and gay sex added in, and through him Hollinghurst does an amazing job capturing the feel of an entire era.

 

Best Nonfiction:

10 Ghost Wars by Steve Coll – The sheer amount of legwork that had to go into making this long, eye-opening book about the clandestine maneuvers in the Middle East (and all over the world, it sometimes seems) that gave rise to, among other things, the rise of Osama bin Laden and the 9-11 attacks. Coll follows the tangle of CIA dealings and counter-dealings in Afghanistan and elsewhere with a bloodhound’s tenacity, and the results are genuinely, if unsettlingly, revelatory.

9 The Five Books of Moses translated by Robert Alter – Talk about eye-opening! Robert Alter’s heavily annotated translation of the Pentateuch blows apart the accrued traditions of nearly a thousand years of English-language renditions of these most famous texts and replaces them with something that will be thrillingly alien to most Western readers who’ve grown up with the Old Testament as part of their DNA. Alter is an irresistibly enthusiastic scholar, and this enormous enterprise is wonderfully captivating from beginning to end – I played in its pages, as I do when I regularly revisit it.

8 Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow – This big, greatly readable biography represents, as I’ve come to both think and maybe a little lament, represents Ron Chernow’s work at its finest, chronicling the complex and not entirely forthcoming life of one of the United States’ most problematic and intriguing Founding Fathers. Chernow shows a mastery of his sources, and he writes with clear-eyed energy throughout, creating what’s still my favorite single-volume life of Hamilton.

7 My Life by Bill Clinton – US presidential memoirs are notoriously places where English-language prose goes to die, but this enormous volume is a very happy exception. During his eight years in power, Bill Clinton employed some of the most talented writers ever to work in the Capital, and he not only learned a thing or two from them but also employed quite a few of them in the hasty preparation of this big, fascinating book, a book full of lively, in-the-moment conversations and scenes tense enough to be at home in a political thriller. I’m a big follower of the large body of literature that’s arisen out of the US presidency, and this one immediately shot to the front as one of my favorites, no matter how appalling I find its subject.

6 Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt – I had high hopes for this book about the highly formative 1580s in the life of William Shakespeare, since Greenblatt is one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars – and even those high hopes were happily exceeded by this fantastic book, in which Greenblatt exercises all his rhetorical gifts to bring Shakespeare’s age to life in all its squalor and energy. It requires rhetorical gifts, of course: no book like this can exist except with a good deal of invention and extrapolation, but Greenblatt is very adept at both, and he creates a necessary book to read about Shakespeare.

5 Ghosts of Vesuvius by Charles Pellegrino – This fiercely intelligent book is almost sui generis in its multi-faceted efforts to grasp the physics and dynamics of massive, intensely-focused destruction. Pellegrino studies the after-effects of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, and he studies the after-effects of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, and in both cases he’s trying to convey the complexities of traumatic energy-release, the seeming unpredictability of some of the results. It’s an amazing book, enormously intriguing.

4 John James Audubon by Richard Rhodes – Since I was familiar with Richard Rhodes’s work on atomic warfare, his choice of subject for this book, the famous 19th-century bird-watcher and bird-painter, came as a surprise to me. But Audubon and his craft and his age seem like a genuine subject of passion for Rhodes, and that passion is evident on every page of this terrific book. Audubon lead a fascinating life, and Rhodes conveys it in hugely energetic chapters that read like he’s downright grateful not to be writing about the end of the world.

3 Rising ’44 by Norman Davies – Davies takes as his subject in this passionate and definitive book is one of the most tragic incidents of the Second World War – a conflict not exactly lacking in tragedy: the Warsaw uprising of August 1944, when the Polish underground, urged on by the Allies, rose up and fought their Nazi occupiers to regain control of their city in advance of the Red Army’s inevitable arrival. When both the Russians and the Allies refused to intervene directly, the German forces were free to turn and crush the uprising, and Davies traces the tension and betrayal through dozens of first-hand accounts that make the whole excruciating two months of the uprising come to life again.

2 Rise of the Vulcans by James Mann – I was naturally angered the first time I read this book, about the small cabal of Washington insiders who eagerly took control of the US government once the Republican-indebted Supreme Court broke the law and installed the clueless and incurious George W. Bush as President in 2000. To one degree or another, the members of this cabal – creatures like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz – were all creatures of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, and as Mann details in thoroughly controlled prose, they wasted no time in inflicting a Nixonian foreign policy on the rest of the world, a foreign policy mixing equal parts venality, treachery, and belligerence. The book is required reading, especially for the 10 billion people now living in the world created by these “Vulcans.”

1 The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins – The best nonfiction book of the year by a wide margin was this incredible, joyous, densely-packed book about the wonders of the natural world and the unending amazements of evolution by means of natural selection. This is Richard Dawkins in his best role, not as a professional hater of religions but as a Carl Sagan-like purveyor of the thrill of science, and the book has two or three mind-expanding revelations on virtually every page. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve recommended this book.