I don’t read many novels, but I picked up Middlemarch recently after reading an essay about George Eliot by Gertrude Himmelfarb. It struck me as kind of a woman’s book, but I loved it, all 800-plus pages of it. (Yes, I know the author was a woman.) Middlemarch is so good that I bought copies for two of my daughters and one of them, Grace, actually read it. Anyway, it’s an extraordinary book with brilliantly conceived characters who’ve stayed in mind every day in the months since I read it. So, to put it mildly, I recommend Middlemarch.

The best non-fiction book of 2007, for me anyway, is What’s So Great About Christianity by Dinesh D’Souza. This a great work, both wise and learned, in defense of Christianity against the current crop of atheists, people who think science has nullified religion, skeptics of one sort or another, intellectual snobs, and wishy-washy Christians. D’Souza takes on every argument you’ve ever heard (and some you haven’t) against Christianity. The book is bound to an instant classic, though I’d always rejected the notion of such a thing. But I suspect Christians and seekers and curious agnostics and maybe a few soft atheists and who knows who else will be reading What’s So Great About Christianity decades from now, just as so many read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis today.