The Year in Books

Of course, not all of these are real books–book books, as we might say. Some of this year’s publications are cookbooks. Others are by Kitty Kelley. A good number are manuals, like Todd Triplett’s The Complete Guide to Small Game Taxidermy: How to Work with Squirrels, Varmints, and Predators (Lyons, 176 pp., $24.95)–the sort of thing you’re glad to know exists for those who need it, but not something you’d typically choose as a book for yourself. Kind of like Bill Clinton’s My Life (Knopf, 1,008 pp., $35) or the Hugh Hefner memoir, Hef’s Little Black Book (HarperEntertainment, 192 pp., $19.95).

Still, even with all the non-book books set aside, 2004 saw an endless blizzard of publication. Want a children’s book? Appearing in 1904, The Bobbsey Twins began a series of seventy-two volumes from Edward Stratemeyer’s writing factory (the innumerable Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift stories were other pseudonymous Stratemeyer productions). I always found the twins’ adventures unreadable, but my mother and grandmother liked them, and they’ll be glad to see such entries as The Bobbsey Twins and the Mystery at Snow Lodge (Grosset & Dunlap, 179 pp., $5.99) come back into print this year. More ambitious parents might prefer the new Polar Bear Math: Learning About Fractions from Klondike and Snow (Henry Holt, 32 pp., $16.95).

Or if your taste runs to coffee-table books, you could try Frozen Oceans: The Floating World of Pack Ice (Firefly, 224 pp., $45) and the genuinely beautiful Under Antarctic Ice: The Photographs of Norbert Wu (California, 176 pp., $39.95). If bodice-ripping romance warms you up, there’s Alexandra Sellers’s The Ice Maiden’s Sheikh (Silhouette, 192 pp., $4.50). If you have a sweet tooth, you might nibble on Ice Cream Treats: Easy Ways to Transform Your Favorite Ice Cream Into Spectacular Desserts (Chronicle, 96 pp., $16.95).

If instead you want to shiver at the doom that global warming threatens, seize Gretel Ehrlich’s overwrought The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold (Pantheon, 224 pp., $21.95). If you need silly science-fiction fantasy about sex-starved heroines, grab Norma McPhee’s Walls of Ice (Ltdbooks, 298 pp., $22.99)–in which “Jannia’s plan to seek sexual healing in the arms of Emarr Dengas, the sensual green-skinned empath and former slave who once saved her life, is complicated almost from the beginning.”

Meanwhile, for the snowbound, there’s the afternoon-filling Snow Day Crosswords (Random House, 112 pp., $6.95) and the possibly informative Snow Loads: A Guide to the Use and Understanding of the Snow Load Provisions of ASCE 7-02 (American Society of Civil Engineers, 128 pp., $49) and…oh, never mind. Amazon.com lists around 500 books published in 2004 with the words “ice” or “snow” in the title, and by my calculation, only two of them deserve much attention: Snow (Knopf, 448 pp., $26), Orhan Pamuk’s compelling novel about a poet’s visit to a modern Turkish town, and the interestingly named One Day the Ice Will Reveal All Its Dead (Viking, 416 pp., $25.95), Clare Dudman’s fictionalized account of Alfred Wegener, the 1920s German meteorologist who formulated the theory of continental drift.

Two books out of five hundred: That sounds about right. In fact, I’ll posit it as a rule: “The Weekly Standard’s 0.4 Percent Reading Rule”–out of any random selection of new books, less than one-half of one percent genuinely need reading.

Or, more to the point, of the 175,000 books published in America last year, The Weekly Standard’s 0.4 Percent Reading Rule predicts that 700 will repay typical readers. The other 174,300 are probably best saved for igloo-building.

UNFORTUNATELY, I DIDN’T ACTUALLY SEE all of those 175,000 books, so identifying the good 700 is a problem. There’s a story told from time to time about reading. I’m not sure of the name of the original character involved; it’s one of those bits of bastard wit that get fathered on whoever has a reputation for comedy, the way half the funny lines ever composed are magically ascribed to Mark Twain, Yogi Berra, or Winston Churchill.

But in this story, a public figure–oh, all right, it’s Pat Moynihan, maybe–is standing around at a cocktail party, filling in fellow guests on the details of the latest book everyone seems to be reading. And he stumbles over some plot turn, leading one skeptical listener to ask if he’s actually read the book. “Not personally,” he replies.

The joke here is in the truth. For people who follow books, there’s an inexorable chain. Whenever a major new volume appears, it begins with the prepublication journals Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Michiko Kakutani chimes in with a snippy notice in the New York Times, and book editor Erich Eichman sweet-talks someone into writing 800 words for the Wall Street Journal.

Then the bloggers start linking to reviews in other newspapers–the Guardian and the Telegraph from England, the great book sections that Frank Wilson runs for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Carol Herman puts together for the Washington Times. The Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, The Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and Books & Culture all come along with longer essays, and by the time you’ve worked your way through seven or eight of these reviews, you really have read the book. Just not personally.

Ron Chernow’s extensively praised biography Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 600 pp., $35) and James Surowiecki’s widely reviewed The Wisdom of Crowds (Doubleday, 320 pp., $24.95) are books I greatly enjoyed reading this year–but not personally, I regret to say. Art Spiegelman’s vile cartoon-attack on the United States, In the Shadow of No Towers (Pantheon, 42 pp., $19.95), is something I’m grateful to have been warned off by the dozen or so notices I saw. Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (Free Press, 320 pp., $27) and Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (Simon & Schuster, 480 pp., $28) had more reviewers than actual readers, and why not? A thousand-word summary will give you the highlights, and the lowlights you can live without.

SO WHAT WERE THE BOOKS published in 2004 that you actually would want to keep around the igloo? The best places to start are Charles M. Schulz’s Complete Peanuts 1950-1954 (Fantagraphics, 720 pp., $49.95), Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Harcourt, 608 pp., $35), and, of course, the critical Latin text of P. Ovidi Nasonis Metamorphoses (Oxford, 534 pp., $39.95). After those volumes, there’s something of a drop-off.

Actually, that’s unfair. Ovid had a good year in 2004. Not only did we finally see the critical edition of the poet’s Metamorphoses–only seventy-five years after the original publication announcement–but Oxford also released a first-rate study guide, Elaine Fantham’s Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Oxford, 178 pp., $35). David Raeburn did an excellent translation, Metamorphoses (Penguin, 723 pp., $11), to match last fall’s equally good Metamorphoses: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 608 pp., $35) by Charles Martin. The classicist Christopher McDonough tells me Thomas McGinn’s The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel (Michigan, 392 pp., $65) is also worth a look, but at that price for that subject, I’m forced to leave it in the not-personally category.

Meanwhile, William Shakespeare had another good year. Perhaps five hundred books with his name in the title were published in 2004, of which–beating The Weekly Standard’s 0.4 Percent Reading Rule–three are especially good for general readers. Stephen Greenblatt wandered down some strange roads in his interesting but eccentric 2001 volume Hamlet in Purgatory. But he returned to the main highway this year with his strong biographical study Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton, 386 pp., $26.95). Harvard’s Marjorie Garber gathered up her popular undergraduate lectures to create Shakespeare After All (Pantheon, 1,008 pp., $40), while Frank Kermode produced a smooth and sensible history, The Age of Shakespeare (Modern Library, 240 pp., $21.95).

Generally, however, we’re somewhere in the middle of the seven lean years for literary criticism. The most talked-about recent volume was Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (Basic, 256 pp., $25), a book notable mostly for how late it is in announcing the death of overarching postmodern theory. That stuff ain’t just dead. Its corpse has been frozen in the ice for a decade. René Girard’s Shakespearean studies, A Theater of Envy (St. Augustine’s, 376 pp., $26), returned to print in 2004–just as a reminder of what groundbreaking criticism used to look like.

For superior popular criticism, try A Terry Teachout Reader (Yale, 448 pp., $38). I was less taken with the productive Teachout’s second book this year, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt, 208 pp., $22), but that may be because modern ballet ranks somewhere around tea-cup painting and morris dancing in my list of favorite arts. Roger Kimball is always worth a read, and his The Rape of the Masters (Encounter, 200 pp., $25.95) is a disturbing set of case studies in the decline of sense about art.

Bob Dylan should have had a good year. His new Lyrics: 1962-2001 (Simon & Schuster, 560 pp., $45) is worth a shot, but both the high-profile entries–the literary critic Christopher Ricks’s worshipful Dylan’s Visions of Sin (Ecco, 528 pp., $26.95) and the sinner’s own Chronicles, Volume 1 (Simon & Schuster, 304 pp., $24)–were misfires.

The sadly neglected novelist James T. Farrell did better: He got a solid new biography, Robert K. Landers’s An Honest Writer (Encounter, 520 pp., $28.95), and a handsome revival with the republication of Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (Library of America, 988 pp., $35). Henry James made the strange move from author to character during 2004 as the subject of two highly touted and serious novels: The Master (Scribner, 352 pp., $25) by Colm Toibin and Author, Author (Viking, 389 pp., $24.95) by David Lodge. I read them both and still don’t know what I think of the attempt to out-James James.

THERE WERE A FEW INTERESTING books this year that combined reporting with hard-nosed thought about public policy and culture. It’s no surprise that Mary Eberstadt’s Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes (Sentinel, 218 pp., $25.95) is as good as it gets, but Steven E. Rhoads’s Taking Sex Differences Seriously (Encounter, 362 pp., $27.95) was an unexpected success.

Phillip Longman’s The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Basic, 288 pp., $26) is an important book, if only because it shows liberal analysis led, almost against its will, toward deeply conservative conclusions. I thought Susan Linn’s Consuming Kids (New Press, 256 pp., $24.95) was the most disturbing book of the year–a fact-filled study of just how commercialized childhood has become. David Lebedoff’s The Uncivil War: How a New Elite is Destroying Our Democracy (Taylor, 208 pp., $24.95) took aim at the “rule by experts” that the test-score meritocracy seems to have wished upon us.

But 2004 saw, in general, a thin trickle of such books. Last year, we had a steady stream of policy volumes worth arguing about, from Matthew Miller’s The Two Percent Solution to Sol Stern’s Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. This year we had politics, instead.

Authors who couldn’t stand John Kerry certainly had their turn, from Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery, 256 pp., $27.95) to How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, 368 pp., $26.95), featuring a picture of the leather-clad authorix on its cover.

But most of the partisan political books seemed to be by the president’s haters. From David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush (Crown, 320 pp., $24) to Eric Alterman’s The Book on Bush (Viking, 256 pp., $24.95) and Maureen Dowd’s Bushworld (Putnam, 523 pp., $25.95), they piled around my desk like drifts of angry snow.

Some of these authors were smart-enough people once upon a time: not geniuses, you understand, but interesting to read. And then the election undid them–unhinged them, made them into raving lunatics. In Obliviously On He Sails (Random House, 128 pp., $12.95), Calvin Trillin set out to be the modern Ogden Nash and managed only to become the modern Molly Ivins. In The Folly of Empire: What George W. Bush Could Learn from Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (Scribner, 256 pp., $24), John B. Judis turned himself from a partisan but intelligent writer into a genuine crank.

Well, maybe he had already done that in the book he and Ruy Teixeira cowrote last year, The Emerging Democratic Majority. The election this November didn’t quite work out the way they predicted. The classic that Judis and Teixeira were imitating was Kevin Phillips’s The Emerging Republican Majority–a 1970 volume that made its author seem the greatest of American political observers. But Phillips himself touched bottom at the beginning of 2004 with the disturbingly paranoid American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (Viking, 320 pp., $25.95).

Meanwhile, Douglas Brinkley converted himself from a pretty good popular historian to a hack hagiographer with Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (William Morrow, 560 pp., $25.95). Did you ever read Arundhati Roy’s beautifully written 1998 novel The God of Small Things? Good. Don’t read her 2004 entry, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (South End, 200 pp., $12). If an author can write for the ages, why does she bother with the minutes?

THE ELECTION YEAR DID HELP a few books, giving them urgency and heft. Myrna Blyth’s surprisingly fun account of the radicalized and gossipy politics of women’s journalism, Spin Sisters (St. Martin’s 352 pp., $24.95), is a good example. Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America (Crown Forum, 192 pp., $22) is another, as is Thomas Frank’s lefty What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan, 320 pp., $24).

But most of these books might as well have come stamped with an expiration date of November 2–“Do Not Sell After Election Day.” Russell Wattenberg, the founder of a free book exchange in Baltimore, was recently asked by the Washington Post what book he sees most often, and he immediately mentioned Lee Iacocca’s 1985 autobiography Iacocca. That’s the kind of book you end up needing a snowplow to clear away in used-book stores: large print runs with shelf-lives of about fifteen minutes.

You could find twenty such books riding out their moment on the bestseller lists in 2004. Someday soon, Joseph Wilson’s The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (Carroll & Graf, 513 pp., $26) won’t even be the answer to a trivia question.

On the war against terror, George Friedman did well with America’s Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between America and Its Enemies (Doubleday, 368 pp., $25.95), and Yossef Bodansky produced The Secret History of the Iraq War (ReganBooks, 570 pp., $27.95), a confusing, badly written book that somehow manages to be filled with fascinating material anyway.

But along the way, some potentially interesting texts were badly warped. The great military historian John Keegan’s The Iraq War (Knopf, 272 pp., $24.95) managed to avoid most of the curse of political topicality, but this year’s paperback reprint of his 2003 Intelligence in War (Vintage, 432 pp., $15) was somehow retargeted to bear upon the presidential election.

The year saw a storm of small books doing Big Think about September 11, America, and the world, but even in the most interesting of them–like John Lewis Gaddis’s Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Harvard, 160 pp., $18.95) and Walter Russell Mead’s Power, Terror, Peace, and War (Knopf, 240 pp., $19.95)–the reader can sense some attempt to have a political tinge, some desire to influence the candidates’ campaigns.

I’d blame the authors–that’s always fun–for this desperate attempt to make their books timely. (One afternoon, when you find yourself snowed in, read the introduction Mary McCarthy talked Hannah Arendt into putting in Arendt’s 1958 The Human Condition: an attempt to suggest that readers will appreciate the essay on universal political philosophy because it explains that puzzling recent event, the launching of Sputnik.)

BUT THE HARVEST OF POLITICIZED books in the late summer and early fall this year, followed by the dearth in November, suggests it was instead the publishers who insisted on hurrying books out before the election. Samuel P. Huntington’s Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity (Simon & Schuster, 448 pp., $27) shows all the signs of a rush job, in addition to its other peculiarities. Mario Cuomo might have written an interesting book on Abraham Lincoln–this isn’t an impossibility; somewhere out on the far, flat edges of the probability curve, there’s a thin chance that Cuomo writes an interesting book–but Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever (Harcourt, 192 pp., $24) is instead a quickie hack job, churned out to try to influence the election.

I know that November 2 was only last month, but it feels as though five years have gone by–five book years, that is, on the analogy of dog years. George W. Bush is still president, but John Dean’s Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (Little, Brown, 272 pp., $22.95) already has the musty scent of a Bull Moose attack on the tariff policies of William Howard Taft. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (Penguin, 400 pp., $25.95) and James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking, 400 pp., $25.95) were good reads. But they have both gotten a little brown around the edges in the few months since they were published.

And as for the torrent of books on the vast neoconservative conspiracy–even I couldn’t keep up with them, and I actually know most of those diabolical neocons. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge, 382 pp., $28), and Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives Are Putting the World at Risk (Prometheus, 268 pp., $26), and Where the Right Went Wrong: How Neoconservatives Subverted the Reagan Revolution and Hijacked the Bush Presidency (Thomas Dunne, 272 pp., $24.95), and Take Back the Right: How the Neocons and the Religious Right Have Hijacked the Conservative Movement (Carroll & Graf, 298 pp., $14)–their titles are almost indistinguishable, and I can’t tell the far-left attacks from the far-right anymore. Besides, it all seems a dozen or more book years ago.

Of course, “book years” used to mean something different–elephant years, maybe, instead of dog years. I love the way old essays in a journal like, say, the New Scholasticism would mention “recent” books. “Against Burckhardt’s somewhat unscholarly presentation,” a typical paragraph would begin, “we must set Ernst Cassirer’s more recent The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy“–by which the author meant work published in German in 1927, responding to a book that first appeared in 1860.

Well, why not? In a world in which the eighteenth-century Immanuel Kant is a modern writer, the thirteenth-century Duns Scotus one of the dangerously trendy breed of scholastics, and the fifth-century Proclus a relatively fresh commentator on platonism–in books seen under the aspect of eternity, in other words–Cassirer’s 1927 rehabilitation of Renaissance philosophy happened just yesterday. The Renaissance itself was only a few years ago.

A few book years, that is. Books are long, and time is fleeting, as our great contemporary Henry Wadsworth Longfellow didn’t quite say. There are already copies of John Sperling’s new The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America (PoliPoint, 296 pp., $39.95) gathering dust on used-book tables. Pick one up, and you’ll see what I mean.

A COUPLE OF FRIENDS AND I were sitting around late one night, and I mentioned the new book-review editor of a newspaper up in New York. “Sure he’s smart,” somebody said, reaching for the wine, “and he’s written some serious books himself. But is he a book guy?”

I knew what was meant. The book guy–the book gal, for that matter–seems to be a disappearing species these days, despite the 175,000 books published a year. Or maybe I mean because of the 175,000 books published a year. You used to find them running little neighborhood bookstores, with all the skillful salesmanship of frightened possums. They scrounged around as occasional reviewers for dying evening newspapers, and they sneered at bestseller lists as a record of what the amateurs were reading.

The book guys could tell you what Joseph Brodsky’s latest collection of poetry was like–and why Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was better schlock science fiction than Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. They could name the standard biographies of Martin Luther–and explain why Max Brand’s westerns should be brought back into print. They always seemed to find jobs that let them work at night, and they didn’t bathe enough, but, man, did they know books.

Who now can keep up with it all? Most book-review editors I know gave up several years ago–and they get free copies of anything they want. (The poet Laurance Wieder once suggested we’d see a damn-sight fewer of those reviews that end “an interesting and worthy volume” if reviewers had to pay for the book themselves.)

I know that I, at least, can’t make sense of the publishing world anymore. Most days I just sit by the window and watch the blizzard of new books swirl around outside. Occasionally, when something drifts against the window sill for a moment and catches my eye, I pick up the phone and call a reviewer. The rest of the time I watch the woods fill up with snow.

STILL, I KNOW A FEW of the dying tribe of book people, and I called them to ask what they had liked this year. They all agreed that the one place you could mostly escape the pressure of politics was–no surprise–in escapist fantasy and science fiction. Neal Stephenson wrote 2,700 pages with a fountain pen in 18 months, and I thought the result showed a lot of self-indulgence. The Baroque Trilogy should have been three 300-page books, not three 900-page monsters. Still, the final volume has appeared, The System of the World (William Morrow, 892 pp., $27.95), and it seems inescapable.

Terry Pratchett delivered the latest of his annual Discworld novels, Going Postal (HarperCollins, 384 pp., $24.95), and nobody does his kind of comedy better. Jasper Fforde had the fourth of his Thursday Next books, Something Rotten (Viking, 320 pp., $24.95), and though the writing seems to have gotten sloppier, the series remains the cleverest and bookiest thing around.

Fantasy has been improving in recent years. There is still a large amount of pseudo-Tolkien being published, but Robin Hobb shows how modern fantasy ought to run, with Fool’s Fate (Spectra, 640 pp., $24.95), the third book in her Tawny Man trilogy (the ninth and concluding volume of her Fitzchivalry Farseer saga).

I know several readers who find George R.R. Martin frustrating–why exactly do we have to work our way through yet another 700-page volume before we find out what happened to characters in the first volume?–but his A Song of Ice and Fire series is a significant attempt to do something new and complicated with narrative in fantasy, and the fourth volume A Feast for Crows (Spectra, 704 pp., $28) appeared this year.

Meanwhile, the grand old man of high, even theological, science fiction is Gene Wolfe, and he produced two volumes of his Wizard Knight series in 2004: The Knight (Tor, 432 pp., $25.95) and The Wizard (Tor, 480 pp., $25.95).

IN MYSTERIES AND THRILLERS, there were a few hints this year that the serial-killer subgenre may actually come to end within our lifetime. (And some people think that God doesn’t exist.) Donald Westlake continued his comedies–longtime favorites of The Weekly Standard–with two Dortmunder entries: The Road to Ruin (Mysterious, 352 pp., $25) and a collection of stories, Thieves’ Dozen (Mysterious, 208 pp., $12.95). He may be signaling the end of the hard-boiled tales he writes under the name “Richard Stark” with Nobody Runs Forever (Mysterious, 304 pp., $23.95). Catch him while you can.

Meanwhile, I liked the latest of Rebecca Pawel’s Spanish Civil War mysteries Law of Return (Soho, 288 pp., $24), and the Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren’s Hash (Overlook, 236 pp., $23.95) was widely praised. Traditional British country-house murders saw James Anderson’s lighthearted The Affair of the 39 Cufflinks (Poisoned Pen, 330 pp., $24.95), and the best of the raging stream of historical mysteries may have been Steven Saylor’s Judgment of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 304 pp., $24.95).

The very eccentric Jewish writer Joseph Telushkin cowrote with Allen Estrin the very eccentric Heaven’s Witness (Toby, 462 pp., $19.95), easily the most interesting of this year’s religious mysteries. In detective stories, The Weekly Standard’s regular mystery reviewer, Jon L. Breen, reports that Michael Koryta’s Tonight I Said Goodbye (St. Martin’s Minotaur, 304 pp., $21.95) and Stuart Kaminsky’s The Last Dark Place (Forge, 256 pp., $23.95) are worth a look.

So is Mat Coward’s Over and Under (Five Star, 247 pp., $25.95). With Old Boys (Overlook, 476 pp., $25.95), Charles McCarry capped his long career of political thrillers.

I read only a little new horror fiction this year. Stephen King finally finished off his series with the seventh volume, The Dark Tower (Donald M. Grant / Scribner, 864 pp., $35). Peter Straub’s In the Night Room (Random House, 330 pp., $21.95) was a good read, while Phil Rickman proved he’s a keeper with his occult mystery The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (Pan, 356 pp., $24.95).

But the horror book of the year, by a wide margin, was Russell Kirk’s Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 406 pp., $25). Gathered together, the tales demonstrate that Kirk was a master of the classic ghost story, a now dying form.

IN MORE DELIBERATELY HIGHBROW FICTION, this was the year that the mass-market genres made a bid for respectability. With Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (Bloomsbury, 800 pp., $27.95), Susanna Clarke tried to bring magic and historical fantasy into serious fiction–and successfully, though the book seems around a hundred pages too long.

So, too, in The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $26), Philip Roth took one of the pulpiest of forms–alternate history–and tried to make a real novel out of it. The initial reviews made me suspicious, suggesting the book claims the United States was always on the edge of Nazism and the Jews missed an American Holocaust only by the slimmest of chances. But the first, politicized reviewers were wrong, I think: Roth seems to be arguing in part that America is, in fact, endlessly resilient, and even if some native fascism had managed to seize control, we would soon have shaken it off.

AMONG THE GIANTS, V.S. NAIPAUL has just published Magic Seeds (Knopf, 288 pp., $25), and Muriel Spark’s corpus expanded to include The Finishing School (Doubleday, 181 pp., $16.95) and All the Poems of Muriel Spark (New Directions, 144 pp., $13.95). William Trevor collected his later stories in A Bit on the Side (Viking, 244 pp., $24.95)–and you might pick up Hugh Ormsby-Lennon’s new study of Trevor, Fools of Fiction (Maunsel, 364 pp., $74.95), to go along with it.

Meanwhile, with The Final Solution (Fourth Estate, 131 pp., $16.95), Michael Chabon produced his first major book since his 2000 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Random House, 528 pp., $14.95) was a genuinely fine novel.

The year also saw a few good literary biographies, particularly Borges (Viking, 574 pp., $34.95) by Edwin Williamson, E.E. Cummings (Sourcebooks, 606 pp., $29.95) by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, and Wodehouse (W.W. Norton, 530 pp., $27.95) by Robert McCrum. (Notice the fading of recent years’ convention of fancy titles for biographies, with the subject’s name relegated to the subtitle? A welcome change.)

In the Wodehousean mode of lighter books, comedy saw four nearly perfect contestants: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (Random House, 421 pp., $24.95) by Paul Murray; Admissions (Warner, 368 pp., $23.95), Nancy Lieberman’s hilarious tale of trying to get your children into upscale schools; It’s All True: A Novel of Hollywood (Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $23) by David Freeman; and, of course, Christopher Buckley’s Florence of Arabia (Random House, 272 pp., $24.95).

FRIENDS OF THE WEEKLY STANDARD had a good year. Stephen F. Hayes has worked his reporting for this magazine into the important book The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America (HarperCollins, 224 pp., $19.95).

Contributing editor John Podhoretz chipped in with one of the year’s best political books, Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century–While Driving Liberals Insane (St. Martin’s, 288 pp., $24.95), due out shortly in paperback.

Another contributing editor, Reuel Marc Gerecht, produced a must-read, The Islamic Paradox (AEI, 225 pp., $15); another, Tod Lindberg, edited Beyond Paradise and Power: Europe, America and the Future of a Troubled Partnership (Routledge, 245 pp., $18.95); and yet another, Irwin Stelzer, edited Neo-conservatism (Atlantic, 276 pp., $36.56), a collection of essays, some old and excellent, others new and stimulating.

Meanwhile, William F. Buckley finished Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography (Regnery, 594 pp., $29.95), Gertrude Himmelfarb gave us The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (Knopf, 304 pp., $25), Jeremy Rabkin published The Case for Sovereignty (AEI, 257 pp., $25), Norman Podhoretz collected The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s (Free Press, 496 pp., $35), David Brooks released On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25), and Peter Berkowitz edited Varieties of Conservatism in America (Hoover, 166 pp., $15), gathering essays from several Weekly Standard writers.

Books by our Internet friends include Scott Ott’s hilarious Axis of Weasels (MacMenamin, 212 pp., $12.95), and Hugh Hewitt’s If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It (Nelson, 272 pp., $19.99). Can I mention here The Pius War (Lexington, 282 pp., $29.95), the collection of essays on Pius XII and the Second World War that I coedited with David Dalin? No, probably not.

TOO MUCH HISTORICAL non-fiction this year was hurt by the election and the war in Iraq, but one good result was an increased interest in the general topic of Anglo-America. Eric P. Kaufmann took a gloomy view in The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America (Harvard, 384 pp., $49.95), while Timothy Garton Ash had a sunnier vision in Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (Random House, 304 pp., $24.95).

James C. Bennett ecstatically pushed the idea with The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-Speaking Nations Will Lead the Way in the Twenty-First Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 352 pp., $39.95). In Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Broadway, 384 pp., $25.95), James Webb followed the lead of David Hackett Fischer’s classic Albion’s Seed in finding the perduring influence of the United States’ British roots. David Hackett Fischer himself produced Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas (Oxford, 851 pp., $50).

First-rate political studies and biographies seemed fewer in 2004 than normal. I liked Scott Stossel’s Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver (Smithsonian, 704 pp., $32.50), Michael Janeway’s The Fall of the House of Roosevelt (Columbia, 284 pp., $27.50), and Michael Ybarra’s Washington Gone Crazy (Steerforth, 818 pp., $35), the story of the forgotten Pat McCarran. Christopher Browning’s The Origins of the Final Solution (Nebraska, 640 pp., $39.95) and Harold H. Tittmann Jr.’s Inside the Vatican of Pius XII (Image, 240 pp., $13.95) both mapped out new material about the Holocaust.

I MISSED TOO MUCH THIS year in nonfiction, but four other books caught my eye and held it: The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 351 pp., $25) by Ben Macintyre, Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? (Knopf, 368 pp., $26.95) by David Fromkin, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (W.W. Norton, 660 pp., $29.95) by the late Roy Porter, and the compellingly interesting Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries (Doubleday, 320 pp., $24.95) by Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder.

In sports, there was Namath: A Biography (Viking, 512 pp., $27.95) by Mark Kriegel and The Second Mark: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $25) by Joy Goodwin. In travel, there was Tobias Jones’s peculiar look at the Italians, The Dark Heart of Italy (North Point, 336 pp., $24).

Children’s books included The Grim Grotto (HarperCollins, 352 pp., $11.99), the eleventh entry in Lemony Snickett’s fantastically inventive Series of Unfortunate Events, although I’m dreading the recently announced movie. Your Favorite Seuss (Random House, 368 pp., $34.95) collects thirteen Dr. Seuss stories, including Horton Hears a Who and Oh, the Places You’ll Go.

Among coffee-table books, it’s hard not to mention The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker (Black Dog & Leventhal, 656 pp., $60), but I’ll try. New Yorkers themselves might prefer New York: The Photo Atlas (HarperResource, 400 pp., $60).

The most intriguing architectural book I looked at was Imagining Ground Zero: The Official and Unofficial Proposals for the World Trade Center Site (Rizzoli, 252 pp., $60). I thought the catalogue Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557) (Yale, 650 pp., $75) the most beautiful book of the year.

POETRY SUFFERED THIS YEAR, with the deaths of Czeslaw Milosz, Anthony Hecht, and Donald Justice. Besides Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004, I added to my permanent shelves Milosz’s Second Space: New Poems (Ecco, 112 pp., $23.95), Justice’s Collected Poems (Knopf, 304 pp., $25), Rhina P. Espaillat’s The Shadow I Dress In (Wordtech, 144 pp., $16), Deborah Warren’s New Criterion prizewinning Zero Meridian (Ivan R. Dee, 96 pp., $18.95), and Catherine Tufariello’s Keeping My Name (Texas Tech, 79 pp., $19.95).

David Mason’s Arrivals (Story Line, 110 pp., $14) and Len Krisak’s If Anything (Wordtech, 104 pp., $16) are both new, first-class formalist work by Weekly Standard contributors.

DID I ALREADY NAME Graham Allison’s disturbing Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe (Times, 272 pp., $24)?

Or Jeffrey Stout’s earnest Democracy and Tradition (Princeton, 368 pp., $35)–a book worth arguing about, from a lefty who has reasoned himself into the political and social necessity of religion?

Lord, there were just too many books. John Wilson of Books & Culture has been forcing Stephen Webb’s Divine Voice: Christian Proclamation and the Theology of Sound (Brazos, 244 pp., $24.99) on everybody he can find, and Duke’s Stanley Hauerwas has been booming David Aers’s Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, 296 pp., $55). George Weigel gave us Letters to a Young Catholic (Basic, 208 pp., $22.50), while Christine Rosen added Preaching Eugenics (Oxford, 296 pp., $35), an account of the role of religious leaders in the rise of eugenics.

Reading Bernd Wannenwetsch’s Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford, 402 pp., $145), I spent most of my time squabbling with the author. Is that a sign of a book you want to recommend or not? Anyway, it’s the sign of a serious book.

In Freeing God’s Children: The Unlikely Alliance for Global Human Rights (Rowman & Littlefield, 368 pp., $27.95), Allen D. Hertzke showed the reemergence of America’s religious believers on the world stage. Joseph Loconte gathered surprising material for his excellent historical study The End of Illusions: Religious Leaders Confront Hitler’s Gathering Storm (Rowman & Littlefield, 252 pp., $65).

And then there’s Robert Alter’s The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W.W. Norton, 1,064 pp., $35.95), which is automatically the Jewish book of the year–and close to being the book of the year for everyone. I enjoyed Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books (Algonquin, 328 pp., $24.95) by Aaron Lansky, and Abraham Rabinovich’s The Yom Kippur War (Schocken, 560 pp., $27.50) seems a solid entry. As does Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 872 pp., $35).

LET’S SEE. WHAT DOES that still leave? How about Ken Silverstein’s The Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear Reactor (Random House, 240 pp., $22.95)? Or Corinne May Botz’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (Monacelli, 223 pp., $35)? Or Robert Sullivan’s Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury, 256 pp., $23.95)?

Maybe this wasn’t such a cold year for books, after all. Even applying The Weekly Standard’s 0.4 Percent Reading Rule to the 175,000 new titles, we still had around 700 books for reading in 2004. More than I could get through, even after I built my daughter an igloo.

Once you’ve constructed your own ice palace, try taking inside with you David Laskin’s account of the winter of 1888, The Children’s Blizzard (HarperCollins, 320 pp., $24.95). It’s as good a way as any to finish off the year.

Joseph Bottum is Books & Arts editor of The Weekly Standard.