100 Notable Books of the Year


This year the Book Review has selected 100 Notable Books from those reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 7, 2003. The book titles are linked to the full reviews [if you click on the link at the end of this piece, it will take you to the linked list.] Next week we'll present the 10 Best Books of the Year, chosen from this longer list.

FICTION & POETRY

ALOFT. By Chang-rae Lee. (Riverhead, $24.95.) The developments of Long Island are the setting for a tale of a self-made American on the rise.

THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $24.95.) An ambitious exploration of domestic dislocation, ranging over 60 years of American experience.

AMERICAN SMOOTH: Poems. By Rita Dove. (Norton, $22.95.) In this collection, dance is an implicit parallel to poetry, each an expression of grace performed within limits.

BANDBOX. By Thomas Mallon. (Pantheon, $24.95.) Two glossy magazines wage a circulation war in the twilight of the pre- Depression era.

A BIT ON THE SIDE. By William Trevor. (Viking, $24.95.) Stories about enduring love without purpose and adultery without passion.

CLOUD ATLAS. By David Mitchell. (Random House, paper, $14.95.) A novel that covers about 1,000 years in narratives involving a New Zealand stowaway, a book editor, a goatherd and others.

COLLECTED POEMS. By Donald Justice. (Knopf, $35.) Justice (1925-2004) spent most of his life around universities, and much of his attention looking behind him, preoccupied with the evocation of nostalgia and the endings of things.

THE CURSE OF THE APPROPRIATE MAN. By Lynn Freed. (Harvest/Harcourt, paper, $13.) Tough fiction whose theme is women's desire.

THE DARLING. By Russell Banks. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) A privileged American girl grows up to see her life ruined in a war in Liberia, and winds up caring for chimps.

THE FALLS. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.95.) The falls are Niagara and the advent of sin as well in this novel of high pressures and ungovernable forces.

THE FIRST DESIRE. By Nancy Reisman. (Pantheon, $24.) An impressionistic debut novel about the tensions and rivalries within an extended family.

FOUR SOULS. By Louise Erdrich. (HarperCollins, $23.95.) A vengeful, partly comical plot that ranges about in time and space, rising in pitch to conclude in gorgeous incantations and poetry.

GILEAD. By Marilynne Robinson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) A demanding, grave and lucid novel in the form of a long letter from an aging preacher to his young son.

THE HAMILTON CASE. By Michelle de Kretser. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A beguiling, multilayered novel that spans much of the 20th century.

HARBOR. By Lorraine Adams. (Knopf, $23.95.) This first novel, based on Adams's reporting for The Washington Post, captures the immensity of the terrorist challenge.

HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A novel of ideas, incarnated in an 18-year-old orphan girl who takes a job in 1935 as secretary to a scholar of an ancient Jewish heresy.

I AM CHARLOTTE SIMMONS. By Tom Wolfe. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.95.) Campus debauchery as seen through the oh-so-innocent eyes of a God-fearing young woman.

THE INNER CIRCLE. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $25.95.) Alfred C. Kinsey, premier American sex scientist, strives to perfect humankind in Boyle's skeptical novel.

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB. By Karen Joy Fowler. (Marian Wood/Putnam, $23.95.) A comic novel, set in a California college town, that is more about how to read than about book groups or Jane Austen.

JONATHAN STRANGE & MR. NORRELL. By Susanna Clarke. (Bloomsbury, $27.95.) A fantasy, involving a Yorkshire magician (Norrell) who comes to London in 1806 and takes on the handsome Jonathan Strange for a disciple.

THE LEMON TABLE: Stories. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $22.95.) Old age and getting there is the scene of this collection by the author of ''Flaubert's Parrot.''

THE LINE OF BEAUTY.By Alan Hollinghurst. (Bloomsbury, $24.95.) This year's Booker Prize novel concerns a gay intellectual whose heart has room in it to like Margaret Thatcher.

LITTLE CHILDREN. By Tom Perrotta. (St. Martin's, $24.95.) Adultery and childraising in a generic suburb.

MAGIC SEEDS. By V. S Naipaul. (Knopf, $25.) A writer's restless world travels lead him back home to India and into the center of a revolution.

THE MASTER. By Colm Toibin. (Scribner, $25.) A deeply considered, crisply delivered novel whose hero is Henry James.

MEN AND CARTOONS: Stories. By Jonathan Lethem. (Doubleday, $19.95.) Brooklynite fiction by the author of ''The Fortress of Solitude.''

NATASHA: And Other Stories. By David Bezmozgis. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) A loosely linked anthropological collection that succinctly and unsentimentally depicts a world of Russian Jews in Toronto.

OBLIVION: Stories. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) Narratives in an exhaustive mode, told by people who notice absolutely everything.

OUR KIND. By Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $23.) A novel in stories, collectively narrated by women who came of age before 1960.

THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY. By Tony Eprile. (Norton, $24.95.) Part fable, part coming-of-age story, Eprile's first novel concerns a burdened South African Jew and his country's endless ''Border War'' in Namibia and Angola.

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. By Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin, $26.) Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 on a pro- Nazi platform, and a Jewish family in Newark suffers the consequences.

THE PRODIGAL.By Derek Walcott. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20.) A verse memoir by the world wanderer who took the 1992 Nobel Prize.

RUNAWAY. By Alice Munro. (Knopf, $25.) Her 11th collection of short stories about people who do what our neighbors do but far more vividly.

SNOW. By Orhan Pamuk. (Knopf, $26.) The line between farce and tragedy is drawn in blood where secular and Islamic Turkey seem to explode on contact.

THE STONE THAT THE BUILDER REFUSED. By Madison Smartt Bell. (Pantheon, $29.95.) The final novel in Bell's huge Haitian trilogy.

SWEET LAND STORIES. By E. L. Doctorow. (Random House, $22.95.) Like Doctorow's novels, these stories affirm the American theme of self-creation.

TRANSMISSION. By Hari Kunzru. (Dutton, $24.95.) An Indian programmer, thwarted in his plans to make his fortune in California, unleashes a killer computer virus.

THE TYRANT'S NOVEL. By Thomas Keneally. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) In a country very like Iraq, a fiction writer is ordered to produce, in one month, a novel to be published under a tyrant's name.

AN UNFINISHED SEASON. By Ward Just. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) Just's 14th novel captures the ethos of Chicago and its suburbs in the 1950's.

VILLAGES. By John Updike. (Knopf, $25.) An old man reflects on his sex life, after the pill and before AIDS, in a sincerely raunchy novel.

WAKE UP, SIR! By Jonathan Ames. (Scribner, $23.) A plot of fine inanity involves an artists' colony, where the hero improbably acquires a sound grasp on things and people.

WAR TRASH. By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $25.) A moral fable whose suffering hero passes from delusion to clarity as a Chinese P.O.W. in Korea.


NONFICTION

AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. By Eva Hoffman. (PublicAffairs, $25.) Hoffman renders the catastrophe as it is revealed to a generation drastically affected by events it is too young to remember.

AGAINST ALL ENEMIES: Inside America's War on Terror. By Richard A. Clarke. (Free Press, $27.) An insider's account of President Bush's early concern with Iraq after 9/11.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON. By Ron Chernow. (Penguin Press, $35.) A biography of the founder who created American capitalism and died in a duel with Aaron Burr.

AMERICAN DREAM: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare. By Jason DeParle. (Viking, $25.95.) A reporter finds ending welfare did not notably increase happiness.

THE AMERICANIZATION OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By Gordon S. Wood. (Penguin Press, $25.95.) An engaging study of the most engaging founder.

THE ANCESTOR'S TALE: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution. By Richard Dawkins. (Houghton Mifflin, $28.) Back through time from our own branch of the tree of life.

ARC OF JUSTICE: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age. By Kevin Boyle. (Holt, $26.) An account of the murder trial and eventual acquittal in 1925 Detroit of a black doctor who fired on a mob that had come to drive him from the house he bought in a white neighborhood.

AT THE TOMB OF THE INFLATABLE PIG: Travels Through Paraguay. By John Gimlette. (Knopf, $25.) An eccentric, hilarious, horrifying — that is to say, utterly faithful — picture of a country as strange as any on earth.

BEASTS OF EDEN: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution. By David Rains Wallace. (University of California, $24.95.) A history of the ''bone hunters'' who have scoured the earth to elucidate mammal development in geological time.

BLUE BLOOD. By Edward Conlon. (Riverhead, $26.95.) A memoir by a New York City police officer with a Catholic education followed by a Harvard one.

CHAIN OF COMMAND: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib. By Seymour M. Hersh. (HarperCollins, $25.95.) What went wrong in Iraq, by the dogged New Yorker reporter.

CHRONICLES: Volume One. By Bob Dylan. (Simon & Schuster, $24.). A memoir — idiosyncratic and revelatory — by the peerless singer-songwriter.

DANCING WITH CUBA: A Memoir of the Revolution. By Alma Guillermoprieto. (Pantheon, $25.) A memoir by a reporter who, as a 20-year-old dance student, took a teaching job in Castro's Cuba in 1969.

DEVIL IN THE MOUNTAIN: A Search for the Origin of the Andes. By Simon Lamb. (Princeton University, $29.95) A geologist's rich account, rock by rock, page by page.

THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. By Brian Greene. (Knopf, $28.95.) A discussion of the irreconcilable differences between the cornerstones of theoretical physics — the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

FATHER JOE: The Man Who Saved My Soul. By Tony Hendra. (Random House, $24.95.) An account of an English Benedictine monk who passed God's love along to someone who couldn't find it alone.

THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES: A Translation With Commentary. By Robert Alter. (Norton, $39.95.) The first five books of the Bible in a version rich in literary insights.

GHOST WARS: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. By Steve Coll. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) An evenhanded account of the battles involving the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top priority.

HIGH NOON IN THE COLD WAR: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. By Max Frankel (Ballantine, $23.95.) This fast-paced history argues that the danger of an all-out nuclear war was less acute than we may have been led to believe.

HIP: The History. By John Leland. (HarperCollins, $26.95.) A lively study of the well-known but hard to define antiestablishment posture.

HIS BROTHER'S KEEPER: A Story From the Edge of Medicine. By Jonathan Weiner. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $26.95.) A cautionary tale about the promise and peril of biomedical research.

IN THE SHADOW OF NO TOWERS. By Art Spiegelman. (Pantheon, $19.95.) An album, a monograph and an intimate memoir by the author of ''Maus,'' who witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center at close range.

THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America. By Russell Shorto. (Doubleday, $27.50.) A history of the first multiethnic upwardly mobile society in America.

JEROME ROBBINS: His Life, His Theater, His Dance. By Deborah Jowitt. (Simon & Schuster, $40.) A grand survey of the great and popular choreographer of both ballet and Broadway.

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON: The Making of an American.By Richard Rhodes. (Knopf, $30.) A biography that also shows a nation taking form.

THE LIFE OF GRAHAM GREENE. Volume Three: 1955-1991. By Norman Sherry. (Viking, $39.95.) The final installment of Sherry's authorized biography.

LIFE ON THE OUTSIDE: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett. By Jennifer Gonnerman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) The hard life and times of a young mother of four who drew 20 to life for her first offense — selling cocaine to an undercover police officer.

THE MISSING PEACE: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace. By Dennis Ross. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35.) A virtual encyclopedia of the ''peace process'' as seen by the special envoy who was the central figure in American Middle East policies for 12 years under two presidents.

MY LIFE. By Bill Clinton. (Knopf, $35.) From hardscrabble days in Hope, Ark., to the brink of impeachment, by the 42nd president.

NATALIE WOOD: A Life. By Gavin Lambert. (Knopf, $25.95.) A wistful and humane account that captures Wood as an industrious performer and vulnerable woman.

THE 9/11 COMMISSION REPORT: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. (Norton, paper, $10.) How and why the government failed to protect us from Al Qaeda, with sweeping recommendations for reorganizing American intelligence.

1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs — the Election That Changed the Country. By James Chace. (Simon & Schuster, $25.95.) A history that sees the presidential election of 1912 as setting up the conflict between progressive idealism and conservative values.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. By Graham Allison. (Times Books/Holt, $24.) A Harvard scholar's report on the nuclear threat and how it might be reduced.

ON THE WING: To the Edge of the Earth With the Peregrine Falcon. By Alan Tennant. (Knopf, $25.) An eco-thriller about studying falcons.

OSAMA: The Making of a Terrorist. By Jonathan Randal. (Knopf, $26.95.) A reporter's guide to the vain, ascetic, humorless man and the Islamic geography that made him.

THE OUTLAW SEA: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime. By William Langewiesche. (North Point, $23.) A report from the empty three-fourths of the globe, where 40,000 merchant ships operate with virtually no oversight. OUT OF GAS: The End of the Age of Oil. By David Goodstein. (Norton, $21.95.) A physicist warns that the world's supply is headed toward depletion.

PERILOUS TIMES: Free Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. By Geoffrey R. Stone. (Norton, $35.) A study in historical perspective that shows a constant expansion of free-speech rights.

PLAN OF ATTACK. By Bob Woodward. (Simon & Schuster, $28.) A behind-the-scenes look at the administration's decision to invade Iraq.

POLITICS: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004. By Hendrik Hertzberg. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) A collection of almost 40 years of articles by an observer whose chief watchtowers have been The New Yorker, The New Republic and Newsweek.

THE PRICE OF LOYALTY: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill. By Ron Suskind. (Simon & Schuster, $26.) A detailed account of the forces driving the Bush White House, as described by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

PUBLIC ENEMIES: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34. By Bryan Burrough. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) A history of the desperadoes called forth by the Depression and of the government's response, organized by J. Edgar Hoover.

RISING '44: The Battle for Warsaw. By Norman Davies. (Viking, $32.95.) The story of the rising of the Polish Home Army against the Germans in 1944 and the destruction of Warsaw by the Nazis.

RIVERS OF GOLD: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, From Columbus to Magellan. By Hugh Thomas. (Random House, $35.) An absorbing account of the extraordinary speed and scope of Spain's imperial expansion.

SONTAG & KAEL: Opposites Attract Me. By Craig Seligman. (Counterpoint, $23.) An appealing meditation on two widely discussed, influential critical icons who arose at the same historical moment (the mid-1960's).

SOUL MADE FLESH: The Discovery of the Brain — and How It Changed the World. By Carl Zimmer. (Free Press, $26.) How a brilliant group of 17th-century thinkers, centered in Oxford, created the modern scientific methods for understanding the human mind and body.

STALIN: The Court of the Red Tsar. By Simon Sebag Montefiore. (Knopf, $30.) An intimate portrait of the Soviet dictator and his henchmen.

STRANGERS: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century. By Graham Robb. (Norton, $26.95.) A work of social archaeology by a writer who comes to gay history by way of writing the lives of Rimbaud and Balzac.

SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Harvard University, $18.95.) Gaddis argues that three salient elements of President Bush's security strategy — pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony — have deep roots in America's history.

THE SURRENDER: An Erotic Memoir. By Toni Bentley. (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $24.95.) The writer and onetime Balanchine dancer extols the joys, physical and spiritual, of anal sex.

THE UNDRESSED ART: Why We Draw. By Peter Steinhart. (Knopf, $23.) A charming report on the renaissance of drawing, led by amateurs who eagerly practice it in recreation centers, museums, private ateliers and living rooms.

UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. By Geoffrey C. Ward. (Knopf, $26.95.) A life of the first black heavyweight champ, who drove white America nuts.

UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York. By Paul Goldberger. (Random House, $24.95.) The story of the long and complex struggle over what should go up in the place of the World Trade Center.

WASHINGTON GONE CRAZY: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt. By Michael J. Ybarra. (Steerforth, $35.) A sweeping narrative life of the Nevada Democrat who was a smarter, more effective edition of Joe McCarthy.

WASHINGTON'S CROSSING. By David Hackett Fischer. (Oxford University, $35.) How a daring venture across the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776 defeated the British at Trenton and changed the dynamic of the Revolutionary War.

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. By Thomas Frank. (Metropolitan/Holt, $24.) How, according to Frank, the rich and powerful have built a cynical alliance with culturally alienated heartlanders.

WILL IN THE WORLD: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. By Stephen Greenblatt. (Norton, $26.95.) Enlightening scholarship on the life and the universe it was lived in.

THE WORKING POOR: Invisible in America. By David K. Shipler. (Knopf, $25.) The story of the millions of Americans who work steadily but fail to escape upward into the middle class.



The New York Times > Books > Sunday Book Review > Holiday Books: 100 Notable Books of the Year