The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 4, 2005. (The 10 Best Books of 2006 will be released on the Web on Nov. 29.)

Here is my selection:

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

IN “Against the Day,” his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years.

Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of “Dune,” that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates.

Note that Michiko didn't care for it:

It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

Suite Française, by Irène Némirovsky

THIS stunning book contains two narratives, one fictional and the other a fragmentary, factual account of how the fiction came into being. "Suite Française" itself consists of two novellas portraying life in France from June 4, 1940, as German forces prepare to invade Paris, through July 1, 1941, when some of Hitler's occupying troops leave France to join the assault on the Soviet Union.

Reading Like A Writer, by Francine Prose

Prose recommends savoring books rather than racing through them, a strategy that “may require some rewiring, unhooking the connection that makes you think you have to have an opinion about the book and reconnecting that wire to whatever terminal lets you see reading as something that might move or delight you.”

“The advantage of reading widely,” she notes, “as opposed to trying to formulate a series of general rules, is that we learn there are no general rules, only individual examples to help point you in a direction in which you might want to go.”

The Places in Between, by Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart's first bo... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]