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 book, "The Places in Between," recounts his journey across Afghanistan in January 2002. Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening. But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban — and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there — Redmond O'Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton — but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters.

The Ghost Map, by Steven Johnson

''The Ghost Map'' takes Johnson, who has also written books on neuroscience and on the cultural implications of computer interfaces, in some new directions -- into historical narrative and the ecology of infectious disease. This time he acknowledges that not everything bad for you is good. In fact some of it, like the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, can be deadly.

Most intriguingly, Johnson goes beyond the immediate details of the 1854 epidemic to consider such related matters as the history of toilets, the upgrading of London's sewer system, the importance of population density for a disease that travels in human excrement, and the positive as well as negative aspects of urbanization itself. Never before Victorian London, Johnson reminds us, had 2.4 million primates of any species lived together within a 30-mile perimeter.

America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama

The neoconservatives, he suggests, are people who, having witnessed the collapse of Communism long ago, ought to look back on those gigantic events as a one-in-a-zillion lucky break, like winning the lottery. Instead, the neoconservatives, victims of their own success, came to believe that Communism's implosion reflected the deepest laws of history, which were operating in their own and America's favor — a formula for hubris.

Only Revolutions, by Mark Z. Danielewski

Mark Danielewski's publisher recommends you read his new book, "Only Revolutions" -- it has been nominated for a National Book Award -- in incremental bursts. The idea is that, if you turn the book upside down and swing it around every eight pages, you can alternate the monologues of its two narrators, Sam and Hailey, so as to spin them together. Should this idea be trusted? Pantheon, after all, also insists the book is a novel, and that's quite a stretch. If we are to call ''Only Revolutions'' a novel, then we must, at the very least, call it a road novel in which the road (one of those numbered routes from an old, weird folk song) is a Möbius strip.

Danielewski's book would be better described as an epic tone poem, a cult object in search of a cult, an experiment gone perfectly mad or a sacrifice to the Ouroboros -- the circular serpent symbolic of eternity, a snake eating its own tail. Further, to hijack Mary McCarthy's line about Vladimir Nabokov's ''Pale Fire,'' it is an infernal machine, a do-it-yourself kit ... and a trap to catch reviewers. This reviewer first felt trapped, then skinned.

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