I'm writing this soon after reading that more than 500,000 people lost their jobs in November—"non-farm" jobs, that is, to which staggering total we could add some farm jobs as well. (The CSA farmer south of Chicago from whom Wendy and I get a box of produce every week, three seasons of the year, had to lay off her help.) And even before the financial crisis hit, the publishing industry was in a state of uncertainty often indistinguishable from panic. (Imagine a convention of buggy-makers sometime after the advent of what they were calling "the horseless carriage.")

I could go on in this vein. And on. Nevertheless, at this moment in time, there are books aplenty. Reading is wonderfully democratic, and we still have a network of libraries crisscrossing the country, though there are more gaps than there used to be. (Maybe President Obama will include libraries in his ambitious plans to strengthen our infrastructure while stimulating the economy.)

And we are here, again, to celebrate some particularly good books. Not the best books of the year, whatever those might be. (One influential reckoning is the New York Times' list, The Ten Best Books of 2008, posted on the web though not yet published in the print version.) What you have here is a personal list, not issued by any magisterium. These are some books that rose to the surface when I unsystematically thought about a year of reading.

The Aeneid. Vergil. Translated by Sarah Ruden. Yale University Press. Not so long ago, if you were an educated person in the Anglo-American sphere, you could read Latin. I can't. I had made three unsuccessful tries to read Vergil's great poem in English (the first time when I was in college, unbidden), each by a different translator. In each case I bogged down pretty quickly. So I wasn't too optimistic when I picked up the galleys of Sarah Ruden's translation last spring. But her version (line-by-line, and metrical) immediately drew me in. I read most of the book on the flights Wendy and I took to and from the funeral of our dear young friend Anna Woodiwiss. And when we were home I read it straight though again. I know I still haven't read Vergil. But I've read Sarah Ruden's Vergil, and that's not to be disdained. Another classical translation that moved me, in this case from Greek—one which, like Ruden's, operated under strict constraints—was John Tipton's rendering of Sophocles' Ajax, published by Flood Editions. (Both books, as it happens, are pleasing to the eye and well designed to cradle in the hand.)

All the World's a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare. John Reed. Plume. Here I will quote from "Wrapping Up 2008, "a piece I did for the December issue of First Things (not yet available on the web, though it will be in time): "The words are (mostly) by William Shakespeare, but they have been rearranged by John Reed. Perhaps a summary of the action will help:

Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet, wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered father, and commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the prince goes mad with jealousy.

All the World's a Grave is a most unsettling book. I felt dizzy several times while I was reading, and I paused now and then to pull King Lear or Hamlet from the shelf to reassure myself that the familiar texts remained intact. What's destabilizing—and often wildly comical—is not just the rude mash-up of characters and settings violently plucked from their canonical sources but the way in which the power of Shakespeare's language flickers uneasily, surging and hissing and fizzing out only to revive and fade again as the words play against their new contexts."

Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory. Roy Blount, Jr. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. And Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. John McWhorter. Gotham. New books on the English language and the history thereof appear with some frequency every year. (Our friend Nathan Bierma has tracked many of them in recent years.) In 2008 I particularly enjoyed Roy Blount's splendid bedside book (brief entries, alphabetically arranged) and John McWhorter's short narrative (conversational, but not in the dumbed-down style of many contemporaries). Both books wittily exhibit a delight in and a mastery of the language that is their subject Both make a very skillful job look easy.

The Butt. Will Self. Bloomsbury USA. It would be petty to ignore a really good book because the publisher failed to send a review copy. Obviously SOME publications got the book— they were able to dispatch it to reviewers who produced uncomprehending or patronizing notices. It would be silly to brood about the tepid reception of Will Self's novel. Still, I find it galling. Self is uneven—from book to book, within books, within paragraphs—and he can be simply nasty. But this phantasmagoric satire, set in a fictitious land that has aspects of Australia and Iraq and other disparate places, is so bracing, so loaded with verbal energy, so inventive in its engagement with all matter of human folly, so gloriously excessive, it stands head and above the usual run of novels. Like many good satiric books, it leaves you with a strange mixture of exhilaration and bleakness.

The General of the Dead Army. Ismail Kadare. Arcade. Kadare's first novel, published in Albania in 1963, first appeared in English translation in 1971 (U.S. publication, 1972). That was a translation of the French translation of Kadare's original. This new edition is a revised version of that 1971 translation-of-a-translation, based on the definitive version of the novel in the bilingual Albanian-French edition of Kadare's complete works. Got that? (For a helpful account of the byzantine history of Kadare in translation, see David Bellos' essay "The Englishing of Ismail Kadare: Notes of a Retranslator.") More than twenty years after Italy invaded Albania (in April 1939), an Italian general is sent to Albania to recover the bodies of Italian soldiers who died there during World War II. The project, which seems fairly straightforward if challenging, becomes nightmarish. While this early book is heavy-handed in comparison to Kadare's later work, it is still absorbing. In part the fascination lies in the Albanian setting, in part in Kadare's sensibility. A paperback edition is due in February from Vintage. Also due in February, from Canongate U.S.: The Siege, Kadare's novel about a Christian citadel in Albania besieged by Ottoman forces, newly "retranslated" by David Bellos.

The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism. Geoff Nicholson. Riverhead. Here again I will quote from "Wrapping Up 2008" in the December issue of First Things: "I have a weakness for writers with interesting, well-stocked minds who don't seem to be in a rush to get anywhere in particular. The late, late hours, when the house is quiet, seem best for such unhurried reading. Geoff Nicholson is a satiric novelist distinguished by sardonic wit, a scabrous imagination, and raffish charm. A Brit who 'divides his time between Los Angeles and London,' he has given us The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism. Don't be deceived by the winking subtitle. There is not much history, science, or philosophy in this book, but it is none the worse for that. The Lost Art of Walking is a ramble, and you never know where the next chapter will wander." This is the latest in a cluster of books about walking published in the last few years, and Nicholson's is the most entertaining of the lot. "Alas, on matters of faith Nicholson is tone-deaf. His skepticism is genial, but there are many missed opportunities." Yes, and there's still room for more good walking books.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East. Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. Philip Jenkins. HarperOne. Here I will quote from Mark Noll's review in the November/December Books & Culture: "Beyond its useful correctives to standard church histories, the book also probes the meaning of Middle Eastern Christianity's long history. Jenkins shows, for example, that much can be learned about inter-religious strife in the 21st century by heeding the history of Christian communities that lived intermingled among Muslims for centuries (and in the Far East, with Buddhists, and in India, with Hindus). He discusses at length the process of church extinction—for example, why once-flourishing Greek Orthodox and Catholic Christianity vanished almost entirely from North Africa once Islam spread through that region, while Monophysite Coptic Christians have survived in Egypt with considerable numbers and at least some spiritual vitality to this day. There is much as well on why outbursts of intense persecution took place in the late 13th century (the spread of the Mongols), at the turn of the 20th century (the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), and in the early 21st (the rise of Islamism); and on the great significance of state authority in determining the fate of Christian churches under non-Christian rulers. Brief, but compelling, thoughts on the judgments of God and the apparent annihilation of Christian communities make for theologically profitable reflection as well." Don't miss it.

Original Sin: A Cultural History. Alan Jacobs. HarperOne. Jacobs is a superb writer whose work is beginning to get the wider notice it has long deserved. He is also a good friend. (While working on this list, I was listening to a couple of samplers of music Alan put together for me.) So let me turn to a third party, Matt Jenson, a theologian teaching great books in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University and the author of The Gravity of Sin (T&T Clark). In his review of Original Sin in the July/August issue of Books & Culture, Jenson describes it as "a book endeavoring to help us say and do something about the sin which so easily ensnares (even if we aren't sure it really exists). Jacobs' is not an easy task. Part apologist, part peddler of cultural curiosities, part champion of the doctrinal underdog, he aims to win another hearing for original sin. Moving back and forth in history, he details commendations and dismissals of the doctrine, beginning—where else?—with Augustine, its most influential expositor. Haven't we all, with Augustine, experienced what Jacobs nicely dubs a 'forking and branching' of the will?"

The Private Patient. P. D. James. Knopf. This isn't the best or among the best of the many novels James has written about police detective and poet Adam Dalgliesh and his associates (so I think, anyway), but it gave me a great deal of pleasure nonetheless. There is the pleasure of James' sinewy intelligence, of reacquaintance with familiar characters and the meeting of new ones, of the sometimes playful if also grave employment of motifs and devices from the long history of the genre (James has an encyclopedic knowledge of the literature of crime). There is interest in seeing how James' rather reticent Anglican faith will inform the moral universe of her tale. And, always, there is the experience of a new setting (in this case a rather remote private medical clinic), for James is masterly in evoking the atmosphere of a place (of an institution, for instance, and of a particular locale that reveals distinctive facets of England and Englishness).

Zong! M. NourbeSe Philip. As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng. Wesleyan University Press. In his foreword to the 1981 University of California edition of Prepositions: The Complete Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky, Hugh Kenner writes, "Anything you can write is somehow already immanent in the language, a baffling fact that has various ways of affecting those who discern it." I thought of that sentence while reading M. NourbeSe Philip's extraordinary "hauntological" book, which takes as its point of departure a 1783 legal decision, Gregson v. Gilbert. The case was occasioned by the voyage of a slave ship, the Zong, which left the west coast of Africa in 1781 bound for Jamaica with a cargo of 470 slaves. Due to navigational errors, the voyage took much longer than it should have. Some of the slaves died from thirst, but roughly 150 were cast overboard, the captain believing that "if they were thrown alive in the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters." The insurers disagreed. Meditating on this case—she felt that the ancestors were speaking through her—and reflecting that this "story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally," Philip was led to take the text of the legal decision itself (included here in two large pages of small type) as her source, fragmenting and dismembering it. First entire words of the text, then fragments of words, are juxtaposed and recombined to make the poem that is this book.

Books of the Year:

The Consolation of Philosophy. Boethius. Translated by David R. Slavitt. Harvard University Press.

De Rerum Natura / The Nature of Things. Lucretius. Translated by David R. Slavitt. University of California Press.

Is everything already written? Was it laid down even before the poet, novelist, essayist, and translator David Slavitt was born in 1935 that in his old age he would translate masterpieces by Lucretius and Boethius? What a pair. Lucretius, that arch-materialist of the first century before Christ, and the Christian philosopher and man of letters Boethius (c. 480-524), who loved Greek and Latin learning and whose faith permitted him to write with serenity while under a sentence of death. And was it laid down also that the two translations should appear in the same year?

I'll be writing more about this odd couple in the pages of Books & Culture. I think you'll find as I did that these translations will repay the time you give to them.

John Wilson is the editor of Books & Culture.

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