2 of 4

Jonathan Sarna is an outstanding scholar, and his American Judaism: A History (Yale Univ. Press), due in April, should be one of the highlights of the year. Also noteworthy from Yale is Jaroslav Pelikan'sInterpreting the Bible and the Constitution, scheduled for May. Also in the don't-miss file is Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (Simon & Schuster), by Allen Guelzo, a frequent contributor to Books & Culture, due in February.

Anne Godoff, formerly of Random House, is now head of a new Penguin Group imprint, the Penguin Press. She has brought some of her big authors with her and recruited some new ones. The impressive first list, scheduled for this spring, includes titles by Niall Ferguson, Lawrence Lessig, Ken Auletta, Richard Evans, Ron Chernow, and the late Michael Kelly, among others, but the one I'm most looking forward to is Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, coming in March.

If you have a gift card from a bookseller and don't know what to spend it on, I have a suggestion. Thanks to a recommendation by our son, Andrew, Wendy and I—like a host of other readers—have become acquainted with The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor), the first book in McCall Smith's series set in Botswana and centered on the resourceful Mma Precious Ramotswe. Wendy and I are just ready to begin the second book in the series, Tears of the Giraffe. For those who are well ahead of us and itching for another installment, the fifth book in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, is scheduled to be published in April by Pantheon. I should add that, on the basis of the first book, at least, McCall Smith has a rather dismissive attitude toward the Church. That was not at all a major theme in the book, but it was present, alas. You might read a few pages in the bookstore to see if you find Mma Precious Ramotswe as appealing as we did.

Another discovery this past year in the mystery genre was the Swedish writer Henning Mankell's series of novels featuring the police detective Kurt Wallander, published in hardback in the U.S. by the New Press and in paperback by Vintage/Black Lizard. Two books in the Wallander series, The Dogs of Riga and The Fifth Woman, will be released by Vintage in April.

I've never been bitten by the Susan Howatch bug, but I know many B&C readers who have. They will be pleased to learn—if they don't already know—that Howatch has a new novel coming in May: The Heartbreaker (Knopf). And further down the road, fans of the wide-ranging New Yorker writer, Lawrence Weschler, can look forward to his latest collection of pieces, Vermeer in Bosnia: Cultural Comedies and Political Tragedies (Pantheon).

Those are a few titles to keep an eye out for among the many worthy books (and many more unworthy ones) that will appear in the coming months. Already I have teetering stacks of "books to read," not all of which will get read, though I will at least investigate most of them. There are heaps of new books: novels, collections of poems—the most interesting right now is Wild Civility, by David Biespiel (Univ. of Washington Press)—several books about sound and history via "the senses," and so on. Also some "old books": I'm re-reading several books by the poet and translator Ben Belitt, for instance, who died this year.

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page