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Let's agree not to quibble over the word "best." I hope that this list will point you to a book or two that you might otherwise have missed—or one that is already buried in a stack of things you've been meaning to read.

1. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, by Michael A. Bellesiles (Knopf). According to the conventional wisdom—accepted both by gun enthusiasts and by their sworn ideological foes, those cultural critics who claim that a fixation with violence is definitive of the American experience—guns were ubiquitous in early America, written large in the national psyche from the very beginning. Michael Bellesiles begs to differ. His book, massively documented and superbly argued, deserves to win a Pulitzer Prize. Along with many rave reviews, Arming America has inspired a good deal of lively criticism, some of which is also worth reading. Go online and check it out after you've read the book.

2. The Art of Arts: Rediscovering Painting, by Anita Albus (Knopf). Translated from the German by Michael Robertson. "There was a time, five hundred years ago, when science was regarded as an art, and art as a science. And in the contest between the senses, the ear. … was conquered by the eye, which would henceforth be king. A new breed of painters aimed to reconcile the world of the senses with that of the mind, and their goal was to conceal themselves in the details and vanish away, like God. A new way of perceiving was born." Anita Albus, herself a painter, focuses especially on the work of Jan van Eyck. Her feast of a book, illustrated with 12 full-color pages and ten full-color gatefolds (beautiful, but not easy of access), is dazzling in its boundary-crossing erudition and its imaginative sweep. And it deftly undercuts our habitual condescension toward the past, reminding us that knowledge is lost as well as gained over the centuries.

3. The Elsewhere Community , by Hugh Kenner (Oxford University Press). Based on five radio broadcasts and easily digestible in an evening or two, this book takes off from Aristotle's observation that "all humans, by their nature, desire to know." Just so, says Hugh Kenner, and "a special and unparalleled way to know is to go where you've never been. And the key to this quest for knowledge is 'elsewhere.' In going there, you join what, in these lectures, we will be calling an 'Elsewhere Community.'" Kenner is best known as a literary critic, the preeminent interpreter of Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, among others, but his notion of the "Elsewhere Community" extends to travel of all kinds, including the virtual travel afforded by the Internet.

4. God's Name in Vain: The Wrongs and Rights of Religion in Politics , by Stephen L. Carter (Basic). Well, you may be saying, the campaign is over; do we really need this book now? Actually, yes, now more than ever: one prediction it's safe to make about the first phase of the Bush Administration is that we will be hearing a great deal about "religion in politics," including a fair amount of hysteria. There's no better guide to thinking about such matters than Carter's book.

5. The Human Stain , by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin). Yes, all of Roth's usual quirks are on display here, including his contempt for Christians and religious believers generally. But this story of an African American professor who "passed" as Jewish is nonetheless a bracing antidote both to political correctness and to the very different culture of euphemism that smothers plain-speaking and truth-telling in the evangelical world. The "human stain" we all share is made palpable in Roth's novel.

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January (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45