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Hard to believe it's already time again for our annual roundup of noteworthy books. As always, there's far more to cover than we have time or space for (not to mention all the good books I simply don't know about). But over the next weeks you'll hear about some of the titles that stand out among the enormous numbers that have arrived in the office in 2003. Two weeks from now we'll feature the Top Ten for the year, and the week after that we'll conclude the bookish year by looking ahead to some titles forthcoming in 2004.

The subject this week is old wine in new bottles. Some of the most interesting titles each year are old books reissued, freshly translated, newly packaged, or otherwise made new.

Our first title is a paperback of a book that was published for the first time just a year ago, Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season (Skylight Paths), edited by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch, with illustrations by Barry Moser. Seasonal anthologies like this rarely attract my interest—they tend toward the saccharine and the predictable—and when a review copy came in last year, the only reason it didn't immediately go into the giveaway bin was that I have considerable respect for the editors, both of whom teach at Calvin College. Nevertheless the book was quickly buried in my office, and only several months later—when winter was almost over—did I really take a look at it. It turns out to be a superb collection, mostly prose but with some poetry as well, including not only familiar figures but also some wonderful surprises. I took the book home, and my wife, Wendy, and I read it in bed each night until spring had decisively come to Wheaton. Get a copy for your bedside table and another two or three for the Christmas stockings of the readers you know best.

Many readers of Books & Culture will be familiar with Walter Wangerin, Jr., but even those who have enjoyed his wonderfully wide-ranging work may have missed The Crying for a Vision, a novel first published in 1994 by Simon & Schuster as a Young Adult book (a category that includes a lot of junk but also some excellent yet hard-to-categorize books that publishers end up sticking there). Set among the Lakota, the novel—in Wangerin's words—presents them as "that common people in whom all peoples see themselves." Now Paraclete Press has reissued the novel in a beautifully designed new edition that includes a long and fascinating afterword recalling the Sun Dance to which Wangerin was invited at the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota.

When I entered high school in the early 1960s, Dylan Thomas was a name to conjure with (hence Robert Zimmerman's earlier metamorphosis into Bob Dylan). If you were a certain sort of person, you would —at a minimum—have read a few of his best-known poems; you might very well have read a lot of them. Just a few years later that was no longer true, and my sense now is that he's read very little. On those rare occasions when I hear some literary type mention Thomas, it's almost always with condescension. If you haven't ever read him—or haven't read him since the '60s—take a look at The Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions), reissued with a CD of Thomas reading. What an astonishing gift he had. (And yes, our family will be reading A Child's Christmas in Wales aloud together again this year.)

One of the joys of the past couple of years for Wendy and me has been a reading group we're part of with three other couples. We meet once a month (with summers off), taking turns choosing books. One of our selections this year was a little book with a new translation of two stories by Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illich and Master and Man (Modern Library). The translator, Ann Pasternak Slater (whose mother was Boris Pasternak's sister), also provides an introduction and notes. "The Death of Ivan Illich" is regularly assigned in college lit classes and not infrequently in high school (or used to be—I'm not sure if that's still true). "Master and Man" is not at all obscure but isn't as widely known, either. Both stories deserve to be read for another 100 years, but "Master and Man," I think, is an absolute masterpiece—as profoundly Christian and as magically artful a story as you're likely to find anywhere.

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December (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47