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Bedside books? Along with David Markson's Vanishing Point, mentioned last week, one of the year's best was Brooke Allen's collection of literary essays, Artistic License (Ivan R. Dee), funny and sharp and full of piquant detail. Also a pair of books on writing, The Sound on the Page: Style and Voice in Writing, by Ben Yagoda (HarperCollins) and The Writer's Voice, by A. Alvarez (Norton).

For a poem or two a night, there was Czeslaw Milosz's posthumous collection, Second Space (Ecco), and the big volume of Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Harcourt); both will be reviewed in B&C sometime in the next year. Also All the Poems of Muriel Spark (New Directions), a beautifully made book.

Reissues? For me, the reissue of the year, hands down, was The Notebooks of Simone Weil (Routledge), long out of print and very hard to find. Others include the Library of America edition of Isaac Bashevis Singer's Collected Stories (in three volumes); a 20th-anniversary edition of William Gibson's Neuromancer (Ace), with a new preface by Gibson; and some scrapings near the bottom of the Philip K. Dick barrel. I remain enormously grateful to Vintage for this magnificent project, which will be complete in 2005. Still to come are two PKDs for completists, The Crack in Space and Dr. Futurity, plus (in August) a new anthology to be called Vintage PKD. There will also be some buzzing about the Richard Linklater film based on Dick's novel A Scanner Darkly—one of my least favorites of his books.

Mention of these forthcoming items reminds me that I had promised this week to include some new arrivals and coming attractions—and The Worst Book of the Year (2004, that is). I will have to defer those to next week.

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture.

The books mentioned above are available from Amazon.com, Christianbook.com, from the publisher, or other book retailers.

Two weeks ago, Wilson listed his top ten books of 2004. For more books, see Christianity Today's 2004 book awards and our collection of articles, interviews, and reviews from all the CT book awards through 2000, including the books of the century.

Books & Culture Corner appears every Tuesday. Earlier editions of Books & Culture Corner and Book of the Week include:

The Top Ten Books of 2004 | And a warning about the risks of reading. (Dec. 28, 2004)

Modern, All Too Modern | Tom Wolfe's new novel, largely reviewed as a satiric report on the sexual mores of today's college students, is fundamentally about the nature of the human will. (Dec. 14, 2004)

Unfashionably Good | A savory collections of essays by Alan Jacobs. (Dec. 07, 2004)

Communicating Communication | A roundup from the National Communication Association's annual convention. (Nov. 30, 2004)

"Summer's Ebullient Finale" | A richly varied anthology offers a "spiritual biography" of autumn. (Nov. 15, 2004)

Autumn Books | Some that stand out in this season's plenty. (Nov. 15, 2004)

Reaching the Light | A review of On Broken Legs: A Shattered Life, a Search for God, a Miracle That Met Me in a Cave in Assisi. (Nov. 09, 2004)

The Prayers of a Self-Governing People | A psalm for Election Day. (Nov. 02, 2004)

In Memoriam: Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) | Remembering a philosopher who never forgot about death. (Oct. 19, 2004)

Whose Independence? | All the Founding Fathers of America celebrated "independence," but what the word meant depended on who was speaking. (Oct. 12, 2004)

Darkness Visible | An unsparing new memoir by the author of Slackjaw. (Oct. 05, 2004)

After Worldview? | A lively conference offers a state-of-the-art assessment of the concept of "worldview," with both advocates and dissenters represented. (Sept. 28, 2004)

A Forgotten Founder's Fatherhood | Race, nature, and patriarchy meet in Rhys Isaac's biography of early American diarist Landon Carter. (Sept. 21, 2004)

The Great American Hustle | The first volume of an ambitious new history of America highlights the engine of "worldly ideals"—and the role of evangelical religion in creating a distinctive American identity. (Sept. 14, 2004)

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January (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49