As with so many years past, so many of the best books I read this year were not, precisely, books of this year -- either they appeared elsewhere long ago, or in England a year ago or more.

This attempt at a least seems rendered further specious by the fact that the quality of my memory is distinctly cheeseclothesque these days, liable only to trap and hold the things you don't want to wind up in the soup. With that in mind, here is a soggy bouquet garni of reading from the past twelvemonth -- with a couple of significant items noted that were not published in 2005, or anywhere near to it, but finally brought to the Wombat's attention during the year.

No links to internet bookstores. Given where I work, I want neither to appear a company shill nor do I love suggesting alternatives, what with the hand that feeds the Wombat and all. So, repair ye to your customary merchant.

Recently I've been drawn to tales of fugitives, doomed outlaws, etc. Bryan Burrough's tommy-gun-toting history Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 (published last year in hardcover) was one of the most informative books about all of those famous "gangsters" one has heard about but never really gotten the details on -- Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, the Barker gang...the details wind up becoming overwhelming, but there's a lot of fascinating demystification along the way. What it really exposes is how inept and out-of-its depth the FBI (as well as the nascent state police forces) were in the 1930s. There was no such thing as national law enforcement. Hoover didn't even want his agents to carry guns until they were forced into it by the heavily armed gangs.

Also on the running-from-the law tip, Christopher Sorrentino's novel Trance, which very lightly fictionalizes the Patty Hearst kidnapping and her resulting life as a fugitive with the SLA is highly enjoyable, emotionally potent, and nails both atmosphere and the cultural smolder around Watergate (or so says this doofus, who didn't really notice anything as tenebrous as a political climate until Reagan landed like sunnily smiling bomb in 1980). The obvious comparison is to Don Dellilo, but Sorrentino has a surprisingly light touch, and his "Alice Galton"/Tania (interestingly, he fictionalizes Paty Hearts's name and some others, but not the SLA's adopted monickers, including the one Hearst used) is one of the most sympathetic characters of the year.

Zadie Smith's On Beauty didn't make me fall in love with her characters in the way that I did with White Teeth (a novel I'm happy to admit had many flaws, and one I loved wholeheartedly nevertheless), but it kept me riveted all the way through, and if I couldn't find myself liking Howard Belsey much at all, that didn't stop me from being fascinated by his self-destructive trajectory. Lots of improbabilities, partial exposures, and easy escapes. But lots of brio, lots of getting much of the angst and appeal of academic life exactly exactly, and lots of just wanting to read one more page.

I think that Saturday, by Ian McEwan, deserves a spot on this list. I go back and forth about how I feel about the novel's climactic set piece -- its sense of stage-managed cultural passion play seems hard to ignore the more I revisit it in memory, and suggests that some of the criticisms of the novel's mechanical effectiveness might not be far off the mark. But again and again through the book -- which wrestles, not incidentally, with an incredibly thorny issue, that is: how do have a character in a novel coherently articulate more than just vague emotional tones about the current state of international politics? -- I was struck by passages of extreme and concise beauty, images and figures of speech that were fresh and invigorating. I blush to say I can't quote any of them for you, and I don't have a copy of the book at hand. But I remember encountering them. And I remember as well the compelling description of neurosurgery itself, and I love fiction that takes you into another person's highly involved expertise, and does that magic trick of convincing you that you're seeing it yourself, from the inside. For that alone, Saturday ought to rank up there as one of the best.

Arthur and George by Julian Barnes -- available in a month or so in the U.S. -- simply a cracking great read. Deeply suspenseful, almost painful to read at times (Barnes renders George's persecution with a placid inevitability that is literally heartbreaking). I'll just add that I think that this is the most fully satisfying work of fiction I've read this year.

However, we'll see how I feel after I'm more than a hundred pages into Europe Central, which is without question the best thing -- so far at least -- that I've read from William Vollmann (note: I'm a neophyte when it comes to Vollman's output: I've only read three of his previous novels and a collection of his shorter pieces. So, my estimation should come with a large asterisk). But so far, this historical-novel-in-stories manages to balance dozens of voices; an encyclopedic familiarity with the nations, political personalities, movements, generals, assassins, etc. that were caught up in the violence of the thirties and forties; a sense of chilling dread that pulls you along like a horror movie unfolding; and Vollmann's insistent and powerful personification of the social and political forces that drove the world into nightmare. I can't put it down, and that's not something I often say about his work.

Finally, this year I was introduced to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, a four-book series -- published in the early 1980s -- that instantly makes that slender list of works which are great "science fiction" or "fantasy" (in this case, something of both, or maybe one in the guise of the other), and are also simply monumentally powerful fiction. Blake, DeQuincey, Melville, Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, LeGuin, and Borges all either come to mind or are clearly part of Wolfe's constellation of influences. My next reading project (after finishing Europe Central) will be to look up some of Wolfe's widely-praised short fiction.

And after that, I'll be trying to lay hands on (among others) John Banville's The Sea, George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, and the Mary Gaitskill novel everyone is telling me I should read.

Note: aside from the above, the Wombat disliked many, many things it read in 2005. But I'm practicing a positive-news-only perspective, in hopes of procuring future work from the Pentagon or other government agencies looking to get the good news out there to the public.