The Best Ten books of 2006

A book is a collection of paper, parchment or other material with a piece of text written on them, bound together along one edge, usually within covers. Each side of a sheet is called a page and a single sheet within a book may be called a leaf. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work.

ABSURDISTAN
Absurdistan is a 2006 novel by Gary Shteyngart. It chronicles the adventures of Misha Vainberg, the 325-pound son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia as he struggles to return to his true love in the Bronx via the invented country Absurdistan. Absurdistan debuted to mainly favorable reviews.

THE COLLECTED STORIES OF AMY HEMPEL
Hempel has demonstrated unusual discipline in assembling her urbane, pointillistic and wickedly funny short stories. Since the publication of her first collection, "Reasons to Live," in 1985, only three more slim volumes have appeared - a total of some 15,000 sentences, and nearly every one of them has a crisp, distinctive bite. These collected stories show the true scale of Hempel's achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart, neurotic, somewhat damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us, and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound.

THE EMPEROR'S CHILDREN
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. 431 pages $25. Alfred A. Knopf. Messud gracefully intertwines the stories of three friends, attractive, entitled 30-ish Brown graduates "torn between Big Ideas and a party" but falling behind in the contest for public rewards and losing the struggle for personal contentment. The vibrant supporting cast includes a deliciously drawn literary seducer and two ambitious interlopers, teeming with malign energy, whose arrival on the scene propels the action forward.

THE LAY OF THE LAND
The Lay of the Land is a 2006 novel by Richard Ford. It is the third in a trilogy. The third installment, following "The Sportswriter" (1986) and "Independence Day" (1995), in the serial epic of Frank Bascombe - flawed husband, fuddled dad, and writer turned real estate agent and voluble first-person narrator. Once again the action revolves around a holiday. This time it's Thanksgiving 2000: the Florida recount grinds toward its predictable outcome, and Bascombe, now 55, battles prostate cancer and copes with a strange turn in his second marriage.

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS
Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) is a mystery novel by American writer Marisha Pessl. The antic ghost of Nabokov hovers over this buoyantly literate first novel, a murder mystery narrated by a teenager enamored of her own precocity but also in thrall to her father, an enigmatic itinerant professor, and to the charismatic female teacher whose death is announced on the first page. Each of the 36 chapters is titled for a classic, and the plot snakes ingeniously toward a revelation capped by a clever "final exam.

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH
By DanielleTrussoni This intense, at times searing memoir revisits the author's rough-and-tumble Wisconsin girlhood, spent on the wrong side of the tracks in the company of her father, a Vietnam vet who began his tour as "a cocksure country boy" but returned "wild and haunted," unfit for family life and driven to extremes of philandering, alcoholism and violence.

THE LOOMING TOWER
By Lawrence Wright The Looming Tower achieves an unprecedented level of intimacy and insight by telling the story through the interweaving lives of four men: the two leaders of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri; the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, John O’Neill; and the former head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Turki al-Faisal.

MAYFLOWER
By Nathaniel Philbrick This absorbing history of the Plymouth Colony is a model of revisionism. Philbrick impressively recreates the pilgrims' dismal 1620 voyage, bringing to life passengers and crew, and then relates the events of the settlement and its first contacts with the native inhabitants of Massachusetts. Most striking are the parallels he subtly draws with the present, particularly in his account of how Plymouth's leaders, including Miles Standish, rejected diplomatic overtures toward the Indians, successful though they'd been, and instead pursued a "dehumanizing" policy of violent aggression that led to the needless bloodshed of King Philip's War.

THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA
By Michael Pollan. "When you can eat just about anything nature has to offer, deciding what you should eat will inevitably stir anxiety," Pollan writes in this supple and probing book. He gracefully navigates within these anxieties as he traces the origins of four meals - from a fast-food dinner to a "hunter-gatherer" feast - and makes us see, with remarkable clarity, exactly how what we eat affects both our bodies and the planet. Pollan is the perfect tour guide.

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN
Rory Stewart's moving, sparsely poetic account of his walk across Afghanistan in January 2002 has been immediately hailed as a classic. Caught between hostile nations, warring factions and competing ideologies, at the time, Afghanistan was in turmoil following the US invasion. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible, mountainous route once taken by the Mohgul Emperor, Babur the Great, Stewart was nearly defeated by the extreme, hostile conditions.

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