Best books read in 2005

-Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series: I'm through the tenth book in what a Times reviewer called "the best historical novels ever written." They deserve all the superlatives they get--nominally they're about a British captain and ship's doctor during the Napoleonic wars (early 1800s), but really they're about men, friendship, art/science, politics, love....

And despite mostly taking place on ships in Her Majesty's Royal Navy, O'Brian books reminds me of Jane Austen's: both create a cozy, sharply-defined world within which they set loose interesting people. The musings and conversational asides of the characters and the author are often pithy, you find yourself reading and then laughing as you get it, or thinking wow, that's really it exactly. I actually prefer O'Brian to Austen--her world, perhaps because I'm a guy, reads like a long narrow hallway after a while, whereas his feels wide as the real world.

-Ann Patchett's Bel Canto: Every so often you read a book that everyone else has read and wonder if everyone else enjoyed it the way you did, or if for them it's just the latest Tuesdays with Morrie. The plot, based on true events, revolves around a South American revolutionary group taking an assortment of glittering elites hostage at an embassy party. There's a renowned soprano, a Japanese industrialist, an essential interpreter, and a pretty revolutionary--the plot bringing such different worlds in one space is interesting, but Patchett's prose, her ability to convey things like longing and telling mannerisms makes Bel Canto.

-Christopher Paolini's Eldest: He's barely 21, but Paolini is already one of the better fantasy writers out there. His first book, Eragon, set up the world of a boy and his dragon; I didn't have the same feeling of amazement reading the second book, but I did love reading it, it's an interesting world he's created and I'm impatient for the final book. It's more Harry Potter (you see the strings being pulled but can't wait to turn the page) than Urusla LeGuin (wow prose you reread and roll around in your head). But the home-schooled Paolini knows his stuff.

-Philip Roth's The Plot Against America: I'd never finished any novels by Roth/Bellow/Updike/Mailer; but I can see why Roth is in the modern pantheon (my own would include Rushdie/Hemingway/E.B. White/Nabokov). PAT imagines the fascist Charles Lindbergh beating FDR in 1940, from the point of view of a Jewish boy growing up in New Jersey. It's a "big" book--you could see it as a gloss of post-9/11 America, but I think Roth would find that too limiting. He's looking at the impact of fear on society, whether Weimar Germany or Caesar's Rome or Hobbes' England. But his ideas don't come at the price of story and character, PAT could just as easily be read as a classic American coming-of-age tale.

Photo of Patrick O'Brian from W. W. Norton & Company.