Your TBR Pile Just Got Taller

[[B O O K S]] * I promised to post what I think are some of the best and most interesting “favorite books of 2005” lists, so here are two more. The first comes from the online magazine Slate. Although that site doesn’t separate its staffers’ choices (not all of which were published originally in 2005) into fiction and non-fiction categories, I have done so here:

Non-Fiction
● Tulia: Race, Cocaine, and Corruption in a Small Texas Town, by Nate Blakeslee (PublicAffairs, $26.95)
● Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits, and How Baseball Got Big, by Jose Conseco (Regan Books, $15.95)
● Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore, by James T. Patterson (Oxford University Press, $35)
● The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, by Megan Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, $28)
● The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26)
● Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America, by Cass R. Sunstein (Basic Books, $26)
● The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson (Knopf, $27.95)
● I’m With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, by Pamela Des Barres (Chicago Review Press, $14.95)
● I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation, by Michaela Wrong (HarperCollins, $25.95)

Fiction
● Saturday, by Ian McEwan (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $26)
● Letting Go (in Philip Roth: Novels and Stories, 1959-1962), by Philip Roth (Library of America, $35)
● The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (Knopf, $23.95)
● Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, $24)
● Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld (Random House, $21.95; paper, $13.95)
● Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala (HarperCollins, $16.95)

Poetry
● The Poems of Catullus: A Bilingual Edition, by Gaius Valerius Catullus; translated by Peter Green (University of California Press, $24.95)

This second list comes from New York magazine:

Literary Fiction
● The March, by E.L. Doctorow (Random House, $25.95)
● Pearl, by Mary Gordon (Pantheon, $24.95)
● The Writing on the Wall, by Lynn Sharon Schwartz (Counterpoint, $24)

Non-Fiction
● The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, by Sean Wilentz (Norton, $35)
● The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, $25.95)
● Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow, $25.95)

Best Debut Novel
● Beasts of No Nation, by Uzodinma Iweala (HarperCollins, $16.95)
● Indecision, by Benjamin Kunkel (Random House, $21.95)
● Summer Crossing, by Truman Capote (Random House. $22.95)

Best Academic Book
● The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value, by James F. English (Harvard University Press, $29.95)
● The Evolution-Creation Struggle, by Michael Ruse (Harvard University Press, $25.95)
● We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, by Tommie Shelby (Harvard University Press, $27.95)

Commercial Books
● The Starter Wife, by Gigi Levangie Grazer (Simon & Schuster, $24)
● Belushi: A Biography, by Judith Belushi Pisano and Tanner Colby (Rugged Land, $29.95)
● Lipstick Jungle, by Candace Bushnell (Hyperion, $24.95)