Salon's Best Books of the Year

Salon chooses its favorite books of the year, looking to those it "propped up next to our bowls of breakfast cereal." The first five are fiction; the others non-fiction:

• "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" by Junot Diaz
• "Sacred Games" by Vikram Chandra
• "Then We Came to the End" by Joshua Ferris
• "Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson

• "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" by Michael Chabon
• "The Father of All Things" by Tom Bissell
• "Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations" by Georgina Howell
• "Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" by Tim Weiner
• "The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" by Judith Freeman
• "The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman

(More literature stories.)