It’s a good time for books. Books are handy to read while traveling for the holidays or even if one’s daily commute has been delayed because of the winter weather. This list could be timely too in preparation for New Year’s Resolutions, if yours is to spend more time between the pages than at surfing channels or the web. I know I wish I read more this year, that’s why I went to the editors of The Atlantic Monthly to fashion this list of books.

1. One of Deputy Editor Scott Stossel’s Picks: My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, by John Updike
Updike’s last collection of short stories, published a few months after his death early this year, reveal a preoccupation with aging and mortality. (For fun, compare Updike’s fictional reckonings with his senescence to his peer Philip Roth’s: the former’s tend toward wistful nostalgia, the latter toward strangulated expressions of bitterness.) Updike’s final stories also remind us that he was one of the most artful crafters of English sentences that the modern language has known. (We published one of these stories in The Atlantic.) Even the clunkers in this collection (and there are only one or two) have lines that make you exclaim admiringly to yourself. Updike was so good for so long that we almost seemed to have stopped noticing.

2. Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Senior Editor’s Pick: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky translation)
I’ve started and abandoned plenty of great masterpieces in my time. I’ve read and reread Pip’s explanation of how he got his name but still haven’t met Miss Havisham. And Swann’s Way, which I find delicious in small bites, is currently lying under a pile of magazines on my nightstand. War and Peace was different: after 10 pages, I was so wholly absorbed that I found myself turning off the television, staying up late, even making excuses not to go out so I could spend the evening with the Bolkonskys and the Rostovs.

I owe a huge part of my enjoyment to the translators. Richard Pevear and his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, managed to render Tolstoy in smooth, natural English without bulldozing over his idiosyncrasies. The two-word sentence Kápli kápali has been translated by others as “The branches dripped,” “The trees were dripping,” or “Raindrops dripped.” Pevear and Volokhonsky simply write, “Drops dripped”—unafraid to pass along Tolstoy’s repetition and brevity. The odd freshness of this language makes the story that much more captivating. And it frees Tolstoy to do what he does best, which is to make fictional characters from far-off times and places feel deeply, startlingly, three-dimensionally human.

3. Daniel Indiviglio, Staff Editor’s Pick: The Prince of Darkness, by Robert D. Novak
The Prince of Darkness, is a 672-page autobiographical account of Robert Novak’s 50 years of reporting in the nation’s capital. No matter your view on Novak’s politics, his talent for breaking huge stories and his ambition as a reporter were undeniable.
The book is written in the tight, unforgiving tone that made his writing famous. The pages fly by. It also provides a glimpse into his personal life, which makes it all the more interesting. From the Plame affair to his obsession with sports to his conversion to the Catholic faith despite his Jewish roots, his life was far from ordinary.

Reading about the history he witnessed up close — and often was the first to document — blew my mind. Beyond his pure talent, Novak worked hard, rested rarely, and had an insatiable hunger for news — which is why he was able to accomplish so much during his career.

4. James Fallows, National Correspondent: “I can’t name the “best” book I’ve read recently, but I have some alternative categories to suggest. One is “Best Book Most Readers Are Likely to Have Missed”: Two Kinds of Time, by Graham Peck
A marvelous words-and-drawings chronicle of travels through China in the decade leading up to the Communist revolution in 1949. Peck, whose day job was as a U.S. foreign service officer, was also a gifted artist and a very witty writer and observer. The book, reissued this year (with a new introduction by Robert Kapp) after its original publication in 1950, is very long but does not contain an uninteresting page.

5. Benjamin Schwarz, Literary and National Editor: Moving Pictures, by Budd Schulberg

This has been a particularly anxious year for me (for most of us), and in the predawn hours, after checking the Fidelity website for the sixteenth time, I’ve reached for books that give me some succor and courage. For succor, nothing beat Budd Schulberg’s dry, elegiac 500-page memoir of his boyhood in Hollywood’s golden age, a reissue of which I chanced on this summer. I found it completely absorbing (I could have really used the book back in March, before the rally), but this year’s dark nights of the soul have required books that I can read again and again.

And: Essays, by George Orwell
For years I’ve kept by my bedside the single-volume 1408-page Everyman collection of Orwell’s Essays. (I always assign it in a seminar I teach on Orwell’s nonfiction), and this year I turned to it (particularly “Charles Dickens,” “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” “The Lion and the Unicorn,” and “Boys’ Weeklies”) several nights a week. Orwell’s bracing intelligence and austere but lithe prose have the same effect on me (in my warm bed) that the skirl of bagpipes had on grenadiers going over the top, and though I don’t cotton to the notion that literature has any purpose, I do believe that reading Orwell will make you a clearer thinker, a cleaner writer, and a more thoughtful—and brave—human being.

6. Marc Ambinder, Politics Editor: The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide To The Laws Of The Universe, by Roger Penrose

“The {fij},” we are told on page 989 of this tome, “are reduced modulo quantities of the form {hi-hj}.” Ah, just when I had gotten my mind around the differences between Lagrangians and Hamiltonians, it took me a day and a half to understand what the physicist Roger Penrose was trying to convey. But such unabridged complexity is one reason why his book, unsubtly titled The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, is probably the best primer on physics ever created for thinking audiences. Penrose, the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, wrote his magnum opus in 2004. After an admonition to give mathematics a chance, it starts in with philosophy, exploring what reality means to a quantum physicist.

By the end of the first chapter, one finds oneself largely agreeing with Penrose that there is something “real” about the mysterious connections among the physical world, the mental world, and the platonic mathematical structure that gives rise to modern physics. Penrose, who has fallen in love with the aesthetics of physics, takes the reader on a journey from Euclid’s geometry to Mandelbrot sets to Reimann torus topology to Newton’s calculus—and then on to the Grassmann algebras and hypercomplex numbers. By page 251, an exasperated reader will have had quite enough math and might be wondering where the familiar descriptive-metaphor physics comes in. But Penrose simply won’t insult his readers, and this is the strength of the book. He takes us inside the mind of mathematicians as they play with mental models and with mathematic concepts, inviting us to understand physics as it is understood by those who practice it.

About 500 pages in, we begin to get to the meat of the book: modern quantum physics and cosmology. Even having picked up only a fraction of the math, the reader is much the better for it.  But begin the book halfway through, and you’ll be just fine. Penrose is one of our finest living scientists, and he provides a systematic, witty survey of all the major topics and debates in particle physics. He is delightfully clear on where consensus has been built and where he disagrees with that consensus. (He does not agree with the standard explanation for entropy prior to the Big Bang, for example, and is also quite skeptical about superstring theory—currently en vogue.)   He is a trenchant critic as well of anthropic reasoning in physics, whereby constraints are set just so, and life and consciousness emerge from a grand design.

I don’t much like math myself, but I’ve found the delights of cosmology and particle physics to be an escape of sorts from the complexities of the real world. This is a book that teems with provocations and fascinating discursions – a rare popular physics book that’s unafraid to be what it is. Highly recommended!

http://bestbook.theatlantic.com/