possibleworldz.com

The NYT has a list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. I’ve book marked these to check out:

FICTION

THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $24.95.) An ambitious exploration of domestic dislocation, ranging over 60 years of American experience.

CLOUD ATLAS. By David Mitchell. (Random House, paper, $14.95.) A novel that covers about 1,000 years in narratives involving a New Zealand stowaway, a book editor, a goatherd and others.

HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A novel of ideas, incarnated in an 18-year-old orphan girl who takes a job in 1935 as secretary to a scholar of an ancient Jewish heresy.

OBLIVION: Stories. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) Narratives in an exhaustive mode, told by people who notice absolutely everything.

SWEET LAND STORIES. By E. L. Doctorow. (Random House, $22.95.) Like Doctorow’s novels, these stories affirm the American theme of self-creation.

THE TYRANT’S NOVEL. By Thomas Keneally. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) In a country very like Iraq, a fiction writer is ordered to produce, in one month, a novel to be published under a tyrant’s name.

NON FICTION

AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. By Eva Hoffman. (PublicAffairs, $25.) Hoffman renders the catastrophe as it is revealed to a generation drastically affected by events it is too young to remember.

THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. By Brian Greene. (Knopf, $28.95.) A discussion of the irreconcilable
differences between the cornerstones of theoretical physics — the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. By Graham Allison. (Times Books/Holt, $24.) A Harvard scholar’s report on the nuclear threat and how it might be reduced.

PERILOUS TIMES: Free Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. By Geoffrey R. Stone. (Norton, $35.) A study in historical perspective that shows a constant expansion of free-speech rights.

SONTAG & KAEL: Opposites Attract Me. By Craig Seligman. (Counterpoint, $23.) An appealing meditation on two widely discussed, influential critical icons who arose at the same historical moment (the mid-1960’s).

SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Harvard University, $18.95.) Gaddis argues that three salient elements of President Bush’s security strategy — pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony — have deep roots in America’s history.

UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York. By Paul Goldberger. (Random House, $24.95.) The story of the long and complex struggle over what should go up in the place of the World Trade Center.