Wizards, Warmongers and the West Coast

7. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Richard Rhodes. This one will make you want to blow your brains out. The run up to a nuclear holocaust that wasn't, it details how all the same villains who gave us the war in Iraq were present and active when the United States and the Soviet Union brinked right up to blowing the world to smithereens back in the days of the Reagan administration.

8. The Book of Psalms. Robert Alter. New translations should make texts alive again, and this one does that in spades. Alter translates felicitously, but he also explains his choices, giving you little lessons in word choice, pastoral imagery, history and religion. You think you know these texts, or you do until you read Alter, who reignites their beauty in bracing and unexpected ways.

9. After Dark.Haruki Murakami. The denizens of Tokyo in the wee small hours, as filtered through the novelist's peculiar, laidback brand of magical realism, complete with a woman who's been asleep for months and who disappears for a while--through the screen of a television set.

10. Falling Man. Don DeLillo. In this fictional accounting of a few lives in the wake of 9/11, DeLillo stares down the temptation to hold forth on Important Themes, preferring instead to register just what it was like to live through that strange time when everything seemed more vivid and nothing added up. A disquieting, haunting book.

11. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. Rajiv Chandrasekaran. The author is a reporter for The Washington Post; the story describes the foolish choices and the outright cupidity on the part of American officials that produced the current situation in Iraq.

12. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Tim Weiner. From the end of World War II to the present, a New York Times reporter's mordant account of government sponsored spying and deceit: the dark side of the American Century.