Reading remembered

The year is at an end, at least as the western world computes such things, and while Greenwich and Paris compete over who has the better system of timekeeping -- the Royal Observatory in England or the computers of International Atomic Time in France -- the rest of us simply mark the sense of something ending and something beginning, certain that the cusp of ages has meaning.

Since this blog is called "Off the Shelf," I thought I would mention some of the titles which came off my own shelves in the past year and gave enjoyment. No system here -- just what I look back on with a feeling of good fortune.

Homecoming, by Bernhard Schlink. Schlink is better known for his 1999 bestseller, The Reader, which is now a new movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Kate Winslet. Homecoming was published in 2008 and a paperback edition is out in early January. It's the story of a young German boy, whose single mother is vague about the identity of his father. The boy finds scraps of a fiction manuscript among his late grandparents' things, and as he pursues the rest of the manuscript and its author, the two quests come together. He finds the sorry truth about his father, a onetime Nazi apologist who has emigrated to the United States and become an eminent professor. Then a sort of stalking begins.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski. Much has been written about this bestseller, an Oprah Winfrey selection, including a story in the Globe, and its plot outline is well-known: an adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet set in Wisconsin, amid dogs and dog breeders. I found it to be completely unbelievable in plot, yet moment by moment and character by character, totally convincing, and I did not ever become impatient, though I did think it takes Shakespeare's tragic story even further, somewhere closer to Homer's Iliad. It's a sprawling novel that did not, as we say in newspapers, "read long."

The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe, by Greg Behrman. This 2007 book is now in paperback, and I was interested to see that the awkward subtitle has been changed to The Marshall Plan and How America Helped Rebuild Europe. The new title omits the word "saved," though that is really what the plan did. The Marshall Plan was ingenious in one respect. By General Marshall's insistence that the Europeans must propose their own plan to remedy their situation of near-starvation and economic collapse, before American aid would be granted, the nations of Western Europe came together, in a way they never had done before, to discuss and sort out common and individual needs. So the Marshall Plan actually prompted the beginnings of what we now know as the European Union. By his initiation of and tireless campaigning for the plan, Marshall showed himself to be probably the greatest peacemaking soldier in history. Behrman's writing is somewhat plodding, and the book had (in hardcover, at leat) an annoying number of typos, but the story is gripping and worth reading for the sake of understanding how powerful diplomacy can be as a means to security in the world.

The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order, by Joan Wickersham. This drew a Globe story, too, but it was no place for an opinion. Here I can say that this short book is a touching and wise account, not only of the facts of a man's self-guided exit from life, but of how that exit affects everyone around the deceased: widow, siblings, children, grandchildren, colleagues and friends. It is not a despairing book, nor is it sentimental. It is about survival and healing.

Finally, there's Bikeman, by Thomas Flynn. Also a Globe story, the short epic poem (technically an epyllion) is an attempt by the former CBS News producer to relate his experience on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he rode his bike into the teeth of the maelstrom at New York's World Trade Center. Flynn had never written poetry before, and said he probably never will again. Bikeman demonstrates that some experiences simply can't be expressed in ordinary prose.

I wish all the millions of "Off the Shelf" readers -- or should I say "page-viewers"? -- a year of rare good fortune in 2009. If it's filled with good reading, it can never be a total loss.