Season's readings

THE TACTILE pleasures of books have largely resisted the electronic revolution that has swept music, video, and (gasp!) newspapers. The heft, beauty, and even, for some people, the smell of a new hardcover book is an integral part of the reading experience. Besides, you can't wrap a podcast in glittery paper and present it in holiday greeting. Here, then, is a collection of books, newly published in 2006, that the Globe editorial board took pleasure in this year.

Allegra Goodman writes vividly of mice and men and women in her novel of a case of suspected fraud in a Cambridge research lab. "Intuition" (The Dial Press) captures all the pressure of deciding which research hunch to pursue, winning National Institute of Health grants, and controlling the media as the press learns of a possible new approach to treating cancer. But what if one researcher has faked his dramatic results, as a fellow scientist in the lab suspects? The skeptic, to complicate matters, is the researcher's ex-girlfriend. This mystery is played out in scenes as familiar as those in a Spenser whodunit -- including the Symphony, Harvard's Sanders Theatre, and Walden Pond.

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The tenuous hold on life and health in the developing world is made achingly real in "Monique and the Mango Rains" (Waveland Press). Peace Corps volunteer Kris Holloway recalls her two-year friendship with Monique Dembele, a midwife in a village of mud huts in Mali. It is a place where an infant's survival can depend on a bar of soap or a replenishing rain. The book is also a frank account of the culture shock Holloway experiences as a young American in Africa. The descriptions of childbirth and sickness are not for the squeamish, but the hardships are redeemed by the richness and beauty of the women, like Monique, and their struggle to bring holistic healing to their world.

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The reading world loves a great narrator, and it has one in Frank Bascombe, the vivid creation of novelist Richard Ford. Bascombe is back for a third try at getting life right in "The Lay of the Land" (Knopf). Readers of Ford's "The Sportswriter" (1986) and "Independence Day" (1995) will recognize Bascombe's tart fatalism as he makes his way through a doomed Thanksgiving week. It is 2000, and Bascombe's current situation is, like the outcome of that year's presidential election, a question mark that promises unhappy answers. Though he's worse for wear (prostate cancer, a second wife has left), there is, as always with Frank Bascombe, hope. Yet Ford masterfully suggests that come the next September everything will change, and that ultimately what matters is how we spend our days, each precious, sloppy one of them.

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Histories of the first Thanksgiving feast emphasize amity between the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians. Nathaniel Philbrick offers a more somber conclusion to this encounter in "Mayflower" (Viking). The second generation of settlers and Indians, spurred by land hunger and desire for English wealth, were on a collision course to the most devastating war ever to be waged in New England.

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Local author Rachel Kadish's novel is called "Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story," (Houghton Mifflin), and in that title is her premise: Contrary to what Leo Tolstoy claims in "Anna Karenina," happy families do not all resemble each other. It's both a playful and compelling idea that launches Kadish's main character Tracy Farber on her own quest through work and romance and New York City to prove that happiness is not "a daisy in a field of a thousand daises," nor is it "for lovers of kitsch and those with subpar intelligence."

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In "Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Nicholas Lemann chronicles the violent campaign to restore white Democratic rule in the South in the 1870s. In Mississippi, as elsewhere in the region, impending elections were an excuse for systematic murder of politically active blacks. Lemann is a diligent researcher, and he tells a chilling story: Zealots got their way through violent means -- and justified it matter-of-factly, as the proper response to wounded honor and historical grievance.

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Not many reputable scientists today would study communication from beyond the grave. But in the late 1800s, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Deborah Blum reports, a small group of eminent scholars risked their reputations to research the paranormal. In "Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death" (Penguin Press), the famous Harvard psychologist helps to found a psychic research society in Boston. Blum's book documents a crucial episode in intellectual history: a last-ditch effort by top researchers to bridge the growing rift between science and spiritual life.

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The biblical accounts of the mighty Kings David and Solomon are among the archetypical stories of Western Civilization. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, using the tools of arch eology and historical analysis, present a different, more primitive account of their reigns in "David and Solomon" (Free Press) and explain why later generations of Hebrew kings may have shaped the finished biblical version for their own ends.

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Now that Democrats have won Congress, ''The Plan: Big Ideas for America" (Public Affairs) might be more than a daydream. Provocative thoughts on healthcare, energy policy, military preparedness, government spending, and other issues are offered by Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed, two veterans of the Clinton White House. On a range of issues, they push a sense of community. "If your leaders aren't challenging you to do your part, they aren't doing theirs," they write.

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Without pretense or preachiness, broadcast journalist Chris Balish offers insights and strategies on "How to Live Well Without Owning a Car" (Ten Speed Press). Balish calculates the real costs in time and money of car ownership, then steers his readers toward "car-free" and "car-lite" lifestyles that offer better health and less stress. One inspired chapter provides tips on how to convince dates that car-free is not synonymous with countercultural loser. Since repeated warn-ings about greenhouse gases and high gas prices have not kept Americans off the road, Balish's ability to present a car-free existence as an exciting personal challenge will send more than a few readers hunting for the nearest public-transit map or ride-share board.

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There has been a cascade of books limning the blunders of President Bush in Iraq, but none more devastating than Peter Galbraith's "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End" (Simon & Schuster ). Galbraith writes as a lucid realist and a long time friend of the Kurds in Iraq, and there is a freshness to his account of American follies in Iraq that springs from his double role as critic and actor. His sojourn in Kurdistan while Saddam Hussein's forces were attacking the Kurds after the first Gulf War brings the reader close to a people who have survived Saddam's genocidal assaults and the several betrayals of foreign allies. He mounts a powerful argument that Iraq has been irretrievably fragmented and there is no point trying to stitch it back together.

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Putt. The word itself is diminutive, suggestive of toys: putt-putt. Yet every golfer, from the most pathetic weekend flailer to pros like Tiger Woods, knows that sinking putts consistently is one of the most difficult challenges in sports. Did you know that putting is one of the few physical skills that deteriorate steadily after adolescence? That even the tour pros miss 4 percent of their 2-footers? An entertaining look at the frustrations of the putting green, and the odd contraptions -- many expensive -- that have been fashioned to overcome them, can be found in Noah Liberman's "The Flat Stick" (Collins).

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There are certain rare lives so adventurous, so picaresque, that it seems they could have been imagined only by a novelist indifferent to the rules of plausibility. Such was the life of the African-American jockey Jimmy Winkfield, who won the Kentucky Derby in 1901 and 1902. Soon after, he was subjected to the implacable racist resentments of white competitors and owners in a brawling, savage era of American history, and became an expatriate. In "Black Maestro" (William Morrow), author Joe Drape recounts the gaudy successes of Winkfield. The reader gets one heck of a ride.

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To form an instant book club, read two books at roughly the same time: Francine Prose's "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them" (HarperCollins) and Roy Peter Clark's "Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer" (Little, Brown). Then pull out a favorite novel or short story, and read it with the guidance of Prose's and Clark's ideas. Both suggest reading quite slowly, word by word, asking readers to slow down and smell the roses of language and literature. Readers will find new worlds in familiar places. And writers will be inspired to pick up their pens.