Every November, the books pages of British newspapers perform what ought to be a helpful service: they present lists of the best books of the year, to remind us of what we missed. It's part of the general round of year-end round-ups - 2008's most significant moments in politics, art, sport, cinema, crime - but it always happens that the annual filing from the world of books is got out of the way early, in order to make room for the acres of larger cultural reflection that mark the actual transition from year X to year Y. This isn't to say that the books coverage is half-hearted. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, has this time extended its literary survey into a four-day marathon of meticulously catalogued mini-reports on the year's output that includes everything from Friday's classics ('biography', 'history', 'politics') to Tuesday's weird ('pop music', 'knowledge', 'food'). You could drown in all this stuff. Where to begin? How to read the lists of what to read?

LRB 18 December 2008 | PDF Download