Susan Choi's Army

From the L.A. Times

--THE BEST BOOKS OF 2003

Best of the best
By Steve Wasserman

December 7 2003
The holiday season is upon us, and from every corner we find ourselves asked to make sense of the avalanche of books that threatens to bury us in tale upon tale. It is, of course, the work of Sisyphus, but we'd have it no other way. More than 100,000 books are annually published in the United States. Here at the Los Angeles Times we have space enough to note and review about 1,500 titles during the year. More nonfiction is published than fiction, and so our reviews follow suit.

Choosing among the universe of the worthy is an inherently fraught process, forcing us to feel much as a World War I surgeon might have felt on the battlefield of Verdun: It's triage every day. Nevertheless, without apology and immodestly, we offer those books that in the opinion of our diverse contributors are among the very best of 2003. We also take this opportunity to single out 20 titles that, in our judgment, are the best of the best.

Fiction

Ten Little Indians
Sherman Alexie
Grove Press

By Night in Chile
A Novel
Roberto Bolaqo
New Directions

Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes, Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
The Ecco Press

American Woman
A Novel
Susan Choi
HarperCollins

The Great Fire
A Novel
Shirley Hazzard
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

The Noonday Cemetery And Other Stories
Gustav Herling
New Directions

The Known World
A Novel
Edward P. Jones
Amistad Press

The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens
A Novel
John Rechy
Grove Press

Still Holding
A Novel of Hollywood
Bruce Wagner
Simon & Schuster

Evidence of Things Unseen
A Novel
Marianne Wiggins
Simon & Schuster

Nonfiction

The Youth of Cezanne & Zola
Notoriety at Its Source: Art and Literature in Paris
Wayne Anderson
Editions Fabriart

King of California
J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire
Mark Arax & Rick Wartzman
PublicAffairs

From Chivalry to Terrorism
War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity
Leo Braudy
Alfred A. Knopf

Where I Was From
Joan Didion
Alfred A. Knopf

Goya
Robert Hughes
Alfred A. Knopf

River of Shadows
Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Rebecca Solnit
Viking

Sea of Glory
America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition,1838-1842
Nathaniel Philbrick
Viking

The Language Police
How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn
Diane Ravitch
Alfred A. Knopf

Regarding the Pain of Others
Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West
Perez Zagorin
Princeton University Press