China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station may not be the best book of the year. (Jonathan Franzen, as you’ve been told a half-dozen times, has that title locked up.) And it’s not an overlooked, tone-perfect little book like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress — it’s flawed and overweight and a little baggy toward the end. But it’s perhaps the best genre-fiction novel of the year, and it’s certainly the most comprehensively inventive book of 2001. Miéville’s plot is convoluted, but secondary to the book’s great triumph. This is the fullness of what Tolkien called "subcreation," the ability to imagine an entire world from scratch. Perdido’s New Crobuzon combines equal parts Dickens and Kafka, Dick and Cronenberg to generate 700-odd pages of moving freak show, united into a single urban organism through the matter-of-fact deadpan of Miéville’s assured narration. Perdido Street Station combines audacious invention with surprising detail and grace, and gives a complex amalgam of grotesque and mundane without flinching or smirking.

What a Time It Was: The Best of W.C. Heinz on Sports

A savory feat of sportswriting from one of the most renowned masters of the form, What a Time It Was proves that W.C. Heinz was an accomplished practitioner of the literary nonfiction decades before the white-suited, fear-and-loathing New Journalism troubadors of the 1960s and early ’70s altered the conventions of print media. This dazzling collection of athletic history — from Stan Musial and Pistol Pete Reiser to Vince Lombardi to Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Graziano — celebrates the lucid, meat-and-potatoes style of Heinz’s work while demonstrating his extraordinary acumen for lyrical narratives and impressionistic detail. The assemblage of columns and profiles is complemented by a sampling of the author’s fiction, most notably an excerpt from the 1968 novel MASH, which he co-wrote with Dr. H. Richard Hornberger (the real Hawkeye Pierce) under the pseudonym Richard Hooker. Yet it’s the magnitude of Heinz’s essays, culled form such diverse publications as True, Sport, Life and TV Guide, that truly highlight his considerable storytelling gifts. What a read it is!

The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

In his long-anticipated revision of his 1986 Historical Baseball Abstract, Bill James re-evaluates baseball history with a new statistical method (Win Shares) and has brief essays on each of the top 100 players of all time at each position; 15 years later, Mike Schmidt still ranks as the best third baseman ever, and Philadelphia A’s legend Lefty Grove remains the greatest southpaw. With terrific anecdotes fleshing out old-timers into three-dimensional people, sharp-as-always commentary — "More and better is yet to come" of Chipper Jones, "if he can stay away from the Hooters’ Girls" — and a slew of in-depth studies (Was the 1884 Union Association a true major league or not? Were the ’61 Yankees really that great? Why are today’s games so damn long?), this new edition continues to overturn conventional wisdom and helps make the world a trifle safer for iconoclasts. Welcome back, Bill.

Niagara Falls All Over Again

A luminous, rollicking story about two comedians in the golden age of vaudeville. This novel has every element I crave as a reader: It’s a breathtaking love story, a rumination on the loveship and hateship inherent in artistic collaborations, and a historical overview of the age of vaudeville — with a little mystery and some "why are we here" philosophy tossed in for good measure. McCracken’s elegant, quirky style reminds me of another all-time favorite, Katharine Dunn’s Geek Love.

Also remarkable was Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, which every journalist should read as a cautionary tale. In it, freelance magazine writer J. Sutter suffers an overdose of cynicism as he covers the pathologically publicized resurrection of folk hero John Henry. The novel contains less of the urban magical realism that fueled Whitehead’s debut, The Intuitionist, but makes up for it with a wicked, razor-sharp wit.

The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band

City Paper’s stubborn sense of erudition wouldn’t allow a proper review of this excessively juicy, über tell-all rock bio. The omission only reinforces The Dirt’s total sleaziness. Author Neil Strauss transcribed hours of taped interviews with each band member, capturing each individual’s voice: Mick Mars’ quiet, exhausted, withdrawn manner; Tommy Lee’s excessive dude-iness; Vince Neil’s arrogance; and Nikki Sixx’s driven self-destruction. But Strauss’ real accomplishment is making Mötley Crüe seem sympathetic, even when committing atrocious acts, including sticking a phone receiver inside a willing groupie’s vagina (only after getting her mom on the line), sending a fleet of costumed dominatrices to a meek Japanese translator, and Neil’s alcohol-assisted vehicular-homicide conviction for killing his friend Razzle of Hanoi Rocks. You read about the piles of drugs, near-death and destruction and come away feeling… fuzzy. Somehow, the bad boys come off sweet. Those guys got away with everything and somehow ended up clean, in spite of all the dirt.

The Huntsman

In his debut novel, The Huntsman, Whitney Terrell tells a robust, dramatic tale about a city convulsed by the racial implications of a young white woman’s murder. As the book opens, a fisherman finds the body of Clarissa Sayers floating in the Mississippi River. A citywide manhunt ensues for her lover, a black man named Booker Short, last seen driving her Corvette. The novel then circles back to reveal how Clarissa’s death was not just a freak occurrence, but the climax of a long and tortured relationship between the races in Kansas City. Terrell develops his tale in brilliant flashbacks, the best of which recount Booker’s life. While he employs the rich vocabulary of Melville and writes long, muscular sentences reminiscent of Faulkner, Terrell’s style is powerfully his own. As The Huntsman careens toward its dramatic finale, Terrell keeps returning to his central question: Can we find redemption from our past? Powerfully and unforgettably, the novel’s ending suggests so.

Lichens of North America

By Irwin M. Brodo, Sylvia Duran Sharnoff and Stephen Sharnoff
Yale University Press, 795 pp., $69.95

Lichens of North America is one of those rare books that can radically alter your experience of the natural world. Not to be confused with plants or even moss, a lichen is a unique form of living thing that owes its existence to a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an organism capable of photosynthesis. The diversity of these creatures is astounding, as the hundreds of beautifully reproduced color photographs will attest. The hues and textures creep off the page and allow the abstract compositions to capture the microscopic alien landscapes of our own backyards. It’s among the most beautiful art books produced this year and belongs on the coffee table of anyone who desires a fuller understanding of life on earth.

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