Books Top 10s

2. Early in Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail by Rubén Martínez (Metropolitan Books), a Mexican priest explains the interdependent complexity of the border. "It's like a chain," he says. "The coyotes [smugglers] make money off the people who cross, and the farmers in America make money off them too, and of course the families and the government in Mexico are remunerated as well. It's a chain looped over many gears." Martínez, also the author of The Other Side: Notes From the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond, finesses labyrinthine border policy into a moving, deeply human story about a family that reads like a novel. It's also a poetic yet polemical book angry at a selectively enforced INS policy that allows immigrants to cross the border when American farmers and factories need them.

3. Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (Random House): The second volume of Morris' planned three-volume study of Roosevelt covers Roosevelt's presidency. It's one of 2001's most exciting reads; TR was a vibrant leader, of course, and a fascinating subject, but Morris' bracing ability to place readers at the scene and his nimble, intimate authority are dazzling.

4. Goats by Mark Jude Poirier (Talk/Miramax): Since Goats is the story of 14-year-old Tucson resident Ellis Whitman as he heads off to boarding school on the East Coast, the clear expectation is that Poirier is writing a coming-of-age story. But Ellis is busy being parental to the adults in his life, like Goat Man, the doped-up freaknik who's been the closest thing Ellis has ever had to a father. Poirier manages to topple the coming-of-age trajectory in a neat, comic reversal of roles that, by the story's end, is both fitting and open-ended.

5. I Cannot Tell a Lie, Exactly and Other Stories by Mary Ladd Gavell (Random House): Gavell, who died in 1967, grew up in Driscoll and was the managing editor of Psychiatry before she died. The editors of that journal published one of her short stories in tribute to her; "The Rotifer," set in a freshman biology class at an unspecified state university in Texas, eventually made its way into The Best American Short Stories of 1968 and 1999's The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Gavell, whose precise, poignant, and acerbic stories were set in rural Texas, among other locales, apparently never attempted to have them published as a collection.

6. Michener Center graduate Arthur Bradford's debut story collection, Dogwalker (Knopf), is impossible to explain -- with a straight face, anyway. There's Bill McQuill, who gets sliced neatly in half by a train on MoPac; a misfit who collects giant slugs and refuses to sell them to the local Satanists; and, in "Chainsaw Apple," our hero has the keen idea that it would be a real crowd-pleaser to use a chainsaw to carve a person's initials into an apple while the apple is stuck in that person's mouth. A lighter Jesus's Son but with intriguing levels of humor like George Saunders' Pastoralia, Dogwalker compels you to keep reading, to see what the misfits and mutants running rampant throughout will do on the next page.

7. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall (Norton) is set largely in the New West of weary Mormons, doped-out loners, and hardened ideologues, so the violence that opens this novel -- it's sudden and awful but almost comically bored -- seems entirely apropos. For some reason, 7-year-old Edgar, who lives on a reservation in Arizona, has inconveniently placed his head under the mailman's jeep while the mailman is inside having a word with Edgar's mother. After the mailman unwittingly squashes Edgar's head with his left rear tire, he tries to save Edgar but nearly has a nervous breakdown and flees Arizona. The buzzword for this novel is "Dickensian," but Edgar must be the most stubbornly hopeful creation in all of recent fiction.

8. The Columnist by Jeffrey Frank (Simon & Schuster): Brandon Sladder, the protagonist of this hilarious but restrained satire, is the character from 2001 I most love to hate. Sladder is a self-important, preening, eggheaded Washington political columnist and pundit who manages, with frightening aplomb, to emotionally fumble through his entire life. Watching him convince himself that he's never wrong is strangely irresistible fun. The author, a senior editor at The New Yorker, also provided last summer's favorite game: Which Washington Political Columnist/ Sunday Morning News Show Commentator Is This Book Really About?

9. Where Dead Voices Gather by Nick Tosches (Little, Brown, and Co.): Journalist, novelist, and critic Nick Tosches, the Bardic bad-ass who can skewer high culture and use words like "expiation" in a single sentence, has been thinking about minstrel and jazz man Emmett Miller for 20 years. Miller's music is "definable neither as country nor as blues, as jazz nor as pop, as black nor as white, but as both culmination and transcendence of these bloodlines and more," Tosches explains. Though he pins down facts about Miller that had previously been in dispute or unknown, Tosches acknowledges that his quest doesn't end in a tidy package of biographical revelations. That's all for the good, as it turns out: Tosches' asides -- the meditations on American culture and why certain artists are embraced by it and not others -- are as much the story here as Miller's mysterious life.

10. Come Up and See Me Sometime: Stories by Erika Krouse (Scribner): Whether it's Lois, Irene, or brassy Maggie, who has a thing for other women's husbands, the young women starring in these deft and bracing stories are shuffling off the things they don't want and rooting around for the things they do. In "Drugs and You," the narrator, new to Santa Fe and lonely, slams into a man who steps backward into her car; she follows him home and falls in love with him, tormented that she can't deter him from being a heroin addict. "Mercy," arguably the most affecting story, is wrenching but entirely hopeful: A refugee from a violent marriage in Texas ends up in New York, satisfied in a little apartment above a strange Chinese restaurant ("I never saw cheese in Chinese food before," one customer remarks). Between their wicked one-liners and often dark utterances, Krouse's women are hunting for elusive answers.