Best books 2005: Our top 10

Here are our picks for the 10 best books reviewed in the Seattle Times book section during 2005.

If you're a discriminating reader you probably love such lists, but you may be wondering — how is such a list assembled? Who gets to vote? What if there's a tie? Here's the answer: We polled a selection of our reviewers and asked them to name (1) the best book they reviewed for The Times this year and (2) the best book they read (but did not review for us) published in 2005.

The books below got the most votes, and, in the spirit of compensation for a rewarding but overwhelming job, the book editor was the tiebreaker.

Without further ado, here's the list, in alphabetical order by author.

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion (Knopf). This chronicle of a famous author's year of grief after the death of her husband is "a sad and anguished book, told in some of the plainest, yet most eloquent prose you'll ever encounter," said book editor Mary Ann Gwinn. It recently won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

"The March" by E.L. Doctorow (Random House). Doctorow's fictionalization of William Tecumseh Sherman's devastating march to the sea during the Civil War "does not just put us in the thick of battle, bullets whizzing by heads, the stench of dead fouling the air. It uses this cataclysm as a powerful metaphor for the dangerous and unstoppable way we humans move through the world," said reviewer John Freeman.

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf). This unsettling piece of speculative fiction by the author of "The Remains of the Day" concerns a trio of young people of mysterious parentage raised in a private school in England. It's "a shuddering glance into the braver newer world of the 21st century and the possible results of far-reaching consequences from late-20th-century scientific experiments couched in the guise of life-affirming experiments," said reviewer Robert Allen Papinchak.

"Teacher Man" by Frank McCourt (Scribner). This memoir of his decades as a teacher by the author of "Angela's Ashes" prompted reviewer Barbara Lloyd McMichael to observe that "'Teacher Man' is the McCourt you've come to expect: wry, rambling, charming, rueful. This retired creative-writing teacher offers advice consecrated by the magnificent trilogy of memoirs he has gifted us with over the last decade."

"1776" by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster). The events of a pivotal year in our nation's history "come brilliantly alive" in this book by McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, said reviewer Steve Raymond, adding: "This is mostly a military history, with plenty of detail about the decisions of generals and the movements of armies, but McCullough also takes time to include many human touches."

"Shalimar the Clown" by Salman Rushdie (Random House). Rushdie's latest, a tale of love and revenge set partly in Kashmir, is "a beautiful, painful, terrifying book, both fantastical and harshly realistic, filled with complex and memorable characters, and completely unpredictable in its blend of political thriller, folk tale, melodrama, reportage and even science fiction," said book critic Michael Upchurch.

"Two Lives" by Vikram Seth (HarperCollins). The author of "A Suitable Boy" writes a multilayered memoir about his Indian war-veteran great uncle and Jewish great aunt (a refugee from Hitler's Germany). "Seth draws insightful connections between visceral personal detail and the big historical picture," Upchurch said, "in a tough, loving, clear-eyed book that insists on the value of steady devotion (as opposed to heated passion) in a world filled with 'suffering, isolation and indifference.' "

"Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War" by Anthony Shadid (Henry Holt). Shadid, a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for his coverage of Iraq, is "that rarest of Americans: an Arab American, fluent in Arabic and entrusted by major media to report from Iraq," wrote reviewer Bruce Ramsey. Shadid tells the story of Iraq's convulsions through the experiences of ordinary Iraqis. "The people in this book are good by their terms," Ramsey added, "and often by ours, too — but their history is different and the facts of their lives are very different. They have been conquered and occupied, and they don't like it."

"Islands" by Dan Sleigh, translated by André Brink (Harcourt). This South African historical archivist's debut novel is "a true epic, the work of a lifetime," said Upchurch. "Taking as his focus the daughter of the first interracial marriage in the 17th-century Dutch colony on the Cape of Good Hope, Sleigh lets us see a village, a town, a city, a whole society arise before our eyes, with all types of human characters, from slandering and sadistic to loving and self sacrificing."

"On Beauty" by Zadie Smith (Penguin Press). The hopes and fears of two families, both of black or mixed race, collide in the groves of academia in both England and America. "At different points, many of the characters in 'On Beauty' behave deplorably — yet Smith always sees them in the round, never letting you lose sight of what demons or delusions might be spurring them on, making their behavior make sense to them," said Upchurch. "The result is a novel that savvily illuminates the times we're living in. It also leaves you feeling there's almost nothing beyond the scope of this gifted young writer."

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com. She has been the Seattle Times book editor since 1998.