It's Christmas time, when we like to recommend the best books we read over the last year. Here are mine: Novels There are two. Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End is one of the best books I've read, period, which is saying something as it's only two years old. Highly recommended. The other good novel I read this year was Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. The book is an achievement, as it's told in the voice of a barely literate Australian outlaw and is written without using commas. It's a gripping postmodern novel -- and one doesn't normally use the words "gripping" and "postmodern" in the same sentence. Nonfiction Robert Kagan's Return of History and the End of Dreams. Robert Cooper's The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-first Century. Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics (2008 Edition). Jack Germond's Fat Man in the Middle Seat: Forty Years of Covering Politics. Humor Simon Rich is twenty-three years old, but don't hold that against him. His Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations and Free-Range Chickens had me in stitches.