Here's a theory no one has floated to explain declining movie box-office receipts: More people are reading. Could it be? Probably not, but there was no shortage of memorable books in 2005. Here are a few of The A.V. Club's favorites.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
(Knopf)
The latest novel by The Remains Of The Day author and The White Countess screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro revolves around a mystery: the exact nature and purpose of the students at Hailsham, a British private school where children are trained to obedience and passivity, with the understanding that they will never work or procreate, but will be given over to a system of "carers," "completions," and other oblique concepts. But while questions about them hang oppressively over the entire book, the real mystery is the heart of the narrator, Kathy H, whose dealings with the entire thing show Ishiguro's usual fascination with the conflict between desire and duty, and his usual talent at expressing volumes through what his characters choose to not say and not do. It's a melancholy, elegant book that wins new depth out of what ultimately reveals itself to be an old genre conceit.
Tracy Kidder, My Detachment: A Memoir
(Random House)
This is the memoir that flew under the radar. Tracy Kidder's recent non-fiction work has gotten the royal treatment from publicists and reviewers, but My Detachment, a slim volume about Kidder's year in military middle management during the Vietnam War, slipped out with little fanfare. Yet Kidder's eye trained upon himself minus 30 years is as keen as his perception of the policemen, doctors, teachers, and computer scientists he normally chronicles. As he indicts Lieutenant Kidder for simultaneously romanticizing, despising, and systematically lying about his war experience, Kidder paints a complex portrait of class struggle in the military establishment, and it deserves to be read alongside the New Journalism classics about Vietnam.
Frank King, Walt And Skeezix
(Drawn & Quarterly)
Plenty of early comic strips are worth studying for their draftsmanship or their incidental socio-historical insight, but Frank King's Gasoline Alley is as witty as it is beautiful and relevant. This Chris Ware-designed collection of the strip's first two significant years—1921 and '22—caught even hardcore comics devotees flatfooted with its boundless wonders. The strip is rooted in the relationship between tubby bachelor mechanic Walt Wallet and his foundling adopted son Skeezix: a perfectly mismatched pair that King drew with a special eye toward how a big man cradles a little one. But just as enjoyable are the day-to-day accumulation of in-jokes and genteel observations on modern life, delivered by the denizens of a loosely wired, auto-obsessed Middle America.
Elmore Leonard, The Hot Kid
(William Morrow)
Prolific crime-fiction ace Elmore Leonard has written 40 novels in 50 years, but he's still got plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Set over 13 years in Oklahoma and Kansas City in the '20s and '30s, his dazzling tale of thieving outlaws and a quick-drawing lawman is populated with vivid characters who imagine themselves grabbing the same headlines as Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelly, and John Dillinger. The showdown between a cop who always shoots to kill and the black-hearted son of an oil millionaire leads to several thrilling setpieces, including a gunfight with local Klansmen that brings the two rivals together. Leonard tours the whorehouses and speakeasies that harbor his unsavory characters, and fills out his colorful backdrop with the sounds of Jazz Age greats like Louis Armstrong and Count Basie.
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores The Hidden Side Of Everything
(William Morrow)
When journalist Stephen J. Dubner first discovered the novel, revelatory theories of "rogue economist" Steven D. Levitt—whose controversial work explores tricky, loaded subjects like the link between legalized abortion and falling crime rates—the joyful sound of cash registers happily ringing must have resonated in his ears. Dubner wrote a popular story about Levitt for The New York Times Magazine, then followed it up with Freakonomics, an irresistible blast of pop-economics co-written with Levitt. Excerpts from Dubner's article appear throughout the book, which perversely makes Levitt simultaneously the co-author and semi-subject of a compulsive page-turner that sneakily aspires to alter its readers' perceptions by examining the often-counterintuitive relationships lurking behind so much of the contemporary world.
Haruki Murakami, Kafka On The Shore
(Knopf)
Murakami's best novels operate with their own internal logic, loaded with odd narrative connections and free-floating surrealistic elements that are tough to explain to the uninitiated, yet surprisingly easy to accept at face value. His latest follows two parallel journeys: That of a keenly intelligent 15-year-old runaway looking for his long-absent mother and sister, and that of an elderly simpleton who lost his memory in a bizarre blackout during World War II. A murder causes their stories to intersect in a highly unpredictable way. It's hard to explain a Murakami novel, but Kafka On The Shore leaves dozens of resonant images, such as the storm of fish and leeches that rain down from a clear sky, or the WWII veterans emerging from a forest, having not aged a day.
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(Farrar Strauss Giroux)
If forced to place a bet on the book in this feature most likely to be read, talked about, and loved in 2025, put money on Marilynne Robinson's instant classic Gilead. In the thoughtful voice of John Ames, an aging preacher, Robinson reflects on the perception of hidden patterns in existence over time. People seem to be substances—fixed, unchanging—but according to Christian doctrine, they're more like rivers—never the same twice. Yet that fluidity makes it harder to teach children what to do, how to act, how to treat others, and how they should be treated. Ames guides readers to such unexpected revelations that the book achieves a kind of page-turner's suspense, while at the same time offering prose as perfect as any in a decade.
Carl Shuker, The Method Actors
(Shoemaker & Hoard)
Methodical and searching—not to mention a blast to read—The Method Actors surveys a group of smart, confused Western friends losing themselves in Tokyo. The city itself serves as a dreamy character; first-time novelist Carl Shuker has a field day describing the sensation of tromping through an urban madhouse in which everything looks, sounds, and feels foreign. Then there's the mystically potent strain of psychedelic mushrooms that gets passed from a rogue botanist to a possibly insane historian who goes missing for reasons that leave everyone in awe. It all comes together in a moving story by an intriguing new author who nods toward David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo while honing a voice worth keeping tabs on.
Chris Ware, The Acme Novelty Library
(Pantheon)
Fans of Ware's brilliant, beautiful, depressing comics about abandonment and creation might mistake this major collection for one of the odds-and-ends anthologies or scrapbook stories that comics publishers have been pushing onto the market. But through some alchemy of time, these apparently disparate examples of Ware's ever-changing styles and fluctuating levels of seriousness not only inhabit the same universe comfortably, but mutually illuminate his deepening themes. Picture a peppering of Ware's ubiquitous "So…" or "And Then…" panels connecting the strips, page to page, and his Gordian knot of story unravels: a father's love, a child's hunger, and the gulf of years and beliefs that prevents the two from connecting.