Signs of Life 2004

By the time you read this, you’ll have seen manifold annual Best-of book lists in other magazines and newspapers. But books-perhaps even more than music-are so personal that it seems more appropriate to highlight several of our writers’ favorites. These are books they didn’t want to put down, then recommended to friends and family, and will read and re-read again. (Besides, you already know what your own favorite books of the year are, don’t you?)

Debbie Blue | Sensual Orthodoxy (Cathedral Hill Press) —Philip Christman

We read the Bible as a trove of familiar metaphors and morality tales, pale and unsurprising. But Debbie Blue reminds us that the Three Wise Men are utterly incongruous, “like having Shirley MacLaine at our manger scene”; that Jesus’ sayings are “a little bomb thrown into the human competition extravaganza”; that resurrection is “threatening”; and being born again is “weird,” “messy,” full of “groaning and blood and pain.” Why does this little essay collection make nearly every popular religious book seem anemic-from evangelical bestsellers, with their thin mandates, to the newly trendy Gnosticism that negates physical reality and social existence aggressively as any warped Christianity? Religion of all kinds, writes Blue, “often has an anti-sensual, abstracting sort of tendency,” but “the story of Christ goes in the opposite direction. God becomes incarnate, physical, in the world. God is made truly human in the womb of Mary and is born into the world through the birth canal.” The book takes its unique power from this movement of de-abstraction, meditating on familiar Biblical passages and metaphors until they give up some of their secrets.

Renée Manfredi | Above the Thunder (MacAdam/Cage) —Natalie Danford

Critics frequently divide books into categories, claiming they’re driven by a single aspect. Above the Thunder, Renée Manfredi’s first novel relies equally on ideas, character and plot, while also packing an emotional wallop. At the start, Anna is a solitary character. Recently widowed and estranged from her only daughter, she lives alone in a townhouse furnished with the previous tenant’s belongings and commutes to a job teaching at a junior college. She is, in short, on automatic pilot. But then the man who ran off with her heroin-addict daughter years earlier shows up with her only grandchild, a serious 10-year-old named Flynn who claims to see ghosts. At the same time, Anna begins supervising an HIV support group and becomes especially involved with some of its members. Out of these and other characters, she cobbles together a family that unites around her—and, like all families, sometimes it suffocates as much as it comforts. Manfredi elegantly weaves together the various plot threads and personalities; information accrues slowly, so each turn of events is never telegraphed but seems inevitable in retrospect.