Books

Historians may look back on this year as the thin edge of the e-publishing wedge, the moment when books made of paper and ink began sliding into digital obsolescence. But those not yet ready for the brave new reading world can mark 2000 by the extraordinary output of new fiction from big-name veteran authors, all producing energetic work at age 60 or older: Margaret Atwood, Saul Bellow, Doris Lessing, Joyce Carol Oates, Edna O'Brien, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, John Updike. The year also brought posthumous books by Joseph Heller and Mario Puzo. The millennium has so far been generous to readers. In with the new! In with the old!

FICTION

1 THE BLIND ASSASSIN Margaret Atwood's novel is part family saga, part social history, part suspense tale and altogether captivating. As its elderly narrator, Iris Chase, looks back on her life--and some mysterious deaths--she evokes not only a tangled past but a luminous fictional realm.

2 THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY Michael Chabon's serious but never somber tribute to the Golden Age of U.S. comic books leaps 600 pages of pop culture and current events in a single bound. The title characters, one a Holocaust escapee, create an imaginary pulp icon while they live through an era of real-life melodramas from the 1930s to the '50s.

3 RAVELSTEIN Much ink was spilled earlier this year wondering how much Saul Bellow's novel revealed about the real life of his deceased friend Allan Bloom. Such a waste of energy. What principally matters here is that the author, 85, produces another brainy, complex and cantankerous hero to add to his glittering gallery of memorable fictional beings.

4 BEOWULF The Anglo-Saxon epic, the bane of English majors, looks brand-new and thrilling in a verse translation by Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. The tale may still strike readers as bloodthirsty, with much hewing and hacking, but Heaney's language evokes Beowulf's tragic stature, his helplessness to avoid--and his bravery while facing--the dictates of his fate.

5 WHITE TEETH Zadie Smith's miraculous first novel takes place in a tumultuously multicultural area of London where unlikely friendships and even more unlikely romances have become the rule. Much of the action is comic, but even at their most foolish, Smith's characters display confusions that are both fascinating and ultimately admirable.

NONFICTION

1 NOTHING LIKE IT IN THE WORLD Veteran historian Stephen Ambrose writes at full throttle about the construction of the transcontinental railroad during the 1860s. This magnificent tale of high finance, low finagling and workers hacking through 2,000 miles is magnificently told.

2 ROBERT KENNEDY Evan Thomas calls his superb biography "the story of an unpromising boy who died as he was becoming a great man." Bobby's well-documented life and legend are re-examined here with moral clarity, psychological subtlety and a bracing dramatic pace. 3 A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS Dave Eggers tricks out his riveting memoir with an ironic title and plenty of literary gamesmanship, but the story he tells is indeed heartbreaking: the death of his parents and his subsequent guardianship of his younger brother. His book shows how laughter is sometimes the only medicine.

4 EXPERIENCE Taking a breather from fiction, Martin Amis writes movingly about life with his famous father Kingsley, who died in 1995. The book hums with the same antic prose and looping comic riffs that characterize Martin's novels, along with a surprising admixture of tenderness.

5 IN THE HEART OF THE SEA The 1820 sinking of the Nantucket whaler Essex, the event that inspired Moby Dick, is thrillingly retold by Nathaniel Philbrick.