With friends and family griping about the dearth of good new reads, it’s worth a look back at the best of the last decade. That’s always my default: Nothing new? Look back. Explains reading all of Hardy, and Richard Yates, repeatedly. Of course, the last decade gave us the me me me “Eat, Pray, Love”

More book grief. Zachary Mason’s “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” is that rare thing: a retelling of a classic that holds you in its grip just as the original did. Will Odysseus survive the war? Will he finally return home to Ithaca? Will Penelope be waiting? Mason offers alternate tellings and endings for the

Easy travel to and from Santa Fe over Thanksgiving gave me unbroken time to read. Indeed, I was so consumed by Barbara Comyn’s Our Spoons Came from Woolworths that the return trip passed in a flash because I gobbled its 196 pages whole. First published in 1950 and recently reissued by New York Review of