"Outside of a dog," Groucho Marx famously said, "a book is man's best friend." So consider this our take on the best of the best friends. PW's 100 Best Books of the Year are presented here, divided by review category and listed alphabetically. There are big books (The Road by Cormac McCarthy) and not so big books (Now Is the Hour by Tom Spanbauer), and books we wanted to call attention to because some of us—or all of us—loved them (The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories by Valerie Martin). We've included comics, religion, cookbooks, poetry and children's books that made us feel like children (The Adventures of the Dish and the Spoon by Mini Grey). Every week some 1,000 books come into our offices, and every week more than a hundred of those go back out again to our reviewers all over the country. Books get stars and books get boxes; others get signature reviews. Some books inspire us to look at the writer behind the page, with author profiles and q&as. This is our chance to revisit them all and audaciously proclaim a small portion of them "best." We expect you to agree and to disagree and to keep the lights on, remembering that Groucho Marx also said, "Inside a dog, it's too dark to read."

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RELIGION
Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming Faith
Diana Butler Bass(Harper San Francisco)Bass showcases 10 thriving mainline Protestant churches, challenging conventional wisdom about the mainline churches' steady decline.

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