Best of 2008 Picks -- Peter S. Beagle

Well, my big literary discovery has been a guy named Michael Gruber, about whom I know next to nothing, except that he's about my age, lives in Seattle, and - I believe - used to ghost-write the mystery/thriller novels that came out under another writer's name. His most recent book, The Forgery of Venus, is the finest book I know about the way artists work and think and dream. I know something about this, having grown up with three uncles who were all painters, and with a buddy across the street who's still my buddy, and still a splendid painter. Anything by Gruber, then; and anything by Alan Furst, who's set himself the impossible task of writing spy novels about Europe in the three or four years preceding the outbreak of World War II, when you know how it's all going to come out, and .and how pitifully futile the efforts of his protagonists to head it off must be... and you still can't put the damn books down.

And there's this English writer named Jason Goodwin, whose novels take place in the Istanbul of 1830 or so, and whose hero is a eunuch whose best friends are a transvestite dancer, and an ambassador from a Poland that literally doesn't exist anymore, having been swallowed up by Russia, where it remained for 150 years. Gruber, Furst and Goodwin...

...and a dazzling guitarist I'd never heard of, named Rick Udler...and seeing 81-year-old Cleo Laine singing in San Francisco for the first time in eight or nine years...and catching Janis Ian a week or two later. Not a bad year.