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" How to Be Bad (St. Martin&amp;#039;s Griffin, $13), by David Bowker. It&amp;#039;s been a tough year. But at least bad life produces good books. Let me recommend Bowker&amp;#039;s How to Be Bad. He writes English pulp: hardcore crime fiction for those who don&amp;#039;t necessarily dig crime fiction. You&amp;#039;ll laugh when laughter is inappropriate, learn bad lessons from a dude named Bad Jesus, and reconsider your soft spot for Nick Hornby. Let&amp;#039;s face it: We live in a noirish age of pulp and porn, and Bowker&amp;#039;s more than the writer we need. He&amp;#039;s the motherfucker we deserve. --BENJAMIN ALSUP Articles of War (Doubleday, $17), by Nick Arvin. Here are some of the ways in which Articles of War runs the risk of seeming hopelessly out-of-date: It is relentlessly literary. It is as prim about sex as is its young hero, Heck, so called because he obeys his parents and doesn&amp;#039;t swear, even in Normandy and Belgium in some of the heaviest fighting of World War II. And its subject is the great lost subject of American fiction, manhood. Heck, you see, is not just an obedient son and a dutiful soldier; he&amp;#039;s a coward. He fears his cowardice just as much as he fears war, and when his cowardice leads him not to the disgrace of desertion but to the death of his own soul, we know exactly what has been lost--not just in the life of poor Heck, but also in the reach of our modern, and then postmodern, and then post-postmodern literature. --TOM JUNOD Never Let Me Go (Knopf, $24), by Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro takes our world, subtly inverts it, and produces a horror show that makes Brave New World seem like a stroll through Kensington Gardens. The setting is a pretty English boarding school in the late 1990s, but the children of this privileged environment aren&amp;#039;t wealthy Eton brats. They&amp;#039;re clones who will be harvested for body organs and are fated to die before reaching middle age. It&amp;#039;s the best dystopian novel in a generation, a book that literally kept me up all night. --GARY SHTEYNGART Judgment Days (Houghton Mifflin, $26), by Nick Kotz. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, never less of a cardboard villain, looked out over Congress and stared bloody history in the eye. It was time for all the perfumed fakery of America to end, its bluff called for good and all by a preacher named King. It was time to let folks vote.  Really, he said, &amp;quot;it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome!&amp;quot; You can hear the echoes of that moment in this unfiinching history of LBJ, King, and the civil-rights movement. --CHARLES P. PIERCE The Tender Bar (Hyperion, $24), by J. R. Moehringer. When I was just starting out, I had the misfortune of reading a magazine article by Moehringer called &amp;quot;Resurrecting the Champ.&amp;quot; It was a boxing story, but it was also a story about fathers, and, more than that, it was the most perfect story I could ever imagine. It made me want to quit writing. Now, with The Tender Bar, his memoir of a heartbreaking, ultimately triumphant life steeped in the rhythms of a Long Island bar, Moehringer has done what I thought was impossible: He has taken another story essentially about fathers (his is mostly absent) and made it better than his first. In content and style, the man has found a new perfect, leaving the rest of us with only so much farther to go. --CHRIS JONES Baseball Prospectus 2005 (Workman, $18).As a boy in Cleveland, I loved pro football. It was a loud, stupid, and obvious sport--it is more so today--and the Browns were good. Baseball I liked, but the Indians sucked, and understanding the nuances of the game was beyond a child&amp;#039;s mind. Yet somehow baseball&amp;#039;s mystery and the Tribe&amp;#039;s perennial ineptitude made the game more attractive to my inner dork. My adult pursuit of baseball knowledge began when Bill James, a lonesome Kansan, started publishing his annual Baseball Abstract. James ended the Abstract in 1988, but a new wave of stat-head cranks at baseballprospectus.com #8212;armed with faster computers and nastier attitudes than James ever had--publishes its fearless heir. Baseball Prospectus 2005 is 568 pages of vitriol, passion, and distilled formulas. But it&amp;#039;s also full of evaluations like &amp;quot;fell out of the glove tree and hit every branch on the way down.&amp;quot; The stats may not illuminate the greatest game, but this book swings so hard for the fences that even its whiffs are interesting. If the Abstract was Babe Ruth, the Prospectus is Adam Dunn. Except a lot dorkier. --SCOTT RAAB (KIDS&amp;#039;) BOOK OF THE YEAR, by Joseph Holt, age 11 GUYS WRITE FOR GUYS READ (Viking, $17), edited by Jon Sciezka. The idea of the book was to get boys to read more, but if they don&amp;#039;t read, how could they read the book? If they did, however, I think that the book would persuade them. I think my favorite part was the entry about Dungeons and Dragons, because it relates a lot to geeks and nerds. The book is not something you could just sit and read for a long time because (no offense) it isn&amp;#039;t very satisfying, like Lord of the Rings. You could read it while you watch TV or cook because it&amp;#039;s (again, no offense) easy to get bored of. This book has a high chance of becoming a best-seller because it fits with so many people&amp;#039;s likes. My advice: Buy the book, read it, and enjoy! "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a89/esq1205books-80/>