As the turning of the year arrives, we won’t be ringing out the old and ringing in the new so much as we’ll watch 2007 slink off into history and brace ourselves for the chaotic mess that will be 2008. In the book world 2007 was nutty as always: There was the end of the Harry Potter series and the outing of Dumbledore. The ever-expanding reach of Oprah Winfrey (as I write, 12 of the current bestsellers in hardcover and paperback are either Oprah’s Book Club picks or have been featured on her show). There was an early pre-primary deluge of presidential candidates’ memoirs and statements of how he or she will return us to that Norman Rockwell America that never actually existed. James Patterson released eight books this year, two of which he actually wrote. Ann Coulter put out yet another lunatic screed with yet another cover photo of her sticklike body in a little black dress. We lost Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut at a time when we really need their brilliant humanity.

This, then, is the list of the best books I read this year, at least the new ones, excluding titles I’ve already reviewed in these pages (though if you haven’t read My Lobotomy or Deer Hunting with Jesus yet, go do it now).

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman (Simon & Schuster). Forget Criss Angel. He’s a punk. We all know that his Mindfreaks are the product of a team of engineers and that without them he’s just another guy with great hair and guyliner. Harry Houdini was the real deal - magician, escape artist, movie star, aviator, and according to this new biography, secret agent. Kalush and Sloman delve deep into Houdini’s activities on behalf of America’s nascent intelligence agencies and lay out the whole story of Houdini’s later career as a debunker of fake mediums and his war with the “Psychic Mafia,” and they offer up their theory that the punch in the stomach that killed him may well have been deliberately thrown. A fascinating portrait of the man and his legend.

Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped a Generation by Marc Fisher (Random House). If, like me, you listen to what passes for FM radio and wonder what the hell happened, Fisher’s book is for you. By turns deeply affectionate and highly critical, Fisher traces the history of radio in the Top-40 era, from the first shows to feature on-air personalities to the current age of multimedia corporate monopolies and programming-by-focus-group. In between, we meet the great figures - Alan Freed, Jean Shepherd, Wolfman Jack, Hunter Hancock, Murray the K, Howard Stern - who’ve shaped radio with their voices and various psychoses alone.

The American Home Front: 1941-1942 by Alistair Cooke (Grove Atlantic). For my generation, Cooke is that stuffy old guy who used to introduce “Masterpiece Theatre” on PBS, but this book reminds us of just how good a journalist and essayist he was back in the day. Recently unearthed from his papers, where security restrictions during the war forced him to mothball it, the book tells of BBC correspondent Cooke’s cross-country road trip in the year following America’s entry into World War II. His portrait of a nation still reeling from Pearl Harbor and struggling with the massive deployment of sons and husbands is evocative and lyrical. Given the sheer number of books dealing with the war Over There, Cooke’s reportage of life Over Here is a wonderful read.

Jesus for the Non-Religious by John Shelby Spong (HarperCollins). In his latest meditation on faith and reason - sure to inflame the legion of critics who refer to him as “the heretic Spong” - the former Episcopal bishop of Newark and Harvard lecturer makes a case for a perspective on Christ that rejects a literalist view of the Bible and of the supernatural aspects of the Son of God in favor of Jesus the man. Spong traces the crises of faith that led him to walk away from a church with which he was becoming increasingly alienated but which led him to an ever-deepening concord with Christ, concluding that if we ignore the trappings associated with Jesus and focus purely on what He taught and who He must have been in the real world, we find something even more inspiring and worthy of emulating. Spong has always been a compelling and rationalist writer, and never more so than in this engaging reconciliation between what we know and what we can believe.

The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones by Anthony Bourdain (St. Martin’s Trade). Bourdain is one of my heroes, the anti-celebrity chef, a welcome wiseass antidote to the relentless perkiness of Rachael Ray and the homespun saccharine of Paula Deen. Bourdain is a kitchen monster, a working chef who may live on TV now but never strays far from the trench warfare that is real restaurant work, and The Nasty Bits is a collection of his various magazine pieces over the years, taken all together a love letter to good food and bad behavior written with his characteristic acid wit and snarkitude.

Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time by Rob Sheffield (Random House). Funny and tragic in the way that only a mix tape can be, former Rolling Stone writer Sheffield’s memoir tells the story, in 15 chapters with 15 actual mix tapes, of his life with Renee, an “Appalchian punk-rock girl” who fulfilled him, married him, and then suddenly died of a pulmonary embolism. As Sheffield describes his torturous journey through the grieving process, he simultaneously meditates on the soundtracks of our lives, the integral effect that music has on how we see the world. Stunning as both a love story and a pop-culture memoir, this is the kind of goods Nick Hornby and Chuck Klosterman deliver at their best.

The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula by Eric Nuzum (St. Martin’s Trade). In another pop-culture journey, albeit of a more bizarre variety, Nuzum embarks on a quest to find the heart of our endless fascination with vampires, from movies to games to the fixation that grips Goth-wannabes between shifts at Taco Bell. Throwing journalistic caution to the winds, he hurls himself headlong into a stint in a coffin in the worst Halloween spookhouse ever, a white-knuckle trip through Romania on the Dracula tour with the guy who played Eddie Munster on TV, a look at the feeble Bram Stoker tourist trade in England, and a gross but hilarious account of trying to drink his own blood. Very funny and exhaustive on the subject of all things vampiric, including the reason why you should never try to watch every vampire movie ever made.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks (Random House). Speaking of monsters, this is Brooks’ followup to his hugely successful The Zombie Survival Guide, but while that book was played for laughs, this one is deadly serious. Told through the device of a United Nations researcher gathering testimony in the aftermath of the end of the world, the novel tells of the virulent disease that rages through the global population, turning us all into a relentless living-dead army that swarms over every nation and reveals, incidentally, certain truths about just how unprepared we are as societies and as people for the worst-case scenario. Both as a masterwork of horror, vividly portrayed, and as a cautionary analogy for everything from natural disaster to nuclear war, Brooks’s novel is chilling and horrific and very, very good.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill (DC Comics). Forget the horrible movie with Sean Connery, this is the good stuff. Alan Moore, who gave us V for Vendetta and From Hell, serves up more of his brilliance in this third volume of the acclaimed graphic-novel series about a team of world-saving heroes drawn from literature and adventure fiction. The first two volumes, set in the Edwardian era, dispatched with the schemes of Fu Manchu and Professor Moriarty and the Martian invasion of H. G. Wells. This one is set in a 1950s where the events of 1984 actually happened, and our heroes are pursued by the remnants of Big Brother’s spy network, including a nasty thug named Jimmy Bond, as they attempt to retrieve the Black Dossier, a history of the League from its founding in the 1600s. Never ones to do anything halfway, Moore and O’Neill include a lost Shakespeare play, the sequel to Fanny Hill, excerpts from a beat novel by a pseudonymous Jack Kerouac, a Tijuana Bible, and a section in 3-D, complete with glasses. Trippy and endlessly entertaining, this is one of those “comics for grownups” that people talk about, only here it’s the real deal.

The Truth About Chuck Norris: 400 Facts About the World’s Greatest Human by Ian Spector (Gotham Books). Chuck Norris once visited the Virgin Islands - now they’re just called The Islands. Chuck Norris can kick someone in the back of the face. Every piece of furniture in Chuck Norris’s house is a Total Gym. Drawn from Ian Spector’s website of contributors’ “facts” about karate master, American hero, and premier thespian Chuck Norris, this is without question the funniest damn book I read all year. A laugh-out-loud-till-you-can’t-breathe compendium of hype sending up the wooden, two-dimensional tough-guy persona of the notoriously humorless Norris (rumor is he’s planning to sue Spector), this is perfect for passing around in a group of friends or taking with you to the restroom for leisurely reading. Of course Chuck Norris takes a baseball bat to the bathroom with him, just in case he craps out a wildcat and has to beat it to death.

John G. Nettles