Charles Glass
One of the advantages of books over plays or films is that reading a book has no deadline. If the books that come one's way during the course of the year disappoint, Jane Austen, Dickens and Tolstoy always beckon from the shelf. By far the best novel I read all year was published in 1935, The Asiatics by Frederic Prokosch. Sadiy out of print, it tells the story of a young American's meandering across Asia from Lebanon in the west to Vietnam in the east — portentous termini, as things turned out. Good books which were published this year and which would make welcome Christmas presents are David Gilmour's The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Quartet, £15.95); Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved (Michael Joseph, £10.95); Said K. Abur- ish's Children of Bethany: The Story of a Palestinian Family (I. B. Tauris, £14.95); and Richard Wilbur's New and Collected Poems (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, $27.95). Even if you don't read them im- mediately, all these books will hold for many years. They will not disappoint, anymore than Prokosch does 53 years on.
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