In one of the rituals of approaching year-end, the New York Times has unveiled its 10 Best Books of the Year. So far I’ve read only one, Joshua Ferris’s rollicking satire of office life, Then We Came to an End (see here for my take on the novel and here for my high-falutin’ reflections on the book that gave Ferris his title, Don DeLillo’s Americana.)The rest of the fiction list looks enticing: Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson; The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño; and the much-lauded Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson—all have been added to that congested holding pattern of books awaiting their slots with this reader.