Five contributing editors of The Revealer round up some of 2008’s most interesting texts. From editor Jeff Sharlet:
Annual “Best Book” lists should usually be read as a review of the best publicity jobs of the year—the books that make the list, as wonderful as they may be, are most often those backed up by dedicated publicists—Charles Taylor’s monumental The Age of Secularism, for instance, one of only two nonfiction titles about religion featured on The New York Times’ 2008 100 Notable Books list, is the kind of very dense, academic study that normally wouldn’t even cross the NYT’s radar. But it’s big, it’s the culmination of a career, and its publisher, Belknap/Harvard University, put all of its considerable prestige behind its promotion—in 2007, that is, when Harvard published the book. The fact that the NYT slipped the book on to its 2008 list is a clue that such lists aren’t so much a reflection of the best as of what the editors read and cared about that year.
That can lead to a certain amount of cronyism—books by NYT contributors are especially well-represented on the NYT’s list. That’s a problem when list makers are taken too seriously, as disinterested judges of the publishing universe. But cronyism can also reflect schools of thought and overlapping spheres of ideas. Looked at for what it is, the web of connections that underlie a “best of” list reveals a portrait of a publication’s concerns, commitments, and fascinations.
So it is here. I asked five contributing editors—an anthropologist, a historian, a novelist, a journalist, and two media scholars—of The Revealer to share their choices for the most interesting texts that deal with religion of 2008—books, mostly, but since we all read across genres, I told them to feel free to roam across media. Following are their picks, and mine. They’re the result of an arbitrary process—our selection from the relatively tiny sample of the year’s new texts we saw—and a reflection of the multiple conversations that intersect at The Revealer.
Find their selections here.