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Our book critic continues her list of the year's best in books. This time, she tells us about her favorites in mysteries and nonfiction.

The main character in Halldor Laxness' novel Independent People is querulous, contrary, hard-hearted and stubborn — but author Christina Sunley can't get enough of him.

Author Alice Hoffman says the world rendered in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 "is a place of great heart and wisdom, a universe of huge imagination where nothing is off-limits."

Author and humorist Sholem Aleichem was a champion of the Yiddish language; his work inspired the Broadway musical Fiddler On The Roof. Now, 150 years after his birth, a new translation offers the first complete English version of his novel Wandering Stars.

Ten years after President Clinton's impeachment, law professor Ken Gormley reviews the entire scandal in his new 800-page book The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr. Gormley joins Fresh Air to discuss the independent counsel investigation — and why it continues to resonate today.

When David Sax was 11, his father handed him The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and said: "Read this if you want to know where I came from." Mordecai Richler's novel about an ambitious teen from Montreal's Jewish working class helped Sax learn to appreciate the immigrant drive.

The sentence reduction means Umar Patek could be released on parole ahead of the 20th anniversary of the bombings in October.

When Michael Koryta was 8 years old, his father took him to visit the ruins of an American hotel that was once referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World. Eighteen years later, he's written So Cold the River, a supernatural thriller about the historic hotel and the mysterious waters that run beneath it.

Marine Jess Goodell spent eight months recovering and processing the remains of fallen troops in the Mortuary Affairs unit. "I don't think I ever stopped smelling death when I was in Iraq," she says.

Almost all modern computers descend from a machine built before World War II by physics professor John Atanasoff. But today, almost no one has heard of him. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley set out to remedy that.