Sent this email to Labyrinth Books in response to a request from them to itemise some books of the year. Why I do this, I don't know

A list of favorite books, 2004.
1. Alan Hollingworth's A Sense of Beauty. In the great tradition of the British novel of manners with oodles of sex thrown in. What I liked in particular: it's carefully and beautifully written; it doesnt rush to judgment, and with one exception (let's pass over it in silence) it doesn't peddle obvious stereotypes.
2. Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire. Hope this counts as a 2004 book. A historical novel mainly set in mid nineteenth-century Afghanstan, as the British scheme to take the place over. Another beautifully crafted work which isn't going to help you shore up your prejudices.
3. Christine Gerrard's Aaron Hill. A specialist's choice admittedly. But few books take one further into the emergence of modern British culture than this scholarly biography of an early eighteenth century entrepreneur, man of letters, patron, philanthropist, eccentric.
4. William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Detailed account of readerships and the book trade in Britain circa 1800. Necessary reading for anyone interested in the emergence of the British literary sensibility.
5. C;A. Bailey, The Birth of the Modern World. The latest 'global history' school comes of an age in this volume. Accessible, formidably learned, and understands that the West isnt the centre of the world, though it could go still further in this direction. For instance, the cover is dominated by a portrait of Toussaint L'Overture, but his slave-revolution, a world-historical event if there ever was one, is covered in all of two sentences.
6. Daniel Tanguay. Leo Strauss, une biographie intellectuelle. Know your enemy: a lucid account of Strauss's intellectual contribution and can be rewardingly read alongside Anne Norton's rather sensationalist Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire. It's a pity Tanguay doesnt historicise Strauss, but that wouldnt be a Straussian thing to do, would it?
7. Gilles Kepel The War for Muslim Minds. Kepel's probably the West's best commentator on the US's stupid war against Sunni extremists. There wasn't a book out by Tariq Ali this year, otherwise I'd probably have added that too.
8. W.H. Auden's The sea and the mirror. In these bad times I have found myself reading more poetry than usual. And strangely enough, few books of poems with more pleasure and admiration than this new edition of Auden's long and hybrid work which riffes off The Tempest.
9. Alexander Kluge, The Devil's Blind Spot. Great to have an excellent translation of a selection of Kluge's groundbreaking fictions.
10. Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévi, Capital Resurgent. Arguably the best book of marxist economics of the past few years. It's analysis of US neo-liberalism, which prefers to think of history as continuous than as marked by breaks and transformations, is sobering.
11. Doris Sommer's Bilingual Aesthetics. This was not a good year for books in cultural and literary studies and theory, unless I missed something (which is more than possible). But I liked this book on the virtues of bilingualism a great deal, as I did the somewhat similar book: Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch'ien's Weird English.

A couple of books I haven't read but am looking forward to:
Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbeme, Johannesburg: the elusive metropolis
Ron Padgett, Remembering Joe Brainard