Our 10 best books of 2018: From 'Boom Town' to 'Douglass' to 'Overstory,' seeing the big in everything

You could have spent the past year reading incendiary insider accounts of the current White House, moving book to book with barely a pause for lunch or earning a living; a few - Michael Lewis' "The Fifth Risk," perhaps, an appreciation of civil servants who can see past their own noses - might even endure beyond the present political cycle.

Or you could have read anything by anyone about anything.

Reading while the world is burning down around you tends to give whatever's in your hands the contours of apocalypse. My two most satisfying moments while reading this year? "The Way Home in the Night," a children's picture book from Japanese illustrator Akiko Miyakoshi, and "Running With the Devil," the memoir of a former manager for Van Halen. Both were from 2017, one about the granular importance of individual lives, the