Admittedly, I don't try to read all the latest titles, let alone those on the best-seller charts. With so many great books of the past I have yet to read, I figure I'll always be playing catch-up with the current literary scene. On top of that, there are the authors you want to revisit by rereading some book or story from decades ago.

I usually go through about 20 books a year, with some added selections from short-story collections. Selecting a lineup of fiction to read each year is a chore, in more ways than one, because of limited time: There never seems to be enough months to squeeze in all the books you want to read.

In addition, despite the best-laid plan, other authors or titles spontaneously surface from the dark recesses of my own bookshelves or some used-book store and insist on being read.

Out of my experience this year, which book did I have in common with The Times list? "The Book Against God" by British writer James Wood. The subject is a lying, procrastinating 30-year-old who first ruins his credit and then his marriage while he's supposed to be working on his Ph.D. dissertation but instead moved straight to his magnum opus, an anti-theological tract.

Would I put it on my Top 10 list for 2003? Barely. Definitely not in the Top Five. But here's what I would recommend to anyone interested in exploring the odd assortment of books that I managed to come up with this year. They are not listed in any order or rank.

•"Positively 4th Street" (2001) by David Hajdu is a close look at the folk music rebirth of the early 1960s and especially the growth and clashing of the egos of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Richard Farina, who married Joan's sister Mimi.

Farina was killed in a motorcycle crash in 1966 shortly after publishing his book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me," about his experiences at Cornell in the late 1950s. His name surfaced a few months ago because of his song "Birmingham Sunday." It was heard occasionally in September because of the 40th anniversary of the racist church bombing the song so emotionally describes.

•"Boston" (1928) by Upton Sinclair. Everything you'd ever wanted to know — and more — about Sacco and Vanzetti and the bogus murder charges that led to their executions in 1927.

•"Love in the Days of Rage" (1988) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. A young couple's surreal adventures on the fringes of the Paris student revolt of 1968.

•"Too Far to Walk" (1964) by John Hersey. College students in the early days of drugs and protests in the 1960s struggle to assimilate the new era with their existentialism.

•"World's End" (1987) by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Family conflicts, class struggle and American Indian losses of land, culture and identity set along the Hudson River in both the 17th and 20th centuries.

•"Toward the End of Time" (1997) by John Updike. I promised a friend, who thrives on Updike, I'd read one book a year, knowing that's not nearly enough to keep up with the prodigious output of this writer. This one's set in the North Shore suburbs of Boston following a nuclear war with China, where a recent retiree faces infidelity, teen vandals, hungry deer and prostate cancer.

•"The Underground Woman" (1973) by Kay Boyle. An older woman's experiences in jail with several other women with whom she was arrested at a late-'60s anti-war protest in San Francisco.

•"Milena" (1977) by Margarete Buber-Neumann. The author met Kafka's great love at the Ravensbrook concentration camp during World War II. The book details the life of journalist Milena Jesenska in Prague and Vienna during the 1920s and '30s and then at the camp where she died. The author was a Jew; Milena a socialist.

•"Village" (1924) by Robert McAlmon. A cynical documentary of the sad and quietly desperate lives of the residents of a small upper Midwest community before the first World War. No plot. No character development. And it leaves you feeling a bit desperate yourself. But it's still worth reading.

McAlmon may be best known as the character Robert Cohn, former Princeton boxer who hopelessly and thus angrily had the hots for Lady Brett in Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises."

None of the older titles made the Best Books of the 20th Century lists, but the writers have some interesting perspectives on some of the most provocative or controversial times.

But as the year ends, and I complete "World's End," I face the task of a plan for next year. A couple more from the Boyles and another Updike will be on the list for sure. And for the 30th straight year, "Finnegan's Wake" will be there.

Maybe next year I'll get through more than another three pages.

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Cary Brunswick is managing editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at (607) 433-3055 or cary@thedailystar.com.