My hat is off to Books of the Year panelist Linda Rodriguez.</p><p>She selected Hesh Kestin&#8217;s <em>Based on a True Story </em>as her top short-fiction collection of 2008. Linda&#8217;s assignment this year was to choose 10 short-story titles, then pick one favorite out of the group. And <em>Based on a True Story </em>is a collection of three novellas.</p><p>The novella is an underrepresented form in modern American literature, and that&#8217;s a shame. So the fact that Rodriguez found value in Kestin&#8217;s book heartened me.</p><p>Jim Harrison is a modern practitioner of the form but offered no novella collection this year. Technically, Philip Roth&#8217;s <em>Everyman</em>, from 2006, was a novella, but that&#8217;s not how it was marketed.</p><p>It&#8217;s too bad publishers are so shy about this form. As the great science fiction writer Robert Silverberg once wrote:</p><p>&#8220;(The novella) is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms &#8230; it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book.&#8221;</p><p>That is very well-said.</p><p>Kestin&#8217;s book is one of our 10 &#8220;highlight&#8221; books for this year, the ones we pull out of our list of the 100 Noteworthy Books. The box accompanying this story lists the nine others.</p><p>I&#8217;m also enamored of Crosby Kemper III&#8217;s selection of Peter Martin&#8217;s biography of Samuel Johnson. This book chronicles one of the towering men of English letters. Johnson was one of the language&#8217;s first real lexicographers. The whole idea of the dictionary, in the form we know it, would not exist without this man. So: Thanks to the Kansas City Public Library&#8217;s chief executive for praising <em>Samuel Johnson</em>.</p><p>There isn&#8217;t a book on this list of 10 that I&#8217;m not impressed with. Just to single out one more, though:</p><p>There&#8217;s probably no better education about the current state of the Middle East than Steve Paul&#8217;s selection, Dexter Filkins&#8217; <em>The Forever War</em>. This <em>New York Times</em> reporter has been a presence in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade now, and it shows in his sharp observations and simple but not simplistic writing. The world in 2008, as it has been for the last several years, is not a peaceful place. Whatever the situation in life, though, this holds true: Knowledge helps. Ignorance hurts.</p><p>So: As William Faulkner once said, &#8220;Read, read, read. Read <em>everything</em>.&#8221; But remember that the good stuff is the most rewarding.</p><p><strong><span class="infobox-head">Our 10 highlights </span></strong><br /></p><p><strong>&#8226;The Underneath</strong>, by Kathi Appelt with illustrations by David Small</p><p><strong>&#8226;Flight: New and Selected Poems</strong>, by Linda Bierds</p><p><strong>&#8226;The Forever War</strong>, by Dexter Filkins</p><p><strong>&#8226;The Spies of Warsaw</strong>, by Alan Furst</p><p><strong>&#8226;The Black List</strong>, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell</p><p><strong>&#8226;Based on a True Story</strong>, by Hesh Kestin</p><p><strong>&#8226;The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo</strong>, by Stieg Larsson</p><p><strong>&#8226;S</strong><strong>amuel Johnson</strong>, by Peter Martin</p><p><strong>&#8226;The Devil&#8217;s Eye</strong>, by Jack McDevitt</p><p><strong>&#8226;Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller</strong>, by Steve Weinberg