This year I read widely as I normally do, but thanks to a lot of travel I did this year, I had the time and space to develop a theme in my reading: Big, enormous epic tomes that I could never read but for some dedicated long-haul flights. More than half of these books would be a month of normal reading on their own, 600- to 800-page doorstops, that I was able to tackle while I was out promoting my own 600-page doorstop of a book.

Here’s to the list:

1) The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carre :: I read more than a dozen Le Carre novels this year, including the entire Karla trilogy, and so was unexpectedly rewarded by all of that reading when I got to Secret Pilgrim, which is in essence a spy’s memoir, telling tales, lessons, and rules of intelligence gathering to a new crop of agents, as he narrates many of Le Carre’s other tales and characters.

2) Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961 by Paul Hendrickson :: Early on in this masterful book, Hendrickson writes that his aim is “to lock together the words ‘Hemingway’ and ‘boat’ in the way that the locked-together and equally American words ‘DiMaggio’ and ‘bat’ or ‘Satchmo’ and ‘horn’ will quickly mean something in the minds of most people, at least of a certain age.” He succeeded impressively. He accomplished something truly masterful—what, I can say with all writerly envy, is the hope of any serious writer starting out: A project that will stand forever and can be read for years and years to come by generations yet unborn. It reminds me in richness, not just in related subject matter, of A. Scott Berg’s biography of Max Perkins, Editor of Genius, which nearly 40 years after its publication is still a masterful work of nonfiction, rich in personality, and densely packed. Rich, textured, and savory, a fulfilling meal not to be rushed or half-tackled, a project of such ambitious scope and expressing such a depth of knowledge as to overwhelm the reader with its sheer virtuosity. It’s reading works like his that I wish my reading comprehension (and retention) was better—reading it I know I won’t retain anything close to the amount that I wish I would. I read it nonstop on the cross-country Friday flight home, then read it much of following day, and finally finished it Sunday afternoon in an intellectual feast unsurpassed in the last year of my reading.

3) 1861 by Adam Goodheart :: My near life-long fascination with the Civil War shows no sign of slowing down, yet I’m running out of books that seem totally new. Most seem at this point to be highly specific niche books, but Goodheart’s history, published to mark the 150^th anniversary of the start of the war this year, was surprisingly fresh—he argues that 1861 was not just beginning of the war,  nor merely another year, but an idea, much like 1776 was in the United States. With remarkably gripping and detailed portraits and scenes, he told the story of that tumultuous year through a series of individuals and their decisions. Also this year I read Lincoln: A Novel by Gore Vidal, which I finally tackled during a swing to the Pacific Northwest this summer, and really enjoyed it. A great true tale told as fiction.

7) Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick :: For the second year in a row, there’s a book by Remnick on my list, amusing only because Remnick actually has written only four books. I spent much of this year reading books on Russian history, as part of some initial research for my next book project, and so turned to Remnick’s classic of the fall of the Soviet Union early on in my studies. I also read this year David Hoffman’s Dead Hand, another great book on Russia—specifically on the Cold War and the multi-decade nuclear showdown between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—by another Post alum.

8.) Defection of AJ Lewinter by Robert Littell :: This is a small book, a tight darkly comic tale of a specific episode in the Cold War by the author of the majestic, sweeping novel of the CIA, The Company, which was a great read. Speaking of variations on an author’s theme, I read David Ignatius’s Sun King, which is the one novel of his that’s not a thriller, and which turned out to be a great, cutting, comic tale of Washington life.

9) Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement by David Brooks :: I’ve gone hot and cold on Brooks’s books before—I thought Bobos in Paradise was fantastic while I couldn’t even finish On Paradise Drive—so I wasn’t sure what to expect as I got into this quite-hyped new book. It turned out to be great, a wonderfully and imaginatively told story of how much of our life’s destiny and thinking is beyond our conscious control. The runner-up in the “imaginative life biography” category would have to be Bill Bryon’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life, which I’ve listened to on audiobook over two long car rides—he’s always been my preferred audiobook accompaniment for car rides—which tells the history of modern life through stories about each room of his house in England: The kitchen, the bathroom, the front porch, the telephone, and so on. The short version: Life was much more Hobbesian much more recently than I would have thought.

10) The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World  by Daniel Yergin. A follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of oil, “The Prize,” expands his scope to include the general global energy picture and is in that respect every bit as interesting as one would expect. What surprised me, though, was that the first two parts of the book, taken together, are among the most provocative and lucid histories of the last decade that I’ve read anywhere. The other amazing book on recent history I read this year was Bethany McLean’s and Joe Nocerra’s All the Devils Are Here, about the financial crisis.

[Check here for my past lists: 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.]

To be on the top 10 list for current affairs with Peter Bergen and Francis Fukuyama is pretty cool, as is appearing on the broader list with some of my favorite books of the year—like David Brooks’s Social Animal and Adam Goodheart’s 1861.

“The Threat Matrix” will be out in paperback in a few weeks, with an updated epilogue, if you’d like to preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Politics & Prose.

In large measure, this is, as author Garrett Graff puts it, the story of the “Muellerization” of the FBI after Robert Mueller took the Bureau’s reins one week before 9/11…. Graff has adopted an interesting approach: This is not a formal history of the Bureau, which might have detailed footnotes, though for perspective he includes considerable historical background with general references….

It was not all smooth going as the challenges implementing the Patriot Act illustrate, (503) but Graff shows that progress was continuous and positive, and the Bureau of today bears little resemblance to Hoover’s organization. Along the way, Graff does more than reprise challenging Bureau cases. He includes biographical details about special agents and illuminates the often frustrating bureaucratic culture in which they operate. The John O’Neill tragedy—he died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9/11—is one instance. Another is the case of Coleen Rowley, the whistle-blowing special agent from Minneapolis, who wrote a memo after 9/11 that attacked “Mueller and other Bureau leaders for pre-9/11 failures.” While its accuracy was not challenged, she had embarrassed the Bureau, an act that violated “the number one precept of the FBI.” Her retirement followed. (417) A chapter on operations in the Iraq war zone includes the engrossing story of George Piro, whose interrogation of Saddam Hussein illustrated the Bureau’s approach to dealing with high-value enemy targets….

The Threat Matrix is based on hundreds of interviews Graff conducted throughout the government and the New York Police Department, plus various books and articles. Graff admits he has recreated some conversations, an increasingly common practice in such histories. The result, nevertheless, is a well-told story and a reading pleasure. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud of the result.

I’ve been fascinated by the story of Najibullah Zazi since it was unfolding in the fall of 2009 as I was researching “The Threat Matrix.” Even as the plot unraveled, I was out in Denver interviewing agents, getting a tour of the “Operation High-Rise” command post, and visiting Zazi’s bucolic condo complex in Aurora. To me, the case of the Denver shuttle bus driver who almost bombed the New York City subways never received the level of attention it should have.

This summer, 5280 Magazine gave me the chance to rectify that to a certain extent. There was much more information available now, including hundreds of pages of court documents, and I supplemented that with extensive interviews of most of the major players in the case. The result was just published in the November issue, “Homegrown Terror,” and significantly—in my biased opinion at least—advances and changes the narrative of a bumbling terrorist. Zazi is in fact the closest al-Qaeda came to successfully striking the United States in the decade after 9/11:

Counterterrorism work is all about chasing ghosts. On an average day, the United States government fields some 3,000 terrorism leads. Virtually none pan out, because the bureau’s routine record searches quickly eliminate most leads. “We had expected the next piece of information that comes in would wash him out,” Olson says. But in the first hours of the investigation, every trap, every records check, every step pointed to one thing: This was no ghost. “People don’t understand how close he was to being successful,” Olson says. “Another 24 hours and he would have gotten in his car without us knowing who he was.”

I’d encourage you to read the whole article on Najibullah Zazi.

As part of New York‘s 9/11 Anniversary issue this week, they did an “Encyclopedia of 9/11,” from A to Z, from Abbottabad to Zazi, looking back over the last decade and the changes big and small in the world, in the United States, and in daily life. I was asked to contribute the “Evidence” entry, focusing on how the FBI pulled together the first hours of the PENTTBOM investigation and the critical jumpstart they got from the 1988 Toyota Corolla, California license plate 3JFZ283, owned by Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. It was a fascinating piece to research—I got to spend some time with one of the last FBI agents still assigned to the PENTTBOM case, who has worked the case since the first hours a decade ago—but all the more so, this piece was humbling to be part of such an ambitious project. New York does a great job with its magazine in general, but this encyclopedia was really impressive. I recommend reading the whole thing.

• My interview on WMAL and Bill Thompson’s Eye on Books, including the audio.
• My book cited and quoted in Bart Gellman’s cover story on Bob Mueller in TIME Magazine.
• My quotation in the Post’s story on Mueller’s term renewal.
• FamousDC’s mention of the Threat Matrix book party.
• My chat on Washingtonpost.com about Mueller’s term renewal.
• My book salon on FireDogLake.

Actually, I gave two talks this week at NEXT—one for the entire conference focused on how “metanarratives” kill on the web and in politics. This is a phenomenon we lived on the Dean campaign (the Dean Scream), as well as how the Macaca Moment killed George Allen in the Virginia Senate race, among other examples. Social media makes it so easy for moments to go viral—but the ones that really impact politics are viral moments that connect with a larger story.

Back in 2007, I was talking to a McCain advisor and he said the thing he feared most was McCain tripping or falling at an event, something that would lend credence to the fear that John McCain was too old and frail to be president. That exact same slip or fall could happen to Barack Obama without any fear of it impacting his campaign as anything more than a night’s laughs on the comedy shows.

Anyway, my second talk in Berlin this week was more focused on personal brands online—specifically, “Inventing an Online Persona: How to balance authenticity and your online brand.” I ran through ten rules of personal branding that would be mostly familiar to any of the graduates of my course at Georgetown. The bottom line of why you want to build a personal brand? We all want to spend our days doing things we love. The presentation itself wended its way from Barack Obama to Charlie Sheen to Julia Allison to Sarah Palin to Gary Vaynerchuk, among many others—each of whom has defined himself or herself online in a certain realm.