Best new book...of 1978

You can tell a lot about a book by looking at its Amazon list of Statistically Improbable phrases, or SIPs.

For the uninitiated, these are two-word combinations determined by Amazon's algorithm to be highly unlikely to occur together anywhere outside the individual piece of work. So, when John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire comes up with SIPs like "elephant position," "smart bear" and "rape expert," it gives you more than a cursory glance at the book, it conjures the vivid images Irving paints in his late '70s masterpiece, a work which has withstood the test of time quite wonderfully.

Nearly three decades on, his quirky (to put it lightly) tale of the Berry family scales very, very well. Irving populates his story with a horny bear, two characters named Freud, a stuffed dog that has a predilection for floating and more humanity than Charles Dickens could shake a stick at.

I've had a long-distance love affair with this book since the late 1970s. My parents kept a paperback copy of it on a shelf in what would later become my sister's room. When I thought it was safe, I'd sneak in a few passages from it here and there, soaking in Irving's rich imagery. Even though I was only eight, I could already appreciate that this was something special. It wasn't the only book of my parents' that I snuck off with. My mom had some Harold Robbins and Erica Jong and, while tantalizing reads, they just didn't stick in my brain like Hotel New Hampshire.

So, on the last night of 2005, I carved out some time to finish the book I'd been savoring for more than 25 years. And it was damned good. Possibly the best thing I've read in several years. And look, I read Ian McEwan, Don Delillo, Salman Rushdie and, for God's sake, Joan Frickin' Didion. They are my writing gods. But nothing can touch a memory from youth and a quest that finally comes to an end. And Rushdie just doesn't have the chops to pull off a lusty bear in heat, no matter how many Booker Prizes he wins.