Christmas Critics.

Oh, you have the best job in the world!" people say to me all the time. "Being paid to read!" It is a good job, and as book critic of the Washington Post I occupy a modestly visible forum from which to harangue an especially responsive readership about new books. But the thing about new books is that they are, well, new, and most of them fall somewhere in that large, gray area between very good and very bad. For me reading is work, much of it of a decidedly quotidian variety. Very good new books do cross my desk--in 2005 these included Michael Connelly's The Closers (Little, Brown, $26.95, 416 pp.), Penelope Lively's Making It Up (Viking Adult, $24.95, 224 pp.), and, most particularly, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (Alfred A. Knopf, $23.95, 240 pp.)--but not often.

So it came as a decidedly welcome change when, about three years ago, I started writing from time to time about old books. For more than two decades I had written a weekly column for the Post about pretty much whatever crossed my mind, but the column had run its course and was closed down. In its place I started writing an occasional series (it appears more or less every three weeks) called "Second Reading," longer pieces in which I reconsider notable and/or neglected books from the past. Now, as it turns out, I really do have the best job in the world, as I am paid to reread books from my own past, many of them books that I quite deeply love.

One of the books that I reread this year--one of the two books I happily recommend to you for Christmas giving, or receiving, or reading, or rereading--was Elizabeth Bowen's masterly novel The Death of the Heart (Anchor, $14, 432 pp.). I had read it when I was a teenager because my mother thought it was wonderful, and whatever she liked I wanted to read; she had exquisite taste and never once said that I was "too young" for any book. In this case, though, I really was too young; The Death of the Heart was over my head, as was, at about the same time, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury.

Coming to Bowen's novel for the second time, in my midsixties, with enough experience of life and literature to grasp its complexities and subtleties, I was astonished. It is one of those rare books in which not a word can be skimmed. Bowen's dense, intricate prose must be read at its own leisurely pace, an experience for which teenagers simply are not equipped. It is in fact a novel about a teenager, but it is strictly for adults.

Originally published in 1938, The Death of the Heart was immediately received with great enthusiasm and in some quarters declared a masterpiece. Bowen was forty years old and by then an established writer, the author of several novels and many short stories, but The Death of the Heart secured her reputation and enlarged her readership on both sides of the Atlantic. She was Anglo-Irish, with a deep fealty to her Irish roots and a strong connection to London literary circles; her friends included Cyril Connolly and Virginia Woolf, though strictly speaking she was not a member of the Bloomsbury crowd.

The most persistent theme in her work is the end of innocence, and in The Death of the Heart it achieves its most powerful expression. Sixteen-year-old Portia Quayne, newly orphaned, is sent to live with her half-brother Thomas and his wife, Anna, in their townhouse on Regents Park in London. Anna is aloof and calculating, Thomas vague and distant. Lonely and longing for love, Portia attaches herself to Eddie, a slick number a few years her senior, who toys with her and ultimately breaks her heart. It is one of several betrayals Portia suffers, and Bowen's words on the subject are characteristically elegant and wise: "One's sentiments--call them that--one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist: only when they are betrayed or, worse still, when one betrays them does one realize their power."

Preparing to write about this remarkable novel, I found my way to the second book I recommend this year, Victoria Glendinning's Elizabeth Bowen, published under that title in this country in 1978 but with the subtitle Portrait of a Writer in England. By odd coincidence, Glendinning was the same age when she published this biography as Bowen was when she published The Death of the Heart, but Glendinning was still early in her career and her major works--biographies of Edith Sitwell, Vita Sackville-West, Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope, and Jonathan Swift--lay in the future.

It is a pity that her American publisher chose to abandon her British subtitle, for "portrait of a writer" is exactly what the book is. Glendinning had worked at the Times Literary Supplement before writing it and presumably had encountered more than a few of the massive compendia of trivia that pass for literary biography these days; one likes to think that she determined to do otherwise. As one who has written three works of biography and reviewed Lord knows how many others, I long ago lost patience with these exercises in academic flatulence (see, by way of instructive example, biographies published this year of Eudora Welty and Edmond Wilson) and was delighted that Glendinning had met the biographer's greatest challenge: to determine what in one's subject's life and work is important and what is not, and to tell the tale accordingly.

Weighing in at just over three-hundred pages of text, Glendinning's narrative is concise and to the point, yet to the best of my knowledge misses nothing that really matters. She is shrewd on Bowen's Irishness, her complicated childhood and adolescence, her long and happy but probably companionate marriage, her love affairs, her literary and social friendships, her accomplishments. Her Elizabeth Bowen is about as good as literary biography gets, which is exactly what her subject deserves.

Jonathan Yardley is the book critic and a columnist for the Washington Post, and author of six books. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism in 1981.