The Word in and out of Season, Homilies for the Sundays of Ordinary Time.

It is a constant complaint of those in book publishing that we are too overloaded with manuscripts to read for pleasure. I often feel as though I work in a bakery, my arms ever mired up to the elbows in pastry dough while trays of fragrant tarts and turnovers fresh from the oven pass beneath my nose. Friends and family ask opinions of recent bestsellers and advice on new books to read; I, struck mute with embarrassment, try to remember the last time I read a book between hard or soft covers; editing, I fear, is making me an ignoramus. In reaction I turned this spring and summer to books I should have read before, during years spent reading mostly manuscripts.

I was drawn to the shortest (with so much catching up to do, one must move quickly), and those with a flavor of foreigness to challenge New York City's particular provinciality: James Joyce's Dubliners, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene, Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop (the foreign place in the novel being the eighteenth-century American Southwest).

Among more recent works, those remote in time or place satisfy best: In an Antique Land (Vintage, $13, 393 pp.) by Amitav Ghosh, is a wonderful travelogue cum scholarly detective story which evokes, through fragments from documents found in a Cairo synagogue, a complex and variegated world of cultural influence and trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean during the eleventh century. Kathleen Norris's Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin, $9.95, 224 pp.), uses quotes from the early Christian desert fathers to limn the windswept landscape of the Dakotas, the land itself a meditation on the poverty and riches of asceticism. Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (Plume, $10, 220 pp.), winner of the 1990 National Book Award, combines the best of all worlds: a mere 209 pages, 150 years distant in its historical setting, cosmopolitan (in the best sense of the word) in its embrace of philosophy, literature, and human nature, and in its reflections on good and evil, on history and race, utterly contemporary, forceful, and wise.

For some specifically Catholic inspiration, Richard Viladesau's The Word in and out of Season, Homilies for the Sundays of Ordinary Time (Paulist Press, Cycle A, $9.95, 138 pp.; Cycle B, $7.95, 132 pp.; Cycle C, $7.95, 120 pp.), though directed toward his fellow priests to share ideas for Sunday reflections (much needed, many parishioners might add), also offers to the layperson that rare combination of intellectual depth and spiritual sustenance Father Viladesau proffers in his own ministry. The troubling or confusing aspects of Scripture or doctrine will not be circumvented here. Father Viladesau will go right to the heart of the difficulty, usually providing some historical or theological context which makes muddied waters somehow clear. Unlike most contemporary priests, he does not act as if theology were a specialized area of knowledge, like neuroscience, limited to an initiate; he speaks not only to our need to be guided or consoled or challenged, but also to understand; he exhorts, but he also teaches.

No editor can resist recommending books he or she has worked on, and such recommendations may not be as untrustworthy worthy as they seem. If after having read a book several times, after having lived with it, one still loves and believes in it, that might say something. So it's not without bias that I, nonetheless, recommend as my two favorite books published this fall, David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (Harcourt Brace, $21.95, 352 pp.), the story of the trial of a Japanese-American fisherman in the Pacific Northwest in die 1950s - an old-fashioned page-turner with a graceful prose style, a novel of subtle courage, ethical concern, resonance, even hope. The second is Commonweal's own Paul Elie's collection of diverse, surprising, moving, and often profound reflections on the saints by contemporary writers (including, Richard Bausch, Avery Dulles, S.J., Tobias Wolf, Ron Hansen, Nancy Mairs, Kathleen Norris, Francine Prose). A Tremor of Bliss (Harcourt Brace, $22, 323 pp.) is a literary dip into a magnificent store of tradition and inspiration.

Finally, as Christmas draws near and gift-giving devolves into frantic search and empty obligation, Lewis Hyde's The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage, $14, 354 pp.) restores to us the meaning of the giving of gifts, especially those gifts, tangible and intangible, we ourselves are given. It was put into my hands by one of the nation's finest booksellers, appropriately enough, as a gift, and one well worth passing along. (Among Hyde's epigraphs is this line from the poet Czeslaw Milosz: "There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor Earth.")

Alane Mason is an editor at W.W. Norton. She lives in New York City.