2009: The Year In Reading

Best Fiction
Glen David Gold, SUNNYSIDE
Arthur Phillips, THE SONG IS YOU
Steve Hely, HOW I BECAME A FAMOUS NOVELIST
Jane Gardam, THE MAN IN THE WOODEN HAT
David Foster Wallace, INFINITE JEST
Nick Hornby, JULIET, NAKED
W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

Best Nonfiction
Leslie T. Chang, FACTORY GIRLS
David Grann, THE LOST CITY OF Z
Dave Eggers, ZEITOUN
Haruki Murakami, WHAT I TALK ABOUT WHEN I TALK ABOUT RUNNING
Patrick Radden Keefe, THE SNAKEHEAD
Cristina Nehring, A VINDICATION OF LOVE

Best Memoir
Tad Friend, CHEERFUL MONEY

Biggest Page-Turners: The Stieg Larsson "Failed To Finish GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST" Memorial Category
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, WATCHMEN
James Ellroy, L.A. CONFIDENTIAL
Emily Perkins, NOVEL ABOUT MY WIFE

Best Discoveries of 2009
Bit silly to claim "discovery" for a writer who has been widely celebrated and another who has been publishing novels for 30 years, but it's a tie between DFW and Jane Gardam. I expect they will have a run-off in '10.

Modern Library of Awesome
E.M. Forster, HOWARDS END
Edith Wharton, ETHAN FROME
John O'Hara, APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA
W. Somerset Maugham, OF HUMAN BONDAGE

Best Book With A Perfect Ending
Walter Kirn, UP IN THE AIR

Best Books With Not-The-Best Endings
Peter Straub, GHOST STORY
Ulrich Boser, THE GARDNER HEIST (though, since it's nonfiction, I can't pin this one on the author in fairness)

Most Quoted
From Michael Chabon's THE FINAL SOLUTION: "Mr. Panicker was not so hopeful or so foolish as to imagine that finding a refugee boy's lost parrot would restore the meaning and purpose to his life. But he had been willing to settle for so very much less."

A Few Random Stats
Best months for reading: Travel-heavy March and May.
Worst: August, which makes perfect sense given that I was working on INFINITE JEST at the same time.
Percentage of books read that were library books: 22.2. I love the NYPL!
Percentage of books read that are actually being published next year: 2. (Not counting half of ...HORNET'S NEST. Gah.)
Average number of books per month that I reviewed for the A.V. Club, the place where most of my reviews ran: 3.25. On pace, could be improved.

As of November, number of years I have been keeping a running list of books I've read: 9
First book on the list: THIS SIDE OF PARADISE. It was the first time I read it, and I remember very clearly that I was sitting in Logan Airport in Boston with my mom.

A Wormbook Year: 13 Notable Posts of 2009

January: Seeing the adaptation of "Revolutionary Road," one of my favorite books of '08, was exciting. Finding out my hometown indie bookstore, Harry W. Schwartz, would be closing was depressing.

April: "You haven't read ETHAN FROME? Get out of my house!" I read it later this year, thus making that inadvertent lie true, for what it's worth.

May: I traveled a lot in May this year but one of my favorite destinations was John K. King Books in Detroit, Michigan. Also, this blog turned 4, so according to PBS Parents it wants to be self-reliant and it should have "learned to better manage intense emotions."

June: I signed up for Infinite Summer and copped to other long books I hadn't read. I still haven't read any of those, but at least I can check INFINITE JEST off (in a kind of full-body gesture of checking, I imagine).

July: Bulwer-Lytton winner Eric Rice came by to share some secrets for writing a very, very bad sentence.

August: The Noughties reckoning began early with this list of the best American novels of the past decade.

September: I went to the Brooklyn Book Festival for the third time and it was wildly entertaining.

October: The discovery of a new Shakespeare play prompted me to wish a different one had been found instead. Great is thy ungratefulness.

November: I hope I'll always be adding to a list of books that make me laugh, and less often to its companion list from July.

Unlikeliest Books I Read In 2009

There are the books you always wanted to read... and then there are some others that just end up under your eyeballs. Here, I celebrate some of those from 2009.



Bollywood chick lit! I borrowed this debut, about a single hotel manager in New Delhi, from my mom while on vacation and it was surprisingly good. I'd definitely read this author's next book.



Whoever put this guy up at BEA with James Ellroy did him a solid. Harrison wasn't allowed to get many words in edgewise, but most people who came for the free copy of BLOOD'S A ROVER also picked up a copy of his novel RISK, a cool and current noir.


A friend of mine on Goodreads gave this book two stars but called it "a cute little story about New York in the magical mid-century days." I wouldn't say run out and get this memoir about an Iowan in New York in the summer of 1945, but I needed a breather and this did the trick.


Worst. Cover. Ever. But when seven copies of this book showed up at once on my library's New Releases shelf, I got curious. I imagine they give this book to head-injury patients to determine whether they've suffered a concussion or not, because that is the only condition under which this book is at all coherent. My favorite parts are the mini-essays by coaches and friends, the theme running through which being "Whatever it is, it's not Chad's fault." Does not bode well for the inevitable Morningside/Manhattanville/Warlem community read.


Just kidding, I was always planning to read this book, and it was even worse than I had expected -- so bad in fact I couldn't even find anything funny to mock about it. All that money and they couldn't even have hired a decent ghostwriter.

Publishers Weekly 100, Amazon 10 (not a score)

See if your favorite snubbed by the top 10 made the cut on the long list, divided among fiction, poetry, mystery, SF/fantasy/horror (yes, all lumped together), mass market (is not a genre!), comics and nonfiction. Counting last week's list I have read four of these books -- THE LOST CITY OF Z, THE BELIEVERS, THE LITTLE STRANGER and THE SNAKEHEAD -- not good but no worse than last year.

Meanwhile, Amazon's in-house book blog Omnivoracious posted its top 10 books of the year, attributed to "the editors," which overlaps by one with PW.

Any books you think should have vaulted to the top, or glaring omissions you want to speak for?

12 For 6: The Best Books I Read In 2009 So Far

Because what's more American than recklessly ranking shit? Truth be told, this list was a little too easy to put together -- I'm hoping to be overwhelmed by choices in the next six months. (Want something that has had time to age a bit? Check out my list of the best books I read last year.)

FICTION
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, WATCHMEN -- Superheroes grapple with their powers in a world that doesn't need them any more in this landmark graphic novel, which was adapted into a movie this year. (Begun in 2008, technically, but the first book I really liked this year.)
Richard Price, LUSH LIFE -- The effects of a late-night murder ripple through the Lower East Side. Took a lot of complaining, but I'm glad I got around to it.
Arthur Phillips, THE SONG IS YOU -- A lonely advertising executive and an up-and-coming singer make an unorthodox connection in New York City (review here). Also, the book I read this year that I'm most likely to re-read first.
Glen David Gold, SUNNYSIDE -- The lives of three men unexpectedly converge during World War I, and only one of them is Charlie Chaplin (review here).
James Ellroy, LA CONFIDENTIAL -- Three L.A. cops in the 1950s get wrapped up in the investigation of what looks like a routine coffee-shop robbery but turns out to be anything but. Also suitable for airports.
Cormac McCarthy, BLOOD MERIDIAN -- "For even if you should have stood your ground, yet what ground was it?" This book is so fresh in my mind I can't bear to boil it down to a sentence, but if you've read it I have some thoughts here.

NONFICTION
Nick Hornby, SHAKESPEARE WROTE FOR MONEY -- The third and final collection of Hornby's reading columns for The Believer only underlined how much they will be missed by book lovers everywhere. Clearly if you're here they are up your alley, so start with THE POLYSYLLABIC SPREE.
Leslie T. Chang, FACTORY GIRLS -- The best reported book of the year as a former Wall Street Journal correspondent spent years with young Chinese women who leave home for economic opportunities unheard of in the previous generation.
Peter Carlson, K BLOWS TOP -- Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. in the 1950s has to go down as one of the most surreal episodes in the Cold War (review here).
Joseph Berger, THE WORLD IN A CITY -- An immigrant looks at the new melting pot from the vantage point of New York neighborhoods succeeding and struggling with cultural change.

So what are your favorite books of the year so far?

Reading Resolutions for 2009

1. Read Richard Yates' other novels, since I loved REVOLUTIONARY ROAD so much in 2008.

2. Continue the Unbookening: going through the books I already own and haven't read, reading them, and trying to get rid of some before I buy more. 

3. Read one Modern Library list book a month.