Your Top Ten Reads of 2009

Looking back on your reading of 2009, what were your top ten reading experiences? "Ten" should be considered a rough number as we know some of you read more and some less than others. Let's just say, 'top ten' or top 10% of your reading?

In no particular order:

Little Bird of Heaven, Joyce Carol Oates (2009)(novel, US author)
American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell (2008)(short stories, US author)
Winter Vault, Anne Michaels (2009)(novel, Canadian author)
Tinkers, Paul Harding (2009)(novella, US author)
Mysteries of Winterthurn, Joyce Carol Oates* (1985)
The Land of Green Plums, Herta Müller (translation, 1998)(novel, Romanian author, 2009 Nobel winner).
The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry, Assia Djebar (translation, 2006)(short stories, Algerian author).
I'd Like, Amanda Michaelopoulou (translation, 2008)(short stories, Greek author)
The City and The City, China Miéville (2009)(novel, UK author)
*The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (translation, 2009)(novel, Japanese author)
*Jamilia, Chingiz Aitmatov (translation, 2008)(novella, Kyrgyz author)

*tied for that last position.

I've only read 13 books so far this year so my list is kind of cheating but here are my best books in no particular order:

*** = number 1 book of the year
* = top five

1) *Shohei Ooka : Fires on the Plain ***
2) *Stefan Zweig : Vingt-Quatre heures de la vie d'une femme (Twenty four hours in the life of a woman)
3) Haruki Murakami : Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche (nonfiction)
4) *Alexandre Dumas : Le comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte-Cristo)
5) Stefan Zweig : Amok
6) *Alexandre Dumas : Les trois mousquetaires (The Three Musketeers)
7) *Victor Hugo : Le dernier jour d'un condamne (Last day of a condemned man)

What a year!

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Les Misérables, Victor Hugo
Emma, Jane Austen
Howards End, E.M. Forster
King Lear, William Shakespeare
Essays of Montaigne (which I have not nearly finished but I luv him)
Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster
Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link

Woodsburner by John Pipkin (an overlooked gem; As America grapples with the industrial age, a pre-Walden Thoreau accidentally burns down a large swath of Concord woods--an event which actually happened)
Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
Les Miserable by Victor Hugo (will finish by the end of the year and it will undoubtedly be among my top five)
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Keats by Andrew Motion
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

In no particular order:

Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector
The Enchanted April, Elizabeth von Arnim
Mosquito by Roma Tearne
The Sunne in Splendour, Sharon Kay Penman
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Scottsboro, Ellen Feldman
Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois. Since I bought this book, I've made homemade bread almost everyday. It's really as easy as the title makes it seem.

Almost certainly #10: Les Miserables, Victor Hugo. I hope to have this finished by the end of the year!

I awarded five stars to these during 2009

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
When I Forgot by Elina Hirvonen
White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India by William Dalrymple
In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes
Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie

There's room for one more before the end of the year.

Top three:

Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam - interlinked short stories set around a group of friends, first medical students and later doctors
The Hunters by James Salter - being a man during the Korean war
Gang Leader For A Day by Sudhir Venkatesh - non-fiction, anthropology and economics of life in the Chicago projects

Honorable mentions:
The Spare Room by Helen Garner - devastating novel about a woman and her dying friend
The Big Necessity by Rose George - an excellent book on the slightly improbable subject of sanitation
Black Watch by Gregory Burke - a play about Scottish soldiers in Iraq
An Audience With An Elephant by Byron Rogers - eccentric essays of Britishness
Hellfire and Herring by Christopher Rush - poetic memoir of a childhood in a Scottish village, distinguished by fishing and hard religion
The Child That Books Built by Francis Spufford - a memoir about childhood reading
A Book Addict's Treasury by Lynda Murphy - haven't quite finished this yet, but it's a perfect little anthology of book addiction

Alphabetical by author:

My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams
Middlemarch by George Eliot (this one will be finished by the weekend and I know it is one of the best.
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Resistance: A Frenchwoman's Journal of the War by Agnes Humbert read in translation
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year by Carlo Levi
A Thread of Grace: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell
Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Belly of Paris by Emile Zola

ETA The Leopard

This is the list I posted in the What Are You Reading? Best Books of 2009 thread, where Lois limited us to 12, and I couldn't make it any less than 13!* I had a wonderful reading year this year, and hope 2010 will be as good or better.

Contemporary fiction
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (and by extension several other works by Mantel that would break the limit Avaland has set)
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Older Fiction
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman

Nonfiction
Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 by David M. Kennedy
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
The Coldest March: Scott's Fatal Antarctic Expedition by Susan Solomon
The Great Crash 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith

*Upped to 15 on 12/27!

>11 rebeccanyc: I like how you distinguish contemporary fiction from "older" fiction. Whereabouts do you draw the line between the two? I didn't even think to include my nonfiction on the list; I suppose because there is too much of my spring research reading involved.

>10 LisaCurcio: The third Zafon novel is due out in May, I believe. The second one is quite good. If an arc of the 3rd falls into my hands, I'll read it but I don't think I'll buy it.

Lois, Thanks for the "heads up" on the 3rd Zafon novel. I have The Angels Game on the shelfwhich contains the books I really want to read--along with I don't know how many others :-).

#12, Lois, it's a little arbitrary. I more or less think of contemporary fiction as something that was written in the last several years. Last year I think I called it "new" fiction and limited it to books that came out that year, but that seems a little arbitrary too. I guess it's one of those "I know it when I see it" things.

When I have a little more time, I'm going to post a longer list of my favorite books of 2009 on my own thread where I impose no restrictions!

In no particular order:

Sur ma mère by Tahar ben Jelloun
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
The Bone Woman by Thea Koff
My Uncle Napoleon by Iraj Pezeshkzad
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
By the Sea by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Blindness by José Saramago
Purgatorio by Tomas Eloy Martinez
A River Called Time by Mia Couto
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano

(I never read as much non-fiction as I think I'd like to, but one of the few I've read this year is the third on this list).

with honourable mentions for:
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugresic
Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

I can't list my top ten yet--there are still 14 reading days left this year and I plan to read several more splendid books. See you sometime around Dec 30!

In no particular order:

Fiction:
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk
Baby Jesus Pawnshop by Lucia Orth
Oh! A Mystery of Mono No Aware! by Todd Shimoda
Under the Sun by Hanne Marie Svendsen
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Poetry:
The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 10 tangos by Anne Carson
The Sugar Mile by Glyn Maxwell

Rereads:
The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

The Known World Edward P. Jones
A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
To Siberia and Out Stealing Horses by per Pettersen
The Giant's House by Elizabeth McCracken
Les Miserables by Hugo
The Master and Magarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Home by Marilynne Robinson
2666 by Roberto Bolano
The Dance Most of All Jack Gilbert

>14 rebeccanyc: actually, 'best of' lists should be by percentage of books read, imo :-) Say, top 10% or something. But it never works out well on a forum (mostly because no one reads the first post, except for the first five or so people).

#19 My "problem" is that I read a lot of wonderful books this year and to some extent they're apples and oranges -- I can't compare them. I did leave out a lot of my favorites to get it down to 13, which is about 16% of the books I read. On my own thread, I listed 27 favorites, which comes to about 33%, so I guess I'm just hopeless at narrowing down. By the way, I did read the instructions -- I just didn't follow them!

Here is my top 10 for the year, in no particular order:

The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso
Travelling with Djinns by Jamal Mahjoub
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
The Fat Man and Infinity by António Lobo Antunes
Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures by Richard Barnett
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel favorite book of the year

My top 10 books for 2009:

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (classic, dystopian, fiction)
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky (epistolary, coming of age, YA fiction)
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (depression, YA fiction)
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Muslim women, refugee, memoir non-fiction)
Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks (historical fiction)
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (classic, gothic, fiction)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (mythology, fantasy, science fiction)
Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer (Vampire, romance, YA fiction)
The March by E. L. Doctorow (American Civil War, historical fiction)
The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt (1960's, Vietnam War, Shakespeare, coming of age, YA fiction)

21> Glad to see Wise Blood on your list. Have you read her short stories by any chance? I'd be hard pressed to rate any other author's short stories above hers in sheer socks-you-in-the-stomach ferocity.

I only read from first page to last, 25 books last year (actually 26) since I forgot to list Tolstoy's, A Confession, so.... in keeping with avaland's 10% suggestion, here's my Top 3 for '09:

1. Les Miserables
2. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
3. The Sea Came in at Midnight

#23: I've only read one of her short stories so far, "The Artificial Nigger", after I saw the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's adaptation of the story, which was fascinating. Bill T. Jones, who is African-American, and a Caucasian woman with a perfect Atlanta accent took turns reading excerpts from the story while the ethnically diverse troupe danced to it. What was most interesting is that the dancers changed characters throughout the piece; for example, the young white boy in the story, whose racist grandfather takes him to Atlanta for the first time, was sometimes portrayed by a white male (or female) dancer, and sometimes by a black dancer. During the scene in which O'Connor describes a black man passing through a whites only carriage on a train traveling to Atlanta as the whites stare at him with vitriolic hatred, the dancers arrange themselves so that the seated passengers were black and the man passing through was white. The story itself is excellent, but Jones' interpretation of it was unforgettable.

I have the Library of America's edition of Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works, which includes her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and her two books of short stories A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories and Everything That Rises Must Converge, along with selected essays and letters. I'm planning to read it this year.

>Darryl, how brave you are to list a "favorite book of the year." If I were to do the same, at this moment I would say it would be The Land of Green Plums for it's story, craftsmanship and artistry (although I realize many would not like this kind of book). But it would be followed closely by American Salvage because the stories and the people refuse to leave my head.

Of course, I might change my mind in an hour...

Lois, despite all of the wonderful books I've read this year, it was easy to choose Wolf Hall as my favorite. My choices of my second, third, etc. best reads are not as fixed.

Like Rebecca, I'll also read a lot more of Hilary Mantel's books in the next year or two, starting with The Giant, O'Brien, which I'll read this weekend.

I'm glad to hear that you loved The Land of Green Plums, which I also have. I'll get to it early next year.

I don't reach ten percent or even just ten, but my favorite books of the year are:

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. This is the second installment in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series and is every bit as good as its predecessor, The Shadow of the Wind.

The Likeness by Tana French. This is also a sequel, but this time is surpasses the previous book, the excellent In the Woods. This clever mystery novel takes place near Dublin, Ireland.

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. I had to defend this book in the 2009 version of Club Read, but it remains my favorite book, featuring Paris, a writer learning his craft, and many, many fascinating people, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Gertrude Stein to James Joyce. My love remains steadfast, despite all of the haters.

Scottsboro by Ellen Feldman. I came across this book mentioned again and again in glowing terms by people here at LT, whose reading I admired. I was thrilled to find that it exceeded my unreasonably high expectations. Communists! Jim Crow! The Great Depression!

Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven by Susan Jane Gilman. The account of two naive university graduates backpacking through China back when it had just opened its doors to Westerners. Excellent and harrowing.

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan. A social history set in the epicenter of the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression. The image of a frantic woman killing centipedes by pressing a hot iron to her newspapered walls will remain with me for a long time.

#24 I'm also a fan of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, and the Artificial Nigger is one that persists in my head - it is the sense of betrayal it it. A Good Man is Hard to Find is another.

>27 RidgewayGirl: May 2010 - Prince of Mist
June 2011 - September Lights, both by Zafon. I came across these when I scanned about 7000 forthcoming titles on Amazon.uk titles over the last few days (something I would not recommend for others...)

Not exatcly 10, but close.

Fiction:
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Morning Watch by James Agee
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
Beloved by Toni Morrison

Nonfiction:
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America by John M. Barry
The French Laundry Cookbook by Thomas Keller
Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food: An Opinionated History and More Than 100 Legendary Recipes

Fantasy/Sci-fi:
The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker
The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I'm going to (try to) post a legit top ten list, ranked in order of how much I think each book will continue to exert influence on me.

1. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges (Short stories, Latin American)
2. The Blank Slate - Steven Pinker (Non-fiction, Psychology, Biology, Intellectual History)
3. The Civil War, A Narrative: Fredericksburg to Meridian - Shelby Foote (Non-fiction, American History)
4. The Road - Cormac McCarthy (Novel, American)
5. Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter (Non-fiction, Logic, Math)
6. Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Daniel Dennett (Non-fiction, Science, Philosophy)
7. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (Novel, Italian)
8. Consciousness Explained - Daniel Dennett (Non-fiction, Science, Philosophy)
9. Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy (Novel, Western, American)
10. Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond (Non-fiction, History, Biology)

#30, janepriceestrada, Glad to find someone else who liked The Rising Tide; I read it some years ago and found it fascinating.

I guess I am not following instructions, but I had to add another book to my list today--The Leopard by Lampedusa. Definitely one of my favorite books ever, not just for 2009.

I'm not following instructions, either, because I'm adding two books to my already-illegal list (#11) today: Everything Flows by Vassily Grossman and American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

My top 10 books, which came out to 11, are:

Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
2666 by Roberto Bolano
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
The Whisperers by Orlando Figes
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
Genesis (wrong touchstone) by Eduardo Galeanos
Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh
Nip the Buds, Shoot the Children by Kenzaburo Oe

>34 rebeccanyc: oh, you did get your hands on American Salvage! Excellent. I still think about some of the people in these stories. I may read it again.

#36, So do you forgive me for ignoring the rules now that I've added American Salvage to the list?

I was too hasty! I have to add a book to my list too:

Le dernier frere by Nathacha Appanah - not just top 10 but the best book I've read all year. There's an English translation due out in Feb next year, The Last Brother.

1. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway.
2. The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys.
3. The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt.
4. Music and Silence by Rose Tremain.
5. After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell.
6. The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George.
7. Regeneration by Pat Barker.
8. No Fond Return of Love by Barbara Pym.
9. The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson.
10. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese.

1-5 in no particular order.

Hyperion, or the Hermit in Greece by Friedrich Hölderlin
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

5-10 in no particular order.

Tractatus logico-philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

I find it nearly impossible to pick the "best of" anything, but I looked over my 2009 reading and picked out everything I rated 4-and-a-half stars or above, which conveniently worked out to an even 20 books Whether I could really call this the best books I read in 2009, I can't say. Ratings for me are such slippery things, and what they actually mean tends to vary from book to book. But here, divided by category but otherwise in no particular order, are the results that approach gives:

FICTION

I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse
The Cat-Nappers by P.G. Wodehouse
The Ant King and Other Stories by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Vol 3: Wolves at the Gate by Joss Whedon et al.

NON-FICTION

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues by Plato
Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human by Michael Chorost
How Doctors Think by Jermoe Groopman
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
Alien Hand Syndrome edited by Alan Bellows
Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell
The National Parks: America's Best Idea by Dayton Duncan
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

HUMOR

xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe
Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein

Okay, so 10% of the 200 books that I read in 2009.............(I was scrambling yesterday to get that last one in) in no particular order:

My absolute favorite read of the year was Dina's Book by H. Wassmo;

Then my top 10% of the remainder of books I read:

Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson
The Overlanders by Dora Birtles
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann
The Loving Spirit by Daphne Du Maurier
The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
Elizabeth and Her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim
Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz
Frost in May by Antonia White
One Extra*Ordinary Day by Harold Myra
All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West
Capote: A Biography by Gerald Clarke
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck
The Land of Spices by Kate O'Brien
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Myself When Young by Daphne Du Maurier
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes by Maya Angelou
For One Sweet Grape or That Lady by Kate O'Brien
Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg

I would like to be able to say that War and Peace, Life and Fate, Anna Karinina and others of that caliber were among my favorites but truth be told they weren't so there you have it. I had a great year of reading in 2009 and am looking forward to more of the same and better in 2010.
belva

I posted about my top reads of the year here:

http://timjonesbooks.blogspot.com/2010/01/book-week-what-i-read-in-2009.html

By genre, my top picks are:

Fiction: Two novels top the list - Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky was superb. Netherland by Joseph O'Neill was a close runner up, wonderful for most of its length but let down a little by the ending.

Poetry: I read many fine collections this year, almost all by New Zealand poets, and it's hard to pick just one - but my choice is made for weather by Kay McKenzie Cooke.

Nonfiction: India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha is a history which fully deserves the adjective "magisterial".

Graphic novels etc.: The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, the first book on my list for 2009, was one of the best things I read in 2009. I'm looking forward to re-reading it soon.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Stitches by David Small
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Border Songs by Jim Lynch
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes ed. by McSweeney’s

well pooh...the cat ate my post..again,in no particular order - my favorites - no pretense to being "the best":
My own country - Verghese
cutting for stone - Verghese
throne of Labdacus - Gjertrud Schnackenberg
the alchemy of stone - Sedia
the age of wonder - Holmes
lonely werewolf girl - Millar
castle waiting - Medley
the housekeeper and the professor - Ogawa
the city and the city - Mieville
anathem - stephenson
world war Z - Brooks

added one for good weight.

Choosing 10 of my favorite books of 2009, like many here, is not an easy task. I usually strike it rich and enjoy almost every book I read... almost. I pick my books carefully. Out of the 94 books for 2009 here is my list of favorites in no particular order:

Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
The Giants by J. M. G. Le Clezio
Five by Endo by Shusaku Endo
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Magnetic Field(s) by Ron Loewinsohn
The New Life by Orhan Pamuk
In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki
This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (the complete Buru Quartet was beautiful)
Letters from my Windmill by Alphonse Daudet

and a little lagniappe because I'm cajun...

Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata
Broken April by Ismail Kadare

>45 bobmcconnaughey: Bob, I see on our 'best of' lists, we share the Miéville and the Ogawa. Miéville has "Kraken" coming out this year. Did you read Ogawa's The Diving Pool, which won a Shirley Jackson Award last year? Three novellas, one of which borders on horror, imo. The other two, subtly creepy.

You can see my 2009 list on my profile page, and my Oscar nominations in Le Salon.

Top Ten? Let me see now.

Hmm.

The Village of Stepanchikovo Dostoevsky
Notes from the House of the Dead Dostoevsky
Humiliated and Insulted Dostoevsky
Oblomov Goncharov
Russian Thinkers Isiah Berlin
Jacques the Fatalist Diderot
A History of Russian Thought Andrjez Walicki
The Icon and the Axe James H. Billington
The Nether World George Gissing
Pushkin TJ Binyon

Haven't read the diving pool - i was surprised when i couldn't find in print copies of the housekeeper and the professor because after reading our library's copy, both Patty and I wanted to give several copies as presents. Looking forward to both the diving pool and Kraken.

I, too, have done this a little differently in the Salon, but here are some top reads of 2009:

Italo Calvino Mr. Palomar
Italo Calvino Baron in the Trees
Mary Renault Bull from the Sea
Sheila Watson Double Hook
Richard Russo Straight Man
Mary Swan The Boys in the Trees
Willa Cather The Song of the Lark
Alain-Fournier Le Grand Meaulnes
Kafka The Metamorphosis
Camus L'Etranger
Homer The Iliad
Homer The Odyssey

Spectacular poetry read this year, category of its own:

Mark Doty, Mary Oliver, Beowulf in the Heaney translation, Cavafy, Rilke, Gilgamesh, Mallarme, Szymborska, Milosz, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Miroslav Florian, Milan Rufus and Jaroslav Seifert.

Memorable non-fiction:

Bill Buford Heat
Thad Carhart Piano Shop on the Left Bank

I feel like I should split my list a little bit:

Recently Published (Let's say, since 2005):
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon was my first read in 2009, and might have been the best of the year. I loved The Angel's Game as well, but I'm not sure that it would make top 10%, although it's likely close
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Delicate Edible Birds and Other Stories by Lauren Groff
The Children's Hospital by Chris Adrian
What is the What by Dave Eggers

Books I likely should have read before, but am glad I got to last year:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
Neuromancer by William Gibson

That's probably about 10% maybe a little less, since I did a less than excellent job keeping track of what I read last year. I'm sure I'm forgetting something that will seem silly to me later, but that's what I can come up with right now.

Last Friday I spent my "lunch" putting together a top 10 that was valid at that moment. It's mostly instinctual, transient, and I'm pretty sure it contradicts my ratings. And, worst of all, it's more than 10% of my books read - because then I could only list 4.5 books.

1. Barefoot Gen Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa
2. Barefoot Gen Volume Two: The Day After by Keiji Nakazawa
3. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
4. Home by Marilynne Robinson
5. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
6. Peace by Richard Bausch
7. Possessed by Shadows by Donigan Merritt
8. Sorry by Gail Jones
9. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
10. Man Gone Down by Michael Thomas

FP's 2009 Favorites

(in no order)

(1) Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster - non-fiction, first person accounts from survivors and others involved in some way - harrowing but fantastic
(2) Barefoot Gen, Vol. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima & Barefoot Gen, Vol. 2: The Day After - graphic novel format memoirs of a young boy who survived Hiroshima
(3) The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1890-1980 - non-fiction, wonderful combination of medical and literary histories
(4) The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
(5) We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
(6) Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Men, Women, and the World - non-fiction
(7) The Rabbi's Cat - graphic novel about the cat of a rabbi living in early 1900s Algeria; great reflections on Jewish Arab culture and the contrast with European Jewish culture
(8) Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII - great intro to Tudor history
(9) The Road by Cormac McCarthy - I don't know why, but I loved it
(10) Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier tied with A Spell of Winter: A Novel by Helen Dunmore tied with A Girl Made of Dust by Nathalie Abi-Ezzi

I have trouble ranking things so this is pretty much the order I read them in:

1. Joker One by Donovan Campbell
2. Finding Darwin's God by Kenneth Miller
3. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
4. Getting Back by William Dietrcih
5. Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson
6. A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore
7. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
8. Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology by David B. Williams
9. The Truth by Terry Pratchett
10. Death, Taxes, and Leaky Waders by John Gierach

My top reads of 2009

Germinal by Émile Zola
The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe
The Days of the Consuls/Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić
Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
Conversation in the Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
Seeing by José Saramago
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Non-fiction
Empires of the Monsoon: A History of the Indian Ocean and its Invaders by Richard Hall
The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

Ack! Impossible to decide...

Fiction:

The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing - amazing book!
Bear by Marian Engel
W, or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec
Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
March by Geraldine Brooks

Poetry:

Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry, anth.
Expeditions of a Chimaera by Erin Moure and Oana Avasilichioaei
Ted Hughes: Poems Selected by Simon Armitage
Poems by Yehuda Amichai
Coal and Roses by P.K. Page
Trail: Paper Poetry by David Pelham

Graphic Novels & Illustrated Books:

Breakdowns by Art Spiegelman
Glacial Period by Nicolas de Crecy
The Museum Vaults by Marc-Antoine Mathieu
Une Semaine de Bonte: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage by Max Ernst
Wild Pilgrimage: A Novel in Woodcuts by Lynd Ward

Nonfiction:

The Translator: A Memoir by Daoud Hari
In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent
Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust by James E. Young
The Man Who Forgot How to Read by Howard Engel

Coincidentally, I chose books by both Howard and Marian Engel - formerly married - but I think I enjoyed Marian's book, Bear, best of the two.

An intriguing list, cocoafield, mostly because I don't recognize many of the titles!

avaland, Some of the Canadian poetry isn't that well known outside of CanLit circles, and frankly would only appeal to those at least passingly interested in language-based poetry (with which I myself have a vexed relationship). And two of the graphic novels (Glacial Period and The Museum Vaults) are part of a collaboration with the Louvre. So far only two in this interesting series.

Out of the fiction, probably my two absolute favourites were The Grass is Singing and W or the Memory of Childhood. The latter (lesser known?) is a fascinating combination of autobiographical writing about Perec's childhood WWII experiences (father killed in war, mother in concentration camp), and allegorical scenes from a fictional island devoted to viciously enforced Olympian ideals. I taught this book, so have read it before, but it continues to amaze me...

Looking forward to returning to this thread to work my way through everyone's lists! :)

Not in any special order:

Out Stealing Horses Per Petterson
Olive Kitteridge Elizabeth Strout
Lark and Termite Jayne Ann Phillips
The Serpent'sTale Ariana Franklin
The Worst Hard Time Timothy Egan
The Night Watch Sara Waters
Home Marillyne Robinson
When Christ and His Saints Slept Sharon Kaye Penman
Disturbances in the Field Lynn sharon Schwartz
Last Waltz in Vienna George Clare

>58 cocoafiend: definitely good to have you back.

thanks, avaland - lovely to be back!