Top Books of 2009

Happy New Year, readers.

Oddly, I don't think I have a favorite book or even a shortlist this year. I read a lot - 52 books, 35 fiction and 17 non-fiction. I started to serious track book recommendations and most everything I read this year was something I planned to read. (There were a few exceptions, like Under a Yellow Sun and Blind Assassin, both picked under duress during book emergencies.) The list of books 'on deck' continues to grow at a Sisyphean rate, as do the piles of books around the house.

I paid more attention to comparative reading this year - Zeiton and City of Refuge were both reflections on Katrina which unintentionally had a lot in common with Blindness. I enjoyed reading about language in Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, Land of Invented Languages, and The Professor and the Madman. And I got to see the South Pacific in Come Onshore..., and Lost Paradise. The fiction I read was a typical mix - plenty of foreign settings and a mix of science fiction and supernatural topics.

Here are the books I liked the most this year, alphabetized by author.


Fiction

Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - A family is spread throughout Nigeria during the civil war.

The Thing around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - A collection of short stories about Nigerians at home and in America.

The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood - A woman's high society life is contrasted with excerpts from a dark novel one of the characters is writing.

A Guide to the Birds of Easts Africa by Nicholas Drayson - Quaint story about a small town in Kenya and a love triangle.

The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff - Brigham Young's 19th wife tries to leave him, while in the present a young boy escapes from a fundamentalist polygamous sect.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner - The story of several American families living in Cuba right before Castro's rise to power.

Disappearance of Irene dos Santos by Margaret Mascarenhas - A young girl disappears in the Venezuelan wilderness and years later all the people involved tell their parts of the story.

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza - A family struggles to make decisions about their future after Hurricane Katrina strikes their home in New Orleans.

Blindness by Jose Saramago - An unnamed city is suddenly struck by an epidemic of blindness.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - A fictionalized account of Laura Bush's life, from childhood leading up to her husband's being president.

Space Between Us by Thrity Umregar - The relationship between a privileged woman and her house servant in India is explored.


Airport Reads

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card - A young boy comes of age at Earth's most elite training school to prepare to lead troops in an intergalactic war.

The Spy who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre - Named the "Best Spy Novel of all time" by Publishers Weekly, this is about a retiring spy's last mission.

Daemon by Daniel Suarez - After a world-famous techie dies, the programs he has left embedded in the Internet come to life.


Non-fiction

Zeiton by Dave Eggers - A Syrian family survives in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog by Kitty Burns Florey - Complete history of diagramming sentences, including memorable illustrations.

Lost Paradise by Kathy Marks - A journalist travels to Pitcairn Island to report on the trials of a series of prominent men accused of sexually assaulting young girls.

In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent - The history of several languages that have been created instead of evolving, from Klingon to Modern Hebrew to Esperanto.

The Monty Hall Problem by Jason Rosenhouse - This history of one of math's most famous and frustrating brainteasers.

The Addict by Michael Stein - A psychiatrist chronicles a year in his treatment of a young drug addict.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All by Christina Thompson - An American woman falls in love a Maori man while in New Zealand studying.

Runners-up

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry - (Fiction) A family has supernatural experiences in modern-day Salem.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown - (Fiction) Another thriller starring Robert Langdon, this time involving the Masons and Washington D.C.

The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly - (Fiction) A young boy travels through an enchanted forest to escape his unhappy life.

The Power of One by Bruce Courtenay - (Fiction) A young white boy grows up in South Africa at the dawn of apartheid - his small challenges are contrasted with his country's larger ones.

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger - (Fiction) American twins inherit their estranged aunt's London apartment located next to a cemetery.

Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan - (Non-fiction) Indictment of our food system, examination of how to eat more healthily and ethically.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows - (Fiction) A writer in postwar England becomes fascinated by the small community on Guernsey Island during the war.

The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester - (Non-fiction) A history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the major contributors being an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane.

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Happy 2010, all.

Fourth Hand by John Irving

I found this John Irving book on a clearance table several years ago and just go around to reading it. It is a weird book. The story is about a news reporter whose hand is bitten off by a lion while he is on assignment. A woman who doesn't know him decides to donate her husband's hand to him for a transplant, but the husband is still alive.

The story follows not just the reporter and the donor's wife, but also the hand surgeon, his housekeeper, and several women with whom the reporter is involved. In some cases, Irving spent large sections of the book telling back stories for these characters. The book shared many themes with others by Irving: physical disability, egregious sexuality, India, a circus, and a very broken main character. He also makes some strong comments about the 24-hour news cycle through the main character's working at a CNN-like station.

I'm not sure I'd strongly recommend this book. It kept my attention but did not make any large points about love or life that haven't been made before, even by Irving. Stick to Garp.

The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

I received this novel from www.BookClubGirl.com but had a conflict with work during the online chat so I just got around to reading it. It was a very unusual book and I enjoyed it.

The story follows a family who lives in Salem, MA. Against a backdrop of tourist buses and daily re-enacted witch hunts, the Whitneys read lace - that is, they can see the future in the patterns of woven lace held up to a person's face. Throughout the book, the reader discovers layers of recent family history and how things are not always as they seem for the Whitneys. Uniquely, the middle third of the book is a 'short' story written by one of the characters (Towner) and based on her life, which adds to the mystique and storytelling within the book. If Towner does not already seem to be an unreliable narrator in the first section of the book, her fictionalized account of her life firmly sets her there in the second.

What I also liked about this book was that it was an old-fashioned story set it modern times. There is an element of life in Salem and in the fictional island off the coast that is timeless - people's homes are accessible only based on the tide schedule, there is a strong presence of folklore and magic and a notable absence of Twitter and Facebook. It was hard to remember that this story was taking place in the current time and not it the 1700's. Certainly that is a function of the presence of history in Salem but also of the story Barry chose to tell.

It is nice to find an author doing something unique.

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Meredith recommended this book to me - great pick! Sittenfeld's (author Prep and Man of My Dreams) novel is loosely based on Laura Bush's life. The story follows a young woman (Alice Lindgren) from her childhood through middle age, culminating in her husband's (Charlie Blackwell) becoming president of the United States.

The first three-quarters of the book was a careful examination of relationships and marriage. Alice is a likable narrator. One of the reasons I didn't read this book immediately when Mer recommended it is that I was taking a break from everything Bush, along with the rest of the country. But Alice is a protagonist for whom I was rooting - through tragedies in her young life to a crazy weekend meeting her inlaws-to-be for the first time to her relationship with her on-again off-again best friend, she is a sympathetic character. She grows up and marries Charlie, discovering how imperfect he is but also how to keep her marriage together. Having just celebrated my 9th anniversary with Webster (only one of those married, for those of you keeping score) it made me think about how much our relationship had changed and how unrecognizable it may be thirty years from now.

Towards the end of the book, Charlie is elected president and Alice reflects first on her life in the White House and then on the 'war on terror.' Because Alice is still in love with Charlie, it was hard to tell initially if Sittenfeld was excusing or crucifying Bush. In fact, Alice is likable enough throughout the story that it was hard to dislike her with the virulence I had disliked everything Bush. But ultimately Alice's describing Charlie's time in the White House does read as an indictment of Bush - even more so than the semi-climactic ending Sittenfeld plans for the story.

My gripes with this book were structural. Most notably, Sittenfeld skips huge sections of time between the sections of her book. The first gap is understandable: we leave Alice as a high school student and find her again right after college. But later in the book, Charlie's rise from governor to national candidate is omitted completely, the last section of the book opening with the Blackwells already comfortably installed in the White House with a war going on. While election night is depicted as a flashback shortly thereafter (complete with a familiar supreme court case involving Florida), there were many parts of the timeline that were missing. She explains in the afterword that there are plenty of other books that depicted campaigns and that wasn't the point of this book; I didn't buy it - it made for a choppy transition that unraveled a lot of the great character development she had done earlier in the book. Without seeing the couple go through a campaign and adjust to life in the White House, the final section of the book reads more like a summary - almost like a busy family's annual Christmas card - than it does an active narrative.

That aside, I enjoyed reading the book. Like Prep, American Wife is a page-turner, and reflects on relationships, ethics, and our political system. Recommended.

2009 Drawing to a Close

My 'Best Books of 2009' is coming along and I'll post it shortly. I've also been updating my 'On Deck' list - taking out some books I'm not as interested in and adding some new ones I've heard about recently.

Meanwhile, check out the other 2009 booklists below - most are fiction but have links to nonfiction within. They stress me out a little because this time every year my 'On Deck' list grows to unmanageable proportions!!

New York Times Top Ten
New York Times Top Ten per daily book critics
LA Times Favorite Fiction
NPR Foreign Fiction
Times Literary Supplement
Best Bookclub Books (from Flashlight Worthy Blog)
Best Canadian Fiction (from Globe and Mail)
New York Times 100 Notables
Washington Post Top Books
Chicago Tribune Best Books

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

Dad bought this for me the day it shipped and I just got around to reading it. I am on vacation from work this week so I breezed through the 450+ pages. It was recognizable as a sequel to Brown's other books starring Robert Langdon - fast-paced and written with the screenplay in mind.

The story opens with an old friend summoning Langdon to Washington DC to fill in as a guest speaker at a large conference. When he arrives there he soon finds out that there are other motives behind the invitation and he is thrust into a time-constrained treasure hunt involving Masonic secrets.

While the book kept my attention and I was interested to know what would happen next, it was frustrating because the puzzles that Langdon has to solve are not ones that the reader can "play along" with. That would have made the book more fun. I seem to remember that frustration from his other books too. Unlike his other books, this one had less of a focus on religion and more on the secrets behind the Freemasons as well as Noetic science, which is loosely the scientific study of metaphysics.

The book was fun and a good vacation read.

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

Courtney and Laura recommended this book to me and when I was at Courtney's house she lent me her copy. They are usually both very reliable book recommenders but I can't say I agree with this one. I found this book so disturbing I nearly stopped reading it - more than once.

The book is a memoir about Burroughs' childhood. His mother is mentally ill and his father is absent, so, oddly, he goes to live with his mother's exceptionally eccentric psychologist. This doctor is reasonably disturbed himself and lives with his wife and several children.

The doctor's house is always a mess, there is no stability with regards to school, food, or even the house's physical nature itself. The therapist encourages Burroughs and the other children to participate in really unhealthy behaviors - for example, at one point Burroughs wants to quit school so the doctor coaches him as to how to fake a suicide attempt. And Burroughs is thrust into a sexual relationship with another member of the family. At the time, he is a young adolescent, and the incidents are graphically depicted in the book.

I don't blame Burroughs for writing the book - he is an excellent memoirist: unflinchingly honest and good at picking particular anecdotes to characterize large portions of his life. However, I do think his editor and publisher should have protected him more. Many reviews of the book describe it as 'funny' and 'hilarious' and I didn't think that was accurate at all. There were a few parts of the book where I chuckled out loud, but wished I hadn't. While I appreciate that Burroughs may have found humor in his past and uses that to cope, the story he tells is not one of his recovery, it is one of a young boy who is in a terrible situation. I don't see humor having a place there and I felt very sad for him. Reading this book I had the same feeling I had when I saw Brokeback Mountain - people in the theater were laughing and somehow only I knew it was not a comedy.


I can't recommend this book, despite how well I thought it was written, because I think it was disturbingly exploitative. I would, however, read something else by Burroughs in the future.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Jamie gave me this book over the summer after she read it. It got lost in my bookshelves until last month, when I found a local book club that was reading it. It's my first visit to this book club so I am writing this before my head is filled with other people's ideas.


The is an epistolary novel - that is, a story told through a collection of letters with no other narratives. Typically, this style frustrates me, but I enjoyed it in this case. It made me reflect on what we express these days through email and texting compared to letter-writing. I email as much as the next person but this book made me long for letters, too.

I found it unusual that it was written by two authors. Theafterward explained that one author is the niece of the other, and the younger one took over when the older one became to ill to finish the book. The niece commented that it was easy for her to take over since the story was really written in her aunt's voice.

The story is about a woman named Juliet who is an author in England in the mid 1940's. She takes an interest in Guernsey, which a quick Google showed me was a British island off the coast of France. Guernsey was occupied by Germany during WWII and Juliet becomes entranced by a small community of people who remained there during and after the war. After corresponding with them for several months, she takes a trip to meet them, in hopes of finding fodder for her next book.

Many of the the letters in the book are to or from Juliet - she corresponds with many of the Guernsians as well as her editor, a best friend, and a love interest. There are some other ancillary characters who also have letters in the book, which I think gives the book a lot more color and dimension. While Juliet and her friends are not unreliable narrators, they do take a particular point of view and it was interesting to see small glimpses of others.

Shamefully, I have not read any Bronte or Austen. This book piqued my interest in that a little bit though. Juliet recommends some of their books to her friends in her letters, and I believe there would be some parallels in her story and their characters' stories. I was also interested in how enthralled in the love story I aspect of the book I could get without there being much lasciviousness at all. I'm not dependent on racy scenes to interest me in a story, but the love story was completely G-rated and yet also completely compelling. Another feature I think I'd find in a Bronte or Austen book.

This was a surprisingly enjoyable book that I'd heartily recommend.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

Jo recommended this to me as one of her recent favorites. They story is set in the future where we earthlings are fighting an intergalactic enemy. The army on Earth recruits the best and brightest children to try and build its forces. This book follows the story of a young boy named Ender as he goes through the army training regiment.

Ender is a sympathetic and pleasant character to follow. Occasionally, his behaviors and thoughts seem unusually advanced for his age. Initially, he struggles with homesickness, and as he gets older, he also finds ethical dilemmas and challenges in being an effective leader.

While I didn't think this book was exceptionally unique, perhaps it was in 1977 when it was first released. Social commentary, common to most good science fiction, presented in the book, but I didn't find anything unusual about it. Mostly, he comments on how we perceive war as both serious and as a game. He also had some strong comments on advanced situations we put children in. Amusingly, Card makes reference to several futuristic technologies that today we would consider "email" and "IM".

Overall the book kept my attention and I would read more by Card.

All We Ever Wanted Was Everything by Janelle Brown

Just in time for the long Thanksgiving weekend, this was a great "beach read." It wasn't strictly chick-lit in that it was more complex than Shopaholic or Devil Wears Prada, but it wasn't literature either.

The story starts on what should be a victorious moment for Janice whose husband's company IPOs for billions of dollars. Instead, she is served divorce papers the same morning. Her younger daughter, Lizzie, is struggling with adolescence and her older daughter, Margaret, is finding her fledgling magazine career suddenly overwhelming. The three women spend the summer together coping with their respective problems.

This book could have been a significant examination of women's lives when they fall apart. It could have been a hilarious story of plotted vindication. Instead it was somewhere in between - more colorful romp than serious analysis, but complex nonetheless. Certain scenes seemed intentionally pulpy in a satiric way, but they came across to me as surreal and vivid, not as social commentary.

One major disappointment I had reading this book was that the men were poorly created characters - nearly all of them were one-dimensional and completely villainous. While there was a "girl power" theme to the book, having positive men in the story wouldn't have threatened that theme and would have made it more realistic. The women were better developed, in some ways daring and in other ways dreadfully predictable. Certainly character development was not the best part of the book.

Still, I was interested to read through to the end. At the book's conclusion, Janice seems to find her stride, but still has tactical problems in her life to address. Margaret has a few major issues to work out, but has a lot of opportunity in front of her too. Fittingly, young Lizzie seems to be at the precipice of starting completely fresh - which is what the reader wants for her.

Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg

I like to think that is compassion and not a macabre desire to watch personal car wrecks that brings me to read so many books on mental illness. Unlike books by Caroline Knapp and Elizabeth Wurtzel, Hurry Down Sunshine chronicles the onset of mental illness from the point of view of the patient's father. I expected this to be similarly enlightening as The Addict, which was told from the doctor's point of view, but instead found it to be more complex. In retrospect, that makes sense - Dr. Stein's book is about his career, about experience and treatment. Greenberg's story is no more personal than Stein's, but it is the first time he is going through any of this so it is raw in a way The Addict is not.

Simply, Greenberg's daughter Sally has her first manic episode as a teenager with few warning signs. One day she is a creative, offbeat kid, and the next she is hurriedly brought to the ER and then hospitalized for what is later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. He chronicles Sally's fight back to health over her summer vacation from school. He touches on his relationship with both his wife and his ex-wife, both of whom play prominent roles in her recovery. Also in his narrative are interactions with his brother, also suffering from mental illness.

I was surprised by what seemed like an unsophisticated approach toward his daughter's healthcare. Perhaps it was the combination of the author's last name coupled with the New York setting, but I expected the neurotic Jewish approach to illness that I grew up with: find the best doctor possible, then agonize endlessly about his credentials and treatment, culminating in aggressive doubt and hushed second and third opinions. Instead, Greenberg entrusts Sally to an inpatient facility he knows nothing about, then enrolls her in an outpatient program he knows nothing about. I empathize with Greenberg's being grateful for whatever he can find with immediacy that helps her. In every way, he clearly desired the best path towards healing for Sally - I was just caught off-guard by an aspect of the narrative I expected to read about just not existing in his experience.

In other places, I was frustrated by parts of the story I wanted to know more about that he left out. For example, there was a short section on his lack of healthcare but he does not return to discuss the particulars of how he addresses Sally's illness financially. I suppose there is a relationship between the author and the reader where he balances what he wants to tell me with what I want to read. But typically with memoirs I am more aligned with the author than I was here. Perhaps that is indicative of this being a (generous and brave!) therapeutic activity for Greenberg. Or perhaps it is my expectation of a familiar narrative not being fulfilled.

That aside, this book was fascinatingly honest. I am appreciative of Greenberg's openness in sharing his story.