favourite books of 2009

I'm late, but it's time for my annual year-end flurry of posts, starting with books. One of the many things I let fall by the wayside this year was listing all the books I read. Fortunately, the library keeps a record of everything I check out so I was able to reconstruct most of my list on goodreads. If you're really interested you can look at my ratings there.

I only read 100 books this year, although I may have forgotten a couple (I thought it was going to be less than 100 until I tried harder to remember ones I didn't get from the library). I thought I was going to have trouble finding 10-ish books to recommend, but it turns out I gave five stars to nine books, so that makes it easy. Two of them were non-fiction, which I haven't included in the past, so I've added a few 4-star books and I'll list the non-fiction separately.

1. Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby. I just read Generation A, by Douglas Coupland, who used to be one of my favourite authors and was sadly disappointed. Coupland really needs to avoid writing about science in any detail. Some of the stories were good, but the book didn't really work as a whole and the ending made me laugh out loud, it was so ludicrous. I bring this up because I was worried that Nick Hornby, another favourite, was going to disappoint me as well. A Long Way Down and Slam weren't at all great, and the premise of Juliet, Naked (a women starts emailing the reclusive musician her boyfriend is obsessed with) didn't sound promising. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find that a return to the topic of obsessive fans was accompanied by a return to writing form. It deals with wasted lives and when to stop putting up with less than happiness.

2. The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan. I was mostly sick of precocious narrators this year, but this book was wonderful.

3. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. This is a biography of a fictional version of Laura Bush. I thought it was going to be lame, from the description, but it wasn't at all. It's kind of snarky but I did come away from it with slightly more sympathy towards George Bush, enough to see how maybe he mightn't have had entirely evil motives all the time, at least.

4. Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz. This was probably the book I most enjoyed this year. The main character is an admissions officer at Princeton so I spent much of the book feeling inadequate compared to the prospective students and very glad I didn't have to go through the US college application process.

5. The End by Salvatore Scibona. The start of this book read kind of like short stories, which I don't tend to enjoy, but once the stories started coming together it was heartbreakingly great.

6. The Missing by Tim Gautraux. I read this book because of Mary's review at This Book is For You, so I'll just let you read that.

7. Oyster by Janette Turner Hospital. I was tossing up between this one and Orpheus Lost for this list, but that got a bit heavy-handed or something at the end. Oyster is a kind of eerie tale about an isolated country town and the nearby cult.

8. Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. I've read a couple of Dan Chaon's earlier books and picked this one up because he's on my "well, I can't see anything that looks really great at the library, but at least I know this won't suck" list. I was pleasantly surprised to find this was a gripping book about identity.

9. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. I don't usually like mysteries or crime novels, but this was excellent. I also enjoyed Dark Places, but not quite as much.

10. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. I don't think this book was objectively that great, but I've been thinking a lot about careers and ambition and what makes life meaningful or worthwhile this year, so it resonated with me. Based on the Goodreads reviews, the fact that I don't have kids might have made it easier to enjoy the book, since the mothers seem to object to their fictional portrayal.

Non-fiction:
Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height by Christine Cosgrove and Susan Cohen.

More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave by Ruth Schwartz Cowan.

These two books made me angry at the world. The second made me especially angry at that Michael Pollan "women need to relearn the joy of slaving over a stove all day/night in order to save the world from obesity" article. I never got around to writing the post I was thinking of at the time because it's hard to be articulate when you just want to smack someone over the head with a copy of Cowan's book.