NEW YORK TIMES the 10 BEST BOOKS of 2009
We have carried these top 10, and they all continue to sell…even though it is 2010! Wonder which titles will grace the “top 10″ for this year?
FICTION
BOTH WAYS IS THE ONLY WAY I WANT IT, by Maile Meloy
Eleven unforgettable new stories demonstrate the emotional power and the clean, assured style that have earned Meloy praise from critics and devotion from readers. Propelled by a terrific instinct for storytelling, and concerned with the convolutions of modern love and the importance of place, this collection is about the battlefields and fields of victory that exist in seemingly harmless spaces, in kitchens and living rooms and cars. Set mostly in the American West, the stories feature small-town lawyers, ranchers, doctors, parents, and children, and explore the moral quandaries of love, family, and friendship. A ranch hand falls for a recent law school graduate who appears unexpectedly and reluctantly in his remote Montana town. A young father opens his door to find his dead grandmother standing on the front step. Two women weigh love and betrayal during an early snow. Throughout the book, Meloy examines the tensions between having and wanting, as her characters try to keep hold of opposing forces in their lives: innocence and experience, risk and stability, fidelity and desire.
CHRONIC CITY, by Jonathan Lethem
Exchanging rapturous love letters with a fiance who is trapped on the Space Station, former child star Chase Insteadman apathetically attends social engagements before marijuana-smoking pop critic Perkus Tooth introduces him to a side of Manhattan that causes Chase to question everything he believes. By the MacArthur Fellowship-recipient author of The Fortress of Solitude.
A GATE AT THE STAIRS, by Lorrie Moore
As the United States begins gearing up for war in the Middle East, twenty-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the Midwestern daughter of a gentleman hill farmer - his “Keltjipotatoes” are justifiably famous - has come to a university town as a college student, her brain on fire with Chaucer, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir.
Between semesters, she takes a job as a part-time nanny. The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her, and although Tassie had once found children boring, she comes to care for, and to protect, their newly adopted little girl as her own.
As the year unfolds and she is drawn deeper into each of these lives, her own life hack home becomes ever more alien to her: her parents are frailer; her brother, aimless
and lost in high school, contemplates joining the military. Tassie finds herself becoming more and more the stranger she felt herself to be, and as life and love unravel dramatically, even shockingly, she is forever changed.
HALF BROKE HORSES, by Jeannette Walls
The author offers a novel based on the life of her grandmother, Lily Casey Smith, who learned to break horses in childhood, journeyed 500 miles on a pony as a teen to become a teacher, and ran a vast ranch in Arizona with her husband while raising two children, including Rosemary Smith Walls, portrayed in the author’s acclaimed The Glass Castle.
A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN, by Kate Walbert
Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women is a portrayal of the complicated legacies of mothers and daughters, chronicling five generations of women from the close of the nineteenth century through the early years of the twenty-first.
The novel opens in England in 1914 at the deathbed of Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself for the cause. Her choice echoes in the stories of her descendants interwoven throughout: a brilliant daughter who tries to escape the burden of her mother’s infamy by immigrating to America just after World War I to begin a career in science; a niece who chooses a conventional path - marriage, children, suburban domesticity - only to find herself disillusioned with her husband of fifty years and engaged in heartbreaking and futile antiwar protests; a great-granddaughter who wryly articulates the free-floating anxiety of the times while getting drunk on a children’s playdate in post-gin Manhattan. In a kaleidoscope of voices and with a richness of imagery, emotion, and wit, Walbert portrays the ways in which successive generations of women have responded to what the Victorians called “The Woman Question.”
Nonfiction
THE AGE OF WONDER, by Richard Holmes
The author of a number of biographies, British author Holmes presents a series of stories which collectively provide an account of the second scientific revolution, which produced a new vision–Romantic science–in 18th-century Britain. Included are chapters on botanist Joseph Banks (1743-1820), astronomers William Hershel (1738-1822) and his sister Caroline (1750-1848), 18th-century balloonists, chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829), and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and the soul. The text also contains an alphabetically-organized list of key individuals in 18th-century science, a thematically grouped bibliography, and some 70 b&w and color reproductions.
THE GOOD SOLDIERS, by David Finkel
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Bagdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines. Combining the action of Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down with the literary brio of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, The Good Soldiers is an unforgettable work of reportage. And in telling the story of these good soldiers, the heroes and the ruined, David Finkel has also produced an eternal tale—not just of the Iraq War, but of all wars, for all time.
LIT, by Mary Karr
The best-selling author of The Liar’s Club reveals a new piece of her life during which, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a surprising spiritual awakening led her to sobriety. 100,000 first printing. An expert on early Christianity reveals the historical Paul, not as the founder of a new Christian religion, but as a devout Jew who believed Jesus was the Christ who would unite Jews and Gentiles and fulfill God’s universal plan for humanity. 25,000 first printing.
LORDS OF FINANCE, by Liaquat Ahamed
It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person’s or government’s control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of that economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades. As yet another period of economic turmoil makes headlines today, Lords of Finance is a potent reminder of the enormous impact that the decisions of central bankers can have, their fallibility, and the terrible human consequences that can result when they are wrong.
RAYMOND CARVER, A WRITER’S LIFE, by Carol Sklenicka
The product of the author’s decades-long cross-country search of archives and her extensive interviews with Carver’s relatives, friends and colleagues, an informative memoir provides the definitive story of an iconic literary figure, whose tales focused on ordinary people and their troubles brought on by poverty, drunkenness and embittered marriages.
Raymond Carver was the most beloved American short-story writer of the late twentieth century. Two decades after his death, this definitive biography tells the story of Carver’s uncanny ambition, legendary life, and enduring work.