Best Books of 2009

By Yankee Rose & Rube Ambler

It’s our last list of the year (whew) and a little shorter than the others, but still a good list (we think). As we consider our favorite books that were first published this year, we also thought for a minute about one thing that usually distinguishes book lovers from music lovers – their continuing interest in discovering the classics. It really is no surprise after all. It takes less than 80 minutes to listen to The Basement Tapes again (even including the time it takes to flip, switch, and flip the two records). It takes considerably longer to reread The Great Gatsby. What’s more, the attentive reader, like the attentive listener, wants to spend some time with the artist’s work so speeding through isn’t in order.

That same ratio of time invested applies when discovering that great work for the first time. Your first go around with The White Album will take less time than a bowl game. Your first time through The White Tiger: A Novel (a modern classic in our eyes) may take an entire bowl season. This is all by way of noting that several of the best books we read for the first time this year, were not published this year. We have written about some, like the The White Tiger and Coyote Blue, and let you know we were reading others, such as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, and will continue to do so to let you discover whatever book you may need to read but haven’t yet come across.

We did read a fair number of new books though, so we thought we would share a quick list of those that really stood out in the crowd. Here they are.

Fool by Christopher Moore (January 31, 2009).

If you didn’t guess we were fans of Christopher Moore, you probably missed my gushing reviews of Fool and Coyote Blue. Rube introduced me to Moore last Spring, and I have torn through his books as fast as I could get my hands on them. While Fool is not a traditional Moore novel, it is a wonderful retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear that will bring a new light to the workings of one medieval royal family.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett (February 9, 2009).

Recommended to me by our favorite local librarian, The Help is an excellent depiction of the civil rights movement in a small Mississippi town. As much about the changing role of women in the South as the ever-present race struggles of the era, this book empowers all to make their own small differences in the world.

Bound South by Susan Rebecca White (February 9, 2009).

Bound South is the debut novel of Atlanta resident Susan Rebecca White. Bound South is an excellent depiction of class struggles in the South, taking The Help forward 40 years to examine class struggles that have moved beyond racial lines. We reviewed it here, and look forward to her next book, A Soft Place to Land, due out this May.

All The Broken Pieces by Ann Burg (April 1, 2009).

A stunning debut for the young reader in your home (even if it’s you). After what I wrote in my review earlier this year, it had to be a lock for this list.

Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music by Greg Kot (May 19, 2009).

Greg Kot’s investigation of the forces that have moved music from the CD to the MP3 is great fun for the music fan, and we might suggest required reading for anybody who thinks they need to be in the music business.

Chronic Cityby Jonathan Lethem (October 13, 2009).

This novel narrated by a former child actor is set in an alternate reality Manhattan where you can get a “War Free” edition of the Times.  But the meta text hardly stops there and in end all that we really know is real about this story may (or may not) be the human condition Lethem so skillfully navigates.