LJ Best Books 2009:31 Titles, Plus Best Genres& How-To

So many books, so many best books lists. What makes ours special, and how do we make our choices? It’s an especially interesting question in light of the controversy stirred by PW’s top-ten, all-male list. For the record, about a third of the authors on our main list are women—and a bunch of titles are by and/or about people of color. Are we consciously striving for a balanced list? In fact, it’s more complicated than that.

When LJ’s book review editors sit down with our best books candidates, we’re obviously looking for the strongest writing on key topics—books that will last. But we aren’t just thinking in terms of Big Books: we’ve found that unimpeachably big books are often unimpeachably dull. So we look for a little edginess, a little risk that sets a book apart and makes us sit up and see things anew even when the narrative isn’t perfect. Fiction editor Wilda Williams says it well:

"What I looked for in my best books picks was unique voices," Willy explained, citing Jonathan Tropper’s and Jason Sheehan's "rollicking, boisterous, and very male narrators." She also wanted original ideas, a fresh take on a well-worn subject ("yes, we all know about Isaac Newton, the genius scientist, But did you know he was also a genius detective?"), and beautiful writing. She was especially taken with the "exquisite prose" of Richard Flanagan's Wanting—which she also praised for rescuing a story that’s hardly been told—and first novelist C.M. Mayo’s The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. I could pitch in with the two first novels I chose—C.E. Morgan’s fiercely original All the Living and Paul Harding’s Tinkers, a small-press title that I was lucky enough to introduce at ALA. It’s a quiet, moving, breathtakingly crafted work I somehow missed earlier in the year. These are books we dare you to read, along with big writers like Jayne Anne Phillips and A.S. Byatt.

Beyond fresh, exciting writing, we’re aware that we’re not looking at books in a vacuum—there’s a dynamic to our work just as there are dynamics to the world we live in. Hence it was exciting that social sciences editor Margaret Heilbrun chose James McCommons’s Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service—A Year Spent Riding Across America just as Warren Buffett purchased the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, promising to revitalize America’s rail travel.

Margaret also picked J. William Harris’s The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty, the lacerating story of a free black man wrongly punished in South Carolina even as the Colonies were agitating for liberty. As she explains, when selecting, "I seem to have been focused—not entirely consciously, but somewhat—on the issue of books that bring lives into relief that were either barely noted or were sketched more conventionally. With so many books about the wonderful Founding Fathers, I was glad to see a book that reminded us that these men’s concept of liberty was not only very self-focused but didn’t prevent their supporting such atrocious acts."

Celebrating original voices, highlighting what might otherwise be lost—the LJ book editors try for a list of best books that we think will make a difference in everyone’s reading lives. In other words, we’d rather offer you a sharp, interesting list that challenges than a list no one could complain about—or discuss. This list is up for discussion, too. Let us know what you think.—Barbara Hoffert

Main List | Best Genre Fiction | Best How-To

Access to Life. Aperture, dist. by D.A.P. ISBN 978-1-59711-105-8. $49.95.

This collection of photographs is not only a moving celebration of the resilience of the human spirit in the face of AIDS but also a somber reminder that the disease has yet to be conquered. Eight photojournalists follow 30 individuals in nine countries to document the positive effects of antiretroviral treatments and to show what happens when treatment comes too late. (LJ 8/09)

Bartlett, Allison Hoover. The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). ISBN 978-1-59448-891-7. $24.95.

Journalist Bartlett quickly learned not to judge a book by its contents—but its cover—after embarking on a mission to investigate the true story of one man whose love of rare books drove him to steal $100,000 worth of volumes in California and another who would stop at nothing to catch the thief. A compulsively readable tale as reported to Bartlett by both men. (LJ 9/1/09)

Bate, Jonathan. Soul of the Age: A Biography of the Mind of William Shakespeare. Random. ISBN 978-1-4000-6206-5. $35.

Another Shakespeare biography? In fact, Bate gives us something different, using the Bard's own “Seven Ages of Man” speech from As You Like It to envision him as an infant, a school boy, a lover, a soldier, a justice, a pantaloon, and an old man entering “oblivion.” The result is a fresh new way to look at Shakespeare and a welcome reminder of what literary biography can still do. (LJ 3/1/09)

Bronson, Po & Ashley Merryman. NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. Twelve: Hachette Book Group. ISBN 978-0-446-50412-6. $24.99.

Journalists Bronson (What Should I Do with My Life?) and Merryman turn the child-rearing genre on its head by educating rather than alarming information-overloaded parents. Expanding on their award-winning article for New York magazine, they clearly and concisely dispel myths about childhood development, drawing on a body of convincing research. An eye-opener in the best sense. (Xpress Reviews, 9/4/09; BookSmack! 9/17/09; http://bit.ly/qiAwg)

Byatt, A.S. The Children's Book. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-307-27209-6. $26.95.

Stories spill forth from Byatt's magisterial new work, and not just the stories told by main character Olive Wellwood, a children's writer. Opening in a late 1800s England rife with new ideas and rushing inexorably toward World War I, this work relates linked events in the lives of Olive and her friends and family in rich, breathtakingly acute prose. (LJ 8/09)

Dexter, Pete. Spooner. Grand Central. ISBN 978-0-446-54072-8. $26.99.

Known for his tough-guy prose, Dexter here turns in something different: a wry and generous autobiographical tale about a wayward young man and the stepfather who stands by him, regardless. No, it's not sentimental, just a strong and sensitive work marking a new direction for the author. (LJ 8/09)

Farmelo, Graham. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Basic Bks: Perseus. ISBN 978-0-465-01827-7. $29.95.

While not the most eccentric of mid-20th-century physicists, Paul Dirac was among the most demure, private, and mysterious. He also was beset by tragedy, and Farmelo's moving biography proposes some novel insights into what shaped him as a man and a scientist. (LJ 10/1/09)

Flanagan, Richard. Wanting. Atlantic Monthly. ISBN 978-0-8021-1900-1. $24.

Acclaimed Australian author Flanagan draws on the tragic history of Tasmania's aboriginal people, polar explorer Sir John Franklin's ill-fated final expedition, and Charles Dickens's unhappy marriage to meditate on the devastation wrought by people convinced that repressing their “wants,” or desires, is the foundation of civilization. Elegant and astonishing. (LJ 3/15/09)

Harding, Paul. Tinkers. Bellevue Literary. ISBN 978-1-934137-12-3. pap. $14.95.

As he lies dying, surrounded by his family, an old man recalls his life as a tinker in hardscrabble New England—and the result is quietly dazzling magic. A tinker in his own right, debut novelist Harding puts together a seamless work that gets right to the heart of a life determinedly lived. Both simple and stunning.

Harris, J. William. The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man's Encounter with Liberty. Yale Univ. ISBN 978-0-300-15214-2. $27.50.

In 1775, Thomas Jeremiah, a free black man in Charleston, SC, was accused of stirring up a slave insurrection and was subsequently hanged and burned. Harris mines contemporary sources to place Jeremiah within the story of high-minded Charleston aristocrats who stood firmly for liberty from Great Britain while estimating Jeremiah's rights at nil. Thus does Harris ask us to reckon with the dark realities of Colonial America's sense of liberty. Meticulously researched and absolutely unforgettable. (LJ 12/09)

Heller, Anne C. Ayn Rand and the World She Made. Nan A. Talese: Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51399-9. $35.

“Russian by both birth and temperament” but “born an American in spirit,” Ayn Rand spent most of her intellectual life unfalteringly defending laissez-faire capitalism. If we perceive Rand as the sum of her unique experiences—and editor/journalist Heller goes to great lengths to describe just how exceptional they were—we begin to appreciate Rand as an incomparable thinker, even if we don't support her ideas. (LJ 9/1/09)

Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. Pantheon. ISBN 978-0-375-42222-5. $40.

Romanticism in Britain at the end of the 18th century is mostly thought of as an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement. But, beginning with botanist Joseph Bank's life-changing experiences in Tahiti, Holmes shows us a marvelous “relay race of scientific stories,” revealing how the second scientific revolution was catalyst to the era's sense of wonder. (LJ 5/15/09)

Holroyd, Michael. A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families. Farrar. ISBN 978-0-374-27080-3. $40.

Though it has the detail, flow, and vast cast of characters of solid historical fiction, Holroyd's theater biography is even more profound as nonfiction. His language is well crafted to describe the sensational lives of these 19th-century English players, and quotations from a wealth of primary and secondary sources melt into his epic narrative. (LJ 2/1/09)

James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women. Riverhead: Penguin Group (USA). ISBN 978-1-59448-857-3. $26.95.

If you think you know what New World slavery must have been like, think again. By tracing the life of Lilith, a slave in 1700s Jamaica with disturbing powers of her own, James makes you live the full force and horror of a life in bondage. Fearlessly written and gaspingly wrenching to read, this is a hard and beautiful book. (LJ 2/15/09)

Jansen, Jonathan D. Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past. Stanford Univ. ISBN 978-0-8047-6194-9. $65; pap. ISBN 978-0-8047-6195-6. $21.95.

South African apartheid may have officially ended in 1994, but in 2000, when Jansen became the first black dean of the faculty of education at the University of Pretoria, he was administrating a white-majority student body in an officially Afrikaans-speaking institution. Not simply a personal memoir, this is the story of how commitment to enlightened pedagogical principles can bring divergent populations—the historically dominant and the historically victimized—into engagement. (LJ 6/15/09)

Lasdun, James. It's Beginning To Hurt: Stories. Farrar. ISBN 978-0-374-29902-6. $23.

What happens when we break through the gauze of everydayness, and existential panic hits? We get this remarkable collection of stories, offering affecting but unsentimental truths about how we live. A jittery stockbroker suddenly convinced that the new neighbors have made off with his daughter is just one of the many acutely imagined characters in Lasdun's bravura work. (LJ 7/09)

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist. Houghton Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-101278-7. $25.

As a detective, Sherlock Holmes has nothing on Sir Isaac Newton. In a superb science biography that reads like a gripping true-crime tale, Levenson unveils a near-forgotten chapter of Newton's remarkable life, when he became Warden of the Royal Mint and embarked on a successful cat-and-mouse pursuit of master counterfeiter William Chaloner. (LJ 5/1/09)

McCommons, James. Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service—A Year Spent Riding Across America. Chelsea Green. ISBN 978-1-60358-064-9. pap. $17.95.

In joining the author on his 2008 rail travels around the country—that is, where passenger rail still survives—readers get a fine, accessible history of American passenger and freight rail service; a travel memoir with authentically rendered portraits; and a prescription for the future of American railroads. With the country seemingly poised on the threshold of major new commitments to a mythic component of our continental history, this is crucial reading. (“Editors' Fall Picks,” LJ 9/1/09; LJ 10/15/09)

Mantel, Hilary. Wolf Hall. Macrae Bks: Holt. ISBN 978-0-8050-8068-1. $27.

We all know the story of Henry VIII, but what about his adviser and, finally, victim, Thomas Cromwell? Mantel makes Cromwell and indeed all Tudor England her own, giving us a whole new picture of the wily statesman in a rigorously written work full of careful detail but driven by the drama portrayed. A model not simply of historical fiction but of literary endeavor in general. (LJ 9/15/09)

Mayo, C.M. The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire. Unbridled. ISBN 978-1-932961-64-5. $26.95.

Once upon a time, there was a little half-American boy who briefly became heir to the Mexican throne—until his distraught parents sued the doomed Emperor Maximilian for his return. As in the best historical fiction, Mayo's sparkling first novel transforms a forgotten historical footnote into a spellbinding, heartbreaking tale filled with drama and fascinating characters. (Xpress Reviews, 5/22/09)

Morgan, C.E. All the Living. Farrar. ISBN 978-0-374-10362-0. $23.

Caught in a fraught relationship with a man trying to salvage his family's Kentucky farm, a young woman considers her choices: hard love or the freedom to be alone. Like the landscape it depicts, this brief, breathtakingly accomplished debut novel is pared to the essentials—and it's essential reading. (LJ 1/09)

Nguyen, Bich Minh. Short Girls. Viking. ISBN 978-0-670-02081-2. $25.95.

This lovely debut novel about Vietnamese American sisters Van and Linny Luong and their eccentric, invention-obsessed father depicts a pluralistic immigrant culture in which all of us are short people trying to measure up to America's tall ideals. (LJ 7/09)

Norrell, Robert J. Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington. Belknap: Harvard Univ. ISBN 978-0-674-03211-8. $35.

Even before his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington, possessed of extraordinary determination to improve his life and that of other struggling blacks through education and enterprise, had been largely dismissed by black and white intellectuals as an accommodationist. In this careful work, Norrell calmly seeks out the man on his own terms and in the context of his own era, allowing us to meet him again—for the first time. (LJ 2/1/09)

Phillips, Jayne Anne. Lark and Termite. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-375-40195-4. $24.

By illuminating the bond between Lark and her younger brother, Termite, mentally disabled and yet with astonishing gifts of his own, Phillips shows how we are all bound together and how we fit into the larger world. Their father's life and death as a soldier in Korea adds resonance to this theme. A pitch-perfect, quietly moving novel. (LJ 12/08)

Sanderson, Eric W. (text) & Markley Boyer (illus.) Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. Abrams. ISBN 978-0-8109-9633-5. $40.

Four centuries of human habitation have all but wiped out Manhattan's natural splendor, but thanks to the striking images presented here, we can get a glimpse of what “the island of many hills” looked like when Henry Hudson arrived in 1609. Readers don't have to be New Yorkers to be enthralled by this remarkable ecological reconstruction. (LJ 4/15/09)

Sheehan, Jason. Cooking Dirty: A Story of Life, Sex, Love and Death in the Kitchen. Farrar. ISBN 978-0-374-28921-8. $26.

For food critic Sheehan, who spent almost 20 years on the restaurant kitchen front lines, cooking is war. His rough, tough, and riveting culinary biography details the scars he earned in his journey through life and gives readers a true taste of a real cook's working world. (LJ 7/09)

Soskice, Janet. The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. Knopf. ISBN 978-1-4000-4133-6. $27.95.

Agnes and Margaret Smith—identical twins from Scotland raised by their Victorian father to possess the intellect and spirit then normally reserved for men—intrepidly toured the Middle East, ultimately using their self-taught skills with ancient languages to search for early manuscripts of the gospels. By camel, by foot, to the Sinai's St. Catherine's Monastery they went—and made a breathtaking discovery. Wryly told with a marvelous sense of narrative rhythm, this is the best kind of adventure story. (LJ 8/09)

Thompson, Nicholas. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War. Holt. ISBN 978-0-8050-8142-8. $27.50.

Grandson of Nitze but rendering Kennan's story with equal insight, Thompson presents an absorbing study of two men crucially engaged in designing—and seeking to renovate—the architecture of U.S. engagement with the world behind the Iron Curtain after World War II. In tracing Nitze's and Kennan's journeys, intersecting, diverging, and drawing together across the years, he disdains stereotypes—even the titular duality—to give us an era with its complexity and humanity restored. (LJ 10/1/09)

Tropper, Jonathan. This Is Where I Leave You. Dutton. ISBN 978-0-525-95127-8. $25.95.

In his best novel yet, Tropper transforms what could have been a stereotypical situation comedy—dysfunctional Jewish family sits shiva for the late patriarch—into a hilarious, testosterone-driven thrill ride that is also heartfelt and poignant. (LJ 6/1/09)

Walbert, Kate. A Short History of Women. Scribner. ISBN 978-1-4165-9498-7. $24.

Ranging from Dorothy Townsend, a suffragette who starves herself to death for the cause in 1914 England, to great-great-granddaughter Dorothy (“Dora”) Barrett-Deel, a headstrong college student in post-9/11 America, Walbert sweeps through four generations whose lives sum up a century of women's history. She could not have offered a more sharply observed or elegantly interleafed story. (LJ 1/09)

Zizek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Verso. ISBN 978-1-84467-428-2. pap. $12.95.

Karl Marx said that history repeats itself by first occurring as tragedy, then as farce. Zizek—called “the most dangerous philosopher in the West”—adds that farce is more dangerous than the actual tragedy. Case in point: modern-day capitalism. If the Left does not fully reinvent itself, he maintains, the world faces a cataclysm. This is but an ellipsis of what unfolds as a complex argument by a courageous thinker. (LJ 11/15/09)