Top ten books of 2008

We don’t claim to be exhaustive here. We know that for every book we read and review, there are another thousand or ten that we never get to. But there’s something to be said for books that never leave us, especially when we’re reading two or three new books a week. So here’s our list of our favorite books of the year, the ones that we still find our minds turning to, long after that back cover has been shut.

Best fiction

1. Our Story Begins, by Tobias Wolff. Knopf, $26.95. The only book to earn our six-star rating this year. It’s true that not everything here is new, but if the Beatles released a greatest-hits album with new songs, you’d consider it, wouldn’t you? That’s how high our esteem is for Wolff.

2. The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon. Riverhead, $24.95. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: It’s not hometown bias that convinced us this is the best novel of the year. It was its bestness.

3. Captives, by Todd Hasak-Lowy. Spiegel & Grau, $24.95. No novel we read this year quite caught the zeitgeist of liberal thinking in the mid-2000s like Hasak-Lowy’s debut. And few made us laugh as hard.

4. All About Lulu, by Jonathan Evison. Soft Skull, $14.95. A strange and beautiful coming-of-age novel, with a pitch-perfect ear for the comic mundanity of everyday speech, All About Lulu earned its moments of painful, pure tenderness. And, it earned its way onto our list.

5. Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain, by Kirsten Menger-Anderson. Algonquin, $22.95. The scope of Menger-Anderson’s debut story collection, combined with her intellectual curiosity when it comes to archaic medical procedures, is dizzying. Yet her prose is equally rich, which still has us baffled as to how she pulled it all off.

Best nonfiction

1. The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, by David Shields. Knopf, $23.95. No book tackled mortality with such wit and honesty, and merged the scientific with the personal in this top-notch take on living while dying. It’s the one book this year that we’ve bought for multiple friends.

2. The Two Kinds of Decay, by Sarah Manguso. FSG, $22. But if there’s a runner-up for tackling mortality, we give it to Manguso, whose poetic, painful memoir of living with disease has haunted us all year long.

3. What It Is by Lynda Barry. Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95. The virtuosic cartoonist lets us in on her creative process in this guide to kick-starting your artistic self.

4. Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein. Scribner, $37.50. Anyone who read Nixonland couldn’t be surprised by the amount of paranoia in the most recently released tapes from Nixon’s White House. That’s because Perlstein nailed our 37th President like no historian before him.

5. Bottlemania, by Elizabeth Royte. Bloomsbury, $24.99. Our descendents will one day look back and laugh at how much money we spent and waste we produced by purchasing water by the plastic bottle. And our defenders will have Royte’s book to wave at them, proving that we weren’t all crazy.

For more of the best of 2008, visit timeoutchicago.com/2008lists.