Guided by voices

Recently, we were asked to take part in a live show that would serve as a year in review for 2009. We joked openly with the audience that we were at a disadvantage: There isn’t much shared cultural currency when discussing, say, recent novels. It’s not like film, where everyone can laugh at Transformers 2. And when we got around to discussing our favorites for 2009, we were surprised by the number of people scratching down titles (or, really, punching them into their iPhones). So we figured we’d organize our year-end top 10 in a manner that meets interested parties on common ground.

Best book for fans of The Wire
Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss (Graywolf, $15)
This may seem like total misdirection, and it is, but it’s still worth pursuing. Biss doesn’t write about cops, but The Wire has always been more about race and class in America, and she’s one of the sharpest, most generous writers we have writing on the topic. Ambivalency, ambiguity, the slippery nature of nuance in issues of race and class, all of these make Biss’s essays inconclusive in the most satisfying way.

Best book for Guillermo Del Toro fans
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda (Open Letter, $14.95)
The final novel of the late Catalan novelist Rodoreda, Death in Spring, features trees that eat men and a colony of deformed guys who have smashed their heads while swimming in a river. Like Del Toro, Rodoreda flips the grotesque into the gorgeous, and the book is filled with an insurrectionist’s spirit. It’s actually kind of unfortunate that Del Toro’s own book The Strain didn’t crack our top 100.

Best book for Noah Baumbach fans
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday, $27.95).
Lethem’s latest is by far his talkiest, but its take on the absurdity of adulthood is a much more humane Margot at the Wedding and also pleasantly stranger. We’ve heard people complain that Chronic City lacks the import of Fortress of Solitude or the genre playfulness of Lethem’s earlier work. But they’re wrong.

Best book for someone who likes the idea of the Oprah Book Club but thinks they’re too cool
The Adventures of Cancer Bitch by S.L. Wisenberg (University of Iowa Press, $25)
Wisenberg’s book about being diagnosed with breast cancer—culled largely from her blog of the same name—manages to dodge much of the maudlin retrospectivity of crisis or illness memoirs. Instead, the reader gets a sense of the immediate reactions and turbulent emotions experienced by a patient as news and developments filter down from doctors.

Best book for anyone let down by comic-book movies
Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow (Tachyon, $14.95)
We’ve been beating the drum for this one all year, and probably won’t stop. Morrow’s story of a B-movie actor who dresses up as Godzilla to frighten Japanese ambassadors has the slapstick humor and political import that Marvel’s latest misses have tried to bring to the big screen.

Best book for anyone who still bought My Friend Leonard
Lit by Mary Karr (Harper, $25.99)
Somehow, even after James Frey was revealed to be a sham and evidence that his friend “Leonard” may not have existed, his second “memoir” sold fairly well. Karr is the real deal, though, and her addiction memoir is not only well written, it doesn’t lie to you.

Best book for Sam Mendes fans
Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press, $14.95)
Mendes’s films tend to feature characters consigning their pasts to nostalgia, only to see them rush back in painful ways, and Harding has that down in his debut novel. His story centers on a dying man, trying to remember his strange, door-to-door salesman of a father. It also contains some of the most beautiful sentences we read this year.

Best book for anyone who saw Jonathan Safran Foer on Martha Stewart
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer (Little, Brown, $25.99)
The strangest moment in literature this year came when Foer addressed Martha Stewart’s audience about the evil vagaries of mass-produced meat, and Martha interrupted to teach him a vegetarian recipe. Not being huge fans of his novels, we wouldn’t have picked Foer to be at the forefront of a movement dear to our hearts, but there he is.

Best book for Natalie Portman fans
Misconception by Ryan Boudinot (Black Cat, $14)
And when we say “Natalie Portman fans,” we mean fans of films about twentysomethings who don’t know what to do with their lives. Boudinot’s Misconception starts out as a fairly standard story of teenagers taking themselves too seriously but ends up being a funny and finely hewn examination of some serious questions about relationships.

Best book for anyone
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (FSG, $30)
Davis is hands-down one of the greatest writers of short fiction in America. This is a collection of her stories. Of course it’s on this list.

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