Love it or hate it, the list is the perfect starting point for a conversation. As reliable as Christmas itself--fraught with anxiety and yet still packing a walloping dose of hope?-- around this time of year, every web site you can imagine serves up the year-end list. As Umberto Eco says, "We like lists because we don't want to die." In that spirit...

Best Books of 2009

New York Times (This one, at 100 items, is almost as good as browsing at a real live bookstore. Note I said almost.)
100 Notable Books

Of course, the Times would be remiss if they didn't choose their very favorites. For fiction,their top five:

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert

Of these five, I've read only the Moore, and I didn't like it nearly as much as some people. Did you read it? What did you think?

Publisher's Weekly (This list stirred up the most controversy, as it included no women in its top ten. The internets were abuzz with anger.)

Their fiction picks are: Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon;  Big Machine by Victor Lavalle; In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin; Jeff in Venice, Death in Varansai by Geoff Dyer; and the graphic novel, Stiches by David Small. I read Await Your Reply,

To write too much about this unnerving novel would be to give away all its rhythm and pacing. But generally, this book is about the nature of self and what that might mean in a world where you can easily slip from one persona to another in both the physical and virtual worlds. It has an undercurrent of decay and loss. Beautiful prose, packed with ideas.

Christian Science Monitor picks Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

I like it when non-reviewers get to recommend books, and at NPR, they surveyed indie booksellers. This isn't a "best" list, but a "suggested" one instead. Await Your Reply makes this list.

Guardian (if you love books, you should be reading this site daily. RSS anyone?) The Guardian has a different take. They ask notable authors to suggest best books of the year. Here, Peter Carey recommends Kamila Shamsie, Ishiguro suggests Bolano, etc. This list has the most personality of all the lists. In addition to this feature, they are also summing up every year of the 2000s with sweet recaps written by various authors. 

Atlantic's list includes nonfiction, with the authors in alphabetical order.

Contemporary Lit chooses The Blue Notebook by James Levine

LA Times has a good list.

Chicago Tribune picks Zoe Heller's The Believers as #1, Lark and Termite as #2, and Homer & Langley by EL Doctorow as 3.

Denver Post writer chooses Valerie Martin's The Confessions of Edward Day as the best novel that was largely ignored by the MSM. I read Martin's Trespass and found her to be a smart, nuanced writer.

My list. I didn't read many 2009 titles, but you can be sure that I found a lot of titles to put on my to-read list for future enjoyment. My favorites are: Await Your Reply, Last Night in Montreal,  Olive Kitteridge, The Financial Lives of the Poets, and The Little Stranger.

Salon: Laura Miller's list. Includes, yes, Await Your Reply. I'll let you click the link to see the rest.

Best of the Decade Lists

The Millions (link to their decade wrap-up, but put them on your RSS for daily reading. They really love books. They chose The Corrections as their best book of the decade, garnering predictable bitching in the comments section. Though their comments are a walk in the park compared to the mean jabs of Salon's.)
Dirty Realistic (thoughtful book commentary. This is his best of the decade list. The winner? Austerlitz by WG Sebald. That was my pick, too.)
Paste Magazine (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is their top pick)
Times Online (uk) (They choose The Road by Cormac McCarthy as #1)
UK Telegraph The Telegraph chooses Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

#1 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
A haunting, mysterious, and visceral novel about the psychological aftermath of the Holocaust. Sebald uses photography, maps, blueprints and other print media as counterpoint to the jumble of memory and observation of the novel's protagonist. This book will influence the way you see, the way you think about your own past, and the collective, which connects and holds us together even as external pressures try to pull us apart. Who are we, in the shadow of the unspeakable? Sebald's narrator searches, and we follow with trepidation and wonder.

#2 Any Human Heart by William Boyd
When you start out, you'll think you might not like this book. The main character is arrogant and, well, young. Brash. But keep going through this fictionalized journal that tracks seventy years of a man's life, including his heartbreaks and strongest loves, as he inches toward the end of his life, and ultimately, to its meaning. Other reviewers bash it for its "Forest Gumpness," yet to me it's not all that unbelievable that an upperclass intelligence officer might have contact with influential persons during one of the world's most tempestuous and active periods in history. I've read several William Boyd titles now and he has repeatedly shown his ability to invent worlds I like inhabiting. Any Human Heart a good winter read, fully sad, sweet, and satisfying.

#3 The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
I like everything about this nonfiction narrative. Rory Stewart chronicles his foot march through Afghanistan right after the first fall of the Taliban. I knew close to nothing about the history and culture of this region, but Stewart's clear and often wry prose both entertains and instructs. I like books where people are willing to be unconventional and stubborn. Excellent book group choice, if you're looking for social relevance.

#4 Saturday by Ian McEwan
One of my favorite books. The whole of a man's life and all his major relationships and all his hopes and fears, as well as the hopes and fears of the the post-9/11 Western world are captured in a twenty-four hour period. Neurology is the core of this novel, how the brain can call forth memory and sensation in times of crisis, and how it can fail as easily from disease, age, and injury. How precious the ability to think, how incredibly precious our ability to love.

#5 Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
A gorgeous novel that explores themes of innocence and abandonment as an older man in decline remembers his adolescence and the fate of his brothers and parents. This one will stick.

#6 The Lazarus Project by Alexandar Hemon
This novel beautifully entwines the barbarism of early 20th century Chicago with the barbarism of Bosnian ethnic cleansing. The narrative is gorgeous and harrowing, calling into question the notion of national identity, homeland, and the clash of cultures. Perception, in this work, is everything, yet makes clear that what we experience is only part of the whole story.

#7 Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
To write too much about this unnerving novel would be to give away all its rhythm and pacing. But generally, this book is about the nature of self and what that might mean in a world where you can easily slip from one persona to another in both the physical and virtual worlds. It has an undercurrent of decay and loss. Beautiful prose, packed with ideas.

#8 The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Compelling novel filled with mystery, psychosis, hysteria, and delusion. Owes an enormous debt to Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. And it's sufficiently scary, too.

#9 Wolf Point by Edward Falco
Beautifully written meditation on crimes of passion and the meaning and implications of erotic art. Published by one of my favorite presses, Unbridled Books.

#10 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Fresh and alive, this novel unfolds the stories of one troubled family besieged by the brutality of politics and the stain of a perceived curse. Diaz has an ear for the musical qualities of oral tales, and isn't afraid to embrace the influences of American culture into the Dominican transplants he introduces. How many times do you see a Harold Lauder reference in world lit? This harsh and unsparing generational story is funny and at the same time unbearably sad.

Honorable mention: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen; Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris; Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell; Black Swan Green by David Mitchell; The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem; Unless by Carol Shields; The Human Stain by Philip Roth; Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel; Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; The Road by Cormac McCarthy; Runaway: Stories by Alice Munro; Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides; That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx; The Spiral Staircase: My Climb out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong; The Magician's Book: A Skeptics Adventures in Narnia by Lisa Miller; Trespass by Valerie Martin.

I purposely avoid book reviews before picking up a title. Sure, I'll maybe skim the first paragraph and  the last sentence of a review of a book I'm interested in to get a general feel of the reviewer's assessment--if there's a scathing cautionary conclusion ("Do not venture into this wasteland of dreck...") I might think twice . But I do not want to know much about the subject or the plot going into my private experience of reading a novel.

My knowledge of a book will start and end with a past experience with the author's other works, or the 'must-read' lists that are the bread & butter of internet newspapers and magazines and blogs, and/or, finally, the tweets of enthusiasts, who might be made up of the book's publisher and friendly publicists. (It's a gorgeous little world, twitterville.) So after the mini-hype but with none of the details,  I enter the discrete textual world that an author has crafted seemingly out of thin air.

I give authors a lot of leeway when I am reading and thinking about their books. After having been involved in publishing small novels and poetry collections and memoirs for a brief but verdant period of the terrible 2000s, I know first hand how much work goes into a novel, from conception to completion. It's a hard, hard row for everyone. Think it, write it, convince someone it's worth publishing, then go through the struggle of editing, layout, cover design, marketing, and finally the publisher gets an email from a reader saying she didn't appreciate the cursing in the author's story and wants her money back.

From all angles, the publication of a book is a labor of love and dedication to a niche endeavor. That's why it's difficult for me to dislike a book. And yet, I often am disappointed despite wanting to give it every advantage and benefit of doubt. That must be the price of a reader's greed.