Tell Us YOUR Top 5 Books of 2009

Happy Holidays to everyone.

I never respond to requests for five best books of the year — there are too many and I wouldn’t trust anyone to have read  enough of them to know the best.  I’m comfortable choosing my five favorites, so here they are:

Bookworm’s Five Favorite Books of 2009

1.  The Magicians by Lev Grossman (Viking)

A complete surprise to me.  A first novel that’s sort of a Harry  Potter for grown ups.  Brilliantly constructed, even post-modern, it’s a  real treat.

2.  The Confessions of Edward Day by Valerie Martin (Nan A,
Talese/Doubleday)

Everyone always overlooks Valerie Martin, and she’s great.  This one  is a novel about acting and schizophrenia, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of stuff.  If you haven’t read her famous book, Mary Reilly (they made a bad movie out of it), try this one.  Or her last, Property, a really terrifying novel about slavery.  Or A Recent Martyr, a book about sainthood and plague set in New Orleans.  Really, you can hardly go wrong with Valerie  Martin.

3.  Your Face Tomorrow by Javier Marias (New Directions)

This is an espionage novel as Henry James might have written it.  It’s  a trilogy in three volumes,the last of which has just been published.  Read
them in order.  Marias was recommended to me by John Ashbery and when it comes to weird, thrilling books he is a connoisseur.  I read all three  volumes in around ten days straight and couldn’t put them down.  Marias  came to America for the first time in twenty years recently, so Bookworm has an upcoming interview with him.

4.  Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (Random House)

This one won the National Book Award, so it may not be news to you, but it’s the book with the greatest emotional breadth that I’ve read this  year. It’s set during the high-wire crossing of the World Trade Center  towers, so the ghosts of 9/11 hover over the novel, but it’s so oblique, so well structured and so moving that you experience a strange deja vu as you  read.

5. Nog, Flats and Quake by Rudolph Wurlitzer ( Two Dollar Radio  )

A throwback.  These three novels were published in 1968, 1970 and  1972 respectively.  Each book is short, but dense and trippy.  If you  want to know what it felt like to be a reader in the late 60′s and early  70′s, when so many new experimental works were put out by mainstream  publishers, these books are great places to start.  Nog even had a blurb  from Thomas Pynchon (“the novel of bullshit is dead!”), Flats wore its Samuel  Beckett influence proudly on its sleeve, Quake took us through a slo mo pomo  earthquake in L.A. Together they provide a tour of the dissolution of  identity that was daily life in the late sixties.

Please let me know your favorite books published this year.

Michael Silverblatt

You’ve heard from KCRW’s tastemakers and personalities and now we want to hear from you. As we reflect on ’09, we want to know your 5 favorite books. Comment below and let us know which books you couldn’t put down this year.

A must for the serious reader, KCRW’s Bookworm showcases writers of fiction and poetry – the established, new or emerging – all interviewed with insight and precision by the show’s host and guiding spirit, Michael Silverblatt.

Tags: books, culture

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