A Year in Reading 2009

Following the example of the reviewers at The Millions, this post is about the best books I read in 2009, regardless of when they were published.

The first book I finished this year may very well have been the best, and that is Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It was this book that inspired my goal to read every one of Rushdie’s novels in the next two-and-a-half years. It is a brilliant and engaging story, but apart from that, the language itself simply blew me away and this is indeed one of the few books I have ever read which I fully intend to reread cover to cover.

I also enjoyed Cormac McCarthy’s The Road very much. It was without a doubt one of the most depressing stories I’ve ever read, but the book itself is absolutely beautiful. McCarthy has a real way with language, and his style couldn’t be more different from Rushdie.

One of the most astonishing examples of storytelling I read this year was Naguib Mahfouz’s short Egyptian novel Wedding Song. It is a deceptively simple story about treachery and intrigue among a troupe of actors, but told four times, each from the perspective of a different character. This is a story that does not unfold chronologically like most, but three-dimensionally as each narrator’s unique point-of-view comes to light.

Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves completely challenged my idea of what a novel could and should be. It strains the definition of frame narrative to the breaking point— a Los Angeles junkie edits a critical manuscript written by a blind man describing an invented documentary about a couple who discover that their house is larger on the inside than on the outside. Parts of this book deeply disturbed me, while others tugged hard at the heartstrings, others aroused me, and still others left me completely unsure what to think. This could certainly challenge Midnight’s Children as the best book I’ve ever read, but its style and format are so drastically different that it seems unfair to compare them, which is basically my way of saying that I can’t really choose which one is better.

Those are the books that especially struck me this year, but here are all the books I read for pleasure this year. I enjoyed nearly all of these, with the exception of American Gods, which I have already reviewed, and Anathema Rhodes, which I found to be so overbearingly postmodern and elaborate in its style and plot as to be almost laughable. It is really quite bad good writing.

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
American Gods, Neil Gaiman
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Vladimir Nabokov
Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
Wedding Song, Naguib Mahfouz
Geek Love, Katherine Dunn
Anathema Rhodes: Dreams, Iimani David
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie