Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Best Books of 2009: The Reviews
-- Publishers Weekly,10/28/2009
Every year, PW selects its top 100 books, and for the first time ever PW has upped the ante by choosing the 10 books that stood out from the rest. The titles, whittled down from the more than 50,000 volumes considered this year, were picked by the PW reviews editors to reflect the very best of 2009. Here, PW reviews the 10 books.
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
Richard Holmes. Pantheon, $40 (552p) ISBN 0375422226
The Romantic imagination was inspired, not alienated, by scientific advances, argues this captivating history. Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes’s biographical approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy’s self-experimenting with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge. Their discoveries, he argues, helped establish a new paradigm of Romantic science that saw the universe as vast, dynamic and full of marvels and celebrated mankind’s power to not just describe but transform Nature. Holmes’s treatment is sketchy on the actual science and heavy on the cultural impact, with wide-ranging discussions of the 1780s ballooning craze, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and scientific metaphors in Romantic poetry. It’s an engrossing portrait of scientists as passionate adventurers, boldly laying claim to the intellectual leadership of society. Illus. (July 14)
Await Your Reply
Dan Chaon. Ballantine, $25 (336p) ISBN 0345476026
Three disparate characters and their oddly interlocking lives propel this intricate novel about lost souls and hidden identities from National Book Award finalist Chaon (You Remind Me of Me). Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile, Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man with many personas who’s been missing for 10 years and is possibly responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle. Chaon deftly intertwines a trio of story lines, showcasing his characters’ individuality by threading subtle connections between and among them with effortless finesse, all the while invoking the complexities of what’s real and what’s fake with mesmerizing brilliance. This novel’s structure echoes that of his well-received debut—also a book of three—as it bests that book’s elegant prose, haunting plot and knockout literary excellence. (Sept.)
Big Machine
Victor Lavalle. Spiegel & Grau, $25 (384p) ISBN 0385527985
LaValle has garnered critical acclaim for his previous works (a collection, Slapboxing with Jesus, and novel, The Ecstatic), and his second novel is sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter. Quickly, Ricky finds himself among the Unlikely Scholars, a secret society of ex-addicts and petty criminals, all black like him, living in remote Vermont and sifting through stacks of articles in a library devoted to investigating the supernatural; the existence of a god; and the legacy of Judah Washburn, an escaped slave who claimed to have had contact with a higher being that the Unlikely Scholars now call the Voice. Ricky’s intoxicating voice—robust, organic, wily—is perfect for narrating LaValle’s high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fateful porter—something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of spiritual X-men—wanders through America’s messianic hoo-hah. (Aug.)
Cheever: A Life
Blake Bailey. Knopf, $35 (770p) ISBN 1400043948
Rebellious Yankee son of a father who fell victim to the Depression and a doo-gooder-turned-businesswoman mother, father to three competitive children he rode mercilessly but adored, chronicler par excellence of the 1950s American suburban scene while deploring all forms of conformity: John Cheever (1912–1982) was a mass of contradictions. In this overlong but always entertaining biography, composed with a novelist’s eye, Bailey, biographer of Richard Yates and editor of two volumes of Cheever’s work for Library of America (also due in March), was given access to unpublished portions of Cheever’s famous journals and to family members and friends. Bailey’s book is fine in descriptions of Cheever’s reactions to other writers, such as his adored Bellow and detested Salinger. Bailey is also sensitive in describing the prickly dynamic of Cheever’s domestic life, lived through a haze of alcoholism and under the shadow of extramarital heterosexual and homosexual relationships. This Ovid in Ossining, who published 121 stories in the New Yorker as well as several bestselling novels, has probably yet to find a definitive position in American letters among academicians. This thoroughly researched and heartfelt biography may help redress that situation. 24 pages of photos. (Mar. 12)
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon
Neil Sheehan. Random, $32 (560p) ISBN 0679422846
The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky individualism in this history of the men who built America’s intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and ‘60s. Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs. Sheehan gives a fascinating run-down of the engineering challenges posed by nuclear missiles, but the main action consists of bureaucratic intrigues, procurement innovations and epic briefings that catch the president’s ear and open the funding spigots. Like the author’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning A Bright Shining Lie, this is a saga of underdog visionaries struggling to redirect a misguided military juggernaut, this time successfully: the author credits Schriever’s missiles with keeping the peace and jump-starting the space program and satellite industry. Sheehan’s focus on personal initiative and human-scale dramas lends an overly romantic cast to his study of cold war policy making and the arms race, but it makes for an engrossing read. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Oct. 6)
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
Daniyal Mueenuddin. Norton, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 0393068005
In eight beautifully crafted, interconnected stories, Mueenuddin explores the cutthroat feudal society in which a rich Lahore landowner is entrenched. A complicated network of patronage undergirds the micro-society of servants, families and opportunists surrounding wealthy patron K.K. Harouni. In Nawabdin Electrician, Harouni’s indispensable electrician, Nawab, excels at his work and at home, raising 12 daughters and one son by virtue of his cunning and ingenuity—qualities that allow him to triumph over entrenched poverty and outlive a robber bent on stealing his livelihood. Women are especially vulnerable without the protection of family and marriage ties, as the protagonist of Saleema learns: a maid in the Harouni mansion who cultivates a love affair with an older servant, Saleema is left with a baby and without recourse when he must honor his first family and renounce her. Similarly, the women who become lovers of powerful men, as in the title story and in Provide, Provide, fall into disgrace and poverty with the death of their patrons. An elegant stylist with a light touch, Mueenuddin invites the reader to a richly human, wondrous experience. (Feb.)
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer. Pantheon, $24 (296p) ISBN 0307377377
Two 40-ish men seeking love and existential meaning are the protagonists of these highly imaginative twin novellas, written in sensuous, lyrical prose brimming with colorful detail. In the first, Jeff Atman is a burnt-out, self-loathing London hack journalist who travels to scorching, Bellini-soaked Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale, and there finds the woman of his dreams and an incandescent love affair. The unnamed narrator of the second novella (who may be the same Jeff) is an undistinguished London journalist on assignment in the scorching Indian holy city of Varanasi, where the burning ghats, the filth and squalid poverty and the sheer crush of bodies move him to abandon worldly ambition and desire. Dyer’s ingenious linking of these contrasting narratives is indicative of his intelligence and stylistic grace, and his ability to evoke atmosphere with impressive clarity is magical. Both novellas ask trenchant philosophical questions, include moments of irresistible humor and offer arresting observations about art and human nature. For all his wit and cleverness, Dyer is unflinching in conveying the empty lives of his contemporaries, and in doing so he’s written a work of exceptional resonance. (Apr.)
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
David Grann. Doubleday, $27.50 (339p) ISBN 0385513534
In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed. Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn’t stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction. He became interested in Fawcett while researching another story, eventually venturing into the Amazon to satisfy his all-consuming curiosity about the explorer and his fatal mission. Largely about Fawcett, the book examines the stranglehold of passion as Grann’s vigorous research mirrors Fawcett’s obsession with uncovering the mysteries of the jungle. By interweaving the great story of Fawcett with his own investigative escapades in South America and Britain, Grann provides an in-depth, captivating character study that has the relentless energy of a classic adventure tale. (Feb.)
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Matthew B. Crawford. Penguin, $25.95 (246p) ISBN 1594202230
Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he calls manual competence, the ability to work with one's hands. According to the author, our alienation from how our possessions are made and how they work takes many forms: the decline of shop class, the design of goods whose workings cannot be accessed by users (such as recent Mercedes models built without oil dipsticks) and the general disdain with which we regard the trades in our emerging information economy. Unlike today’s knowledge worker, whose work is often so abstract that standards of excellence cannot exist in many fields (consider corporate executives awarded bonuses as their companies sink into bankruptcy), the person who works with his or her hands submits to standards inherent in the work itself: the lights either turn on or they don’t, the toilet flushes or it doesn’t, the motorcycle roars or sputters. With wit and humor, the author deftly mixes the details of his own experience as a tradesman and then proprietor of a motorcycle repair shop with more philosophical considerations. (June)
Stitches
David Small. Norton, $24.95 (329p) ISBN 0393068579
In this profound and moving memoir, Small, an award-winning children’s book illustrator, uses his drawings to depict the consciousness of a young boy. The story starts when the narrator is six years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent during his early adolescence. The youngest member of a silent and unhappy family, David is subjected to repeated x-rays to monitor sinus problems. When he develops cancer as a result of this procedure, he is operated on without being told what is wrong with him. The operation results in the loss of his voice, cutting him off even further from the world around him. Small’s black and white pen and ink drawings are endlessly perceptive as they portray the layering of dream and imagination onto the real-life experiences of the young boy. Small’s intuitive morphing of images, as with the terrible postsurgery scar on the main character’s throat that becomes a dark staircase climbed by his mother, provide deep emotional echoes. Some understanding is gained as family secrets are unearthed, but for the most part David fends for himself in a family that is uncommunicative to a truly ghastly degree. Small tells his story with haunting subtlety and power. (Sept.)
See the full list of our top 100 titles here.
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| Submitted by: | Anonymous Reviewer 11/23/2009 10:07:39 PM PT |
| Location: | New York |
| Occupation: | Anonymous Reviewer |
PW Reviews should be taken with a grain of salt. They are anonymous,
and reviewers are paid less than Chinese sneaker stitchers. Sometimes,
you get what you pay for. Which is deference to Knopf titles, and a
creeping laziness that becomes apparent once one actually reads the
books and notices that the reviewer probably just skimmed. Internet
book sites with more serious and experienced reviewers putting their
names on reviews are making Publishers Weekly reviews less relevant in
this age, and that is certainly a good sign.
| Submitted by: | Amy Holman (aocean63@earthlink.net) 11/18/2009 12:15:29 PM PT |
| Location: | Brooklyn, NY |
| Occupation: | Writer and Literary Consultant |
I agree with Sarah Berry and Amy King who each point out the more insidious problem of the 10 Best Books--the "male" subject matter. But, that, too would not be as much of a problem if some of the authors were women. If any of you recall the brilliant article, Scent of A Woman's Ink, in Harper's Magazine about 10 years ago written by Francine Prose, you would recall that she pointed out how women writers were more often criticized more for writing "male subjects" than were the men writing the same topic. It would be equally bad if a ten best list of all women writers writing only so called women's subjects came up. We can be mad at the list, but we should be thinking about the ways in which we can continue to change the way society, and its readers, think. We are all of us in this world, experiencing. We can all of us write about anything we want, and write well.
| Submitted by: | Sean McAfee 11/12/2009 4:17:18 PM PT |
| Location: | Colorado |
Someone wrote "Where is the balance?". If there was balance, it wouldn't
be what THESE PEOPLE considered the best books, would it?. it's just
some people's opinion! Political correctness should be the LAST thing
considered when it comes to writing. If someone told writers that we had
to be politically correct, we would be protesting loudly. Why do the critics
commenting here think Publisher's Weekly shouldn't be allowed the same
freedom of expression that we, as authors, take for granted?
| Submitted by: | Brian Dear (superacidjax@me.com) 11/10/2009 1:56:00 AM PT |
| Location: | Suzhou, China |
| Occupation: | writer |
These crybaby responses lamenting the lack of women in the top ten
are ridiculous. Why not cry about the apparent lack of gays, or native-
Americans or Chinese writers? Shouldn't the list be about the best
books and not about the best books by a _____ writer. The political
correctness of literature is getting silly. Let's look at books on their
merits and not their gender. Does anyone think that there was a
conscious decision to exclude women? Shouldn't the merits of the work
be more important than the gender of the writer? How about writers
from Texas? Or Montana? The list was about the best books (in the
opinion of the editors.) Period. If you ignore the name of the writer,
then this outcry wouldn't exist. How about Oprah's list? Why does she
tend to pick women writers (and very often minorities?) Is THAT right?
Stop making literature about "diversity" and start making it more about
great writing.
| Submitted by: | Vic 11/6/2009 6:11:25 AM PT |
| Location: | Virginia |
| Occupation: | Literacy Specialist |
While I am sure these men merited a mention, are you sure
that not one woman did? Before publication deadline, was
not one person in your organization struck by this
enormous oversight? What were you folks drinking, er,
thinking?
| Submitted by: | Mrs. Harrington 11/5/2009 12:25:07 PM PT |
| Location: | WI |
| Occupation: | Teacher |
I also read through this list hoping to find something interesting and came up with nothing. It is disappointing to see a list overloaded with testosterone, but I couldn't really argue over their choices without first looking at their method of selection and composition. I can simply chalk it up to personal opinion and remind myself that gender bias has been going on for ages and has been especially transparent since the DNC and Super Tuesday last year. It's sad and backward but it keeps happening.
| Submitted by: | Caroline W. Holmes 11/4/2009 5:03:59 PM PT |
| Occupation: | Bookseller |
This list reads like a flier tacked to the wall at a men's club. Where are the female authors? Where is the balance?
And further, the “anonymous” reviews of PW have gotten out of control. Some of the finest works I’ve ever read were trashed and dismissed by PWs anonymous reviewers. And interestingly enough, the vast majority of those books were written by women. It's shameful that this practice has continued ad nauseam. I have not renewed my PW subscription for this very reason. Enough is enough.
| Submitted by: | Sarah Berry 11/4/2009 3:38:04 PM PT |
| Location: | San Francisco |
| Occupation: | Writer |
It's awful that there's not a single book by a woman on this list. In addition, almost all these books are about male protagonists, male adventures, male coming of age. This is a classic example how women are excluded from publishing because the subjects they write about aren't considered as weighty or ambitious. This kind of bigotry affects my and other women writer's ability to make a living and support our families. The Publishers Weekly editorial staff should be ashamed of themselves.
| Submitted by: | amy king (amyhappens@gmail.com) 11/3/2009 7:36:38 PM PT |
| Location: | new york |
| Occupation: | professor |
Spent some time checking out the general content of the books that
made the list - the summaries are all taken from the Publisher's
Weekly website below. Simple to observe that the content that "stood
out from the rest" according to PW is all about mostly male
protagonists and their realities: war, adventure, science, boyhood
adventures, taming the wilderness, the male writer's life, etc. In other
words, the novels that deal with women's realities simply "don't stand
out" - check the content of the TOP TEN "UNIVERSAL" MEN:
~
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the
Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)
[PRIMARILY ABOUT MALE PROTAGONISTS FOCUSED ON MOSTLY MALE
SCIENTISTS]
Holmes, author of a much-admired biography of Coleridge, focuses on
prominent British scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
including the astronomer William Herschel and his accomplished
assistant and sister, Caroline; Humphrey Davy, a leading chemist and
amateur poet; and Joseph Banks, whose journal of a youthful voyage to
Tahiti was a study in sexual libertinism. Holmes’s biographical
approach makes his obsessive protagonists (Davy’s self-experimenting
with laughing gas is an epic in itself) the prototypes of the Romantic
genius absorbed in a Promethean quest for knowledge.
~
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)
[AGAIN, MOSTLY MALE PROTAGONISTS]
Eighteen-year-old Lucy Lattimore, her parents dead, flees her stifling
hometown with charismatic high school teacher George Orson, soon to
find herself enmeshed in a dangerous embezzling scheme. Meanwhile,
Miles Chesire is searching for his unstable twin brother, Hayden, a man
with many personas who’s been missing for 10 years and is possibly
responsible for the house fire that killed their mother. Ryan Schuyler is
running identity-theft scams for his birth father, Jay Kozelek, after
dropping out of college to reconnect with him, dazed and confused
after learning he was raised thinking his father was his uncle.
~
Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)
[AGAIN, THE MALE REALITY WINS]
Gritty, mostly honest-hearted ex-heroin addict protagonist Ricky Rice
takes a chance on an anonymous note delivered to him at the cruddy
upstate New York bus depot where he works as a porter.
~
Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey (Knopf)
[ALL ABOUT A MAN]
In this overlong but always entertaining biography, composed with a
novelist’s eye, Bailey, biographer of Richard Yates and editor of two
volumes of Cheever’s work for Library of America (also due in March),
was given access to unpublished portions of Cheever’s famous journals
and to family members and friends.
~
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate
Weapon by Neil Sheehan (Random House)
[AHEM, SERIOUS MALE REALITIES, WAR AND "REAL WORLD" SHIT]
The military-industrial complex proves an unlikely arena for plucky
individualism in this history of the men who built America’s
intercontinental ballistic missile program in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Sheehan paints air force Gen. Bernard Schriever and his colorful band
of military aides, civilian patrons, defense intellectuals and aerospace
entrepreneurs as a guerrilla insurgency fighting Pentagon red tape, and
a hostile air force brass, led by Strategic Air Command honcho Curtis
LeMay, who advocated megatonnage bomber planes over ICBMs.
~
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)
In eight beautifully crafted, interconnected stories, Mueenuddin
explores the cutthroat feudal society in which a rich Lahore landowner
is entrenched.
~
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)
[WHOA, MANLY ADVENTURE]
Two 40-ish men seeking love and existential meaning are the
protagonists of these highly imaginative twin novellas, written in
sensuous, lyrical prose brimming with colorful detail.
~
Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David
Grann (Doubleday)
[SURPRISE: MORE ON MEN AND THEIR ADVENTUROUS EXPLORING
NATURES]
In 1925, renowned British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett
embarked on a much publicized search to find the city of Z, site of an
ancient Amazonian civilization that may or may not have existed.
Fawcett, along with his grown son Jack, never returned, but that didn’t
stop countless others, including actors, college professors and well-
funded explorers from venturing into the jungle to find Fawcett or the
city. Among the wannabe explorers is Grann, a staff writer for the New
Yorker, who has bad eyes and a worse sense of direction.
~
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)
[WHEW, THIS LIST SHOULD BE CALLED, "HOW MEN LIVE"]
Philosopher and motorcycle repair-shop owner Crawford extols the
value of making and fixing things in this masterful paean to what he
calls manual competence, the ability to work with one's hands.
~
Stitches by David Small (Norton)
[AND HOW BOYS GROW UP TO BECOME MEN]
In this profound and moving memoir, Small, an award-winning
children’s book illustrator, uses his drawings to depict the
consciousness of a young boy. The story starts when the narrator is six
years old and follows him into adulthood, with most of the story spent
during his early adolescence.
| Submitted by: | jione (jennyione@yahoo.com) 11/2/2009 2:04:50 PM PT |
| Location: | Dutchess County |
| Occupation: | med technology |
Further proof that PW is slipping. Didn't they just lose their editor in chief?
Check it out--Newsweek a while back starting using almost only men
and who reads them any more? They're the size of a pamphlet now. This
kind of thing is such a sign of backward thinking. So ironic that PW came
out with this the week France awarded the prestigious Goncourt Award to
a book called "Three Strong Women."
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