Janet Maslin's Top 10 Books of 2009

Janet Maslin's Top 10 Books of 2009

There’s a good reason why the three daily book critics for The New York Times don’t make 10-best lists at the end of the year: we can’t. None of us has read everything. Our reviewing assignments don’t overlap. None of us has an objective overview of the year’s best and most important books, but this is what we do have: favorites. They are books we have not only admired in the abstract but also enjoyed, recommended and given to friends. Read more...
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'The Age of Wonder'
By RICHARD HOLMES
With a bracingly original premise and a wealth of information, this author chronicles the eureka-moment adventurousness of scientific progress during the Romantic era. (Pantheon Books, $40)

* Review

'Await Your Reply'
By DAN CHAON
A strange and stunning novel of eerily shifting identities, ingeniously manipulated by a writer with a gift for ghostly tricks. And the story’s mysteriously separate parts align for a crystal-clear ending. (Ballantine Books, $25)

* Review

'The Cradle'
By PATRICK SOMERVILLE
A slim, enchanting, unsentimental debut novel in which a young father-to-be’s journey to retrieve his wife’s stolen cradle sends him on an unexpectedly important journey. (Little, Brown & Company, $21.99)

* Review

'How It Ended'
By JAY McINERNEY
A career-spanning short story collection reveals something unexpected about the author of “Bright Lights, Big City”: the self-confidence was legit. He’s become as good as he always thought he was. (Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95)

* Review

'The Imperial Cruise'
By JAMES BRADLEY
The author of “Flags of Our Fathers” takes a startling, revisionist look at what besotted Theodore Roosevelt biographers prefer to ignore, arguing that Roosevelt’s dismissive racial attitudes led him to make disastrous long-range foreign policy miscalculations in the Pacific and Asia. (Little, Brown & Company, $29.99)

* Review

'The Lineup'
Edited by OTTO PENZLER
The ultimate How-dunit: two dozen writers of popular mystery series explain who their famous crime-solving characters are and how they got that way. (Little, Brown & Company, $25.99)

* Review

'Lords of Finance'
By LIAQUAT AHAMED
A knowledgeable, colorful and very prescient account of the global economy in Depression-era meltdown, presented so winningly that this monetary horror story feels like a labor of love. (The Penguin Press, $32.95)

* Review

'Passing Strange'
By MARTHA A. SANDWEISS
A true story that would strain most novelists’ imaginations: the tale of how Clarence King, a blue-eyed, white Newport-bred explorer and cartographer spent part of his life as a sought-after luminary— and part of it calling himself a Pullman porter, living as the patriarch of a black family that knew nothing of his other life. (The Penguin Press, $27.95)

* Review

'Under the Dome'
By STEPHEN KING
A mysterious, invisible barrier drops down upon a small Maine town— and within its confines, a fully-formed flesh-and-blood community comes to life. A rollicking good page-turner and one of this author’s most realistic human dramas, dome and all. (Scribner, $35)

* Review

'Zero at the Bone'
By JOHN HEIDENRY
No crime writer this year conjured anything as malevolent as this stark, chilling, unembellished true-crime account of kidnapping, corruption and murder. Evil schemes don’t get any more hard-boiled than this. (St. Martin’s Press, $25.99)

* Review

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