Omnivoracious' Amazon Blog

This year was an invigorating one for Comics & Graphic Novels, marked, notably, by the debut of a New York Times Bestseller list for the medium. All of a sudden, comics went legit, extending beyond True Believers and into mainstream literary circles. Our editors' picks for 2009's Best of Comics and Graphic Novels showcase the wide spectrum of critical darlings and sleeper favorites that made this year a rewarding one for comics readers.

Kicking off our list is David Small's graphic memoir, Stitches, which recently caught a few eyes thanks to a National Book Award nomination. Amazon editor Anne Bartholomew, however, was an early fan and picked it as her Best of the Month selection for September. Stitches marks the first time an original graphic novel has ever cracked the Top 10 of Amazon's Best Books of the Year.

The medium, however, received no greater love letters than our No. #2 and #3 picks: Seth's George Sprott:(1894-1975) and David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. Utilizing intricate and dizzying panel layouts as well as painstaking design--not to mention stories filled with heartbreak and challenging concepts, these are the graphic novelist's graphic novels.

This isn't to say that comics forgot where they came from, and 2009 had its share of superhero stories, including Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's end to their multiple Eisner-award winning run on All Star Superman. Together, they proved a Man of Steel can go home again.

But back on Earth, R. Crumb, underground comix extraordinaire, chose an auspicious subject for what many assumed would be his trademark ire: The Book of Genesis. What the project blossomed into, however, is a fairly straight-faced approach for Crumb, although it's told through his signature pencils. The Book of Genesis never looked so indie, yet it stays true to The Good Book's dense and complex storytelling. 

But our bookshelf runneth over. The Best of 2009 Store contains more graphic novels that made this a banner year for the medium, plus plenty of other top picks to explore.

Editors' Top Ten Picks in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. Stitches: A Memoir
2. George Sprott:(1894-1975)
3. Asterios Polyp
4. All Star Superman, Vol. 2
5. The Umbrella Academy: Dallas
6. Locas II: Maggie, Hopey, & Ray
7. The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders
8. A Drifting Life
9. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
10. Masterpiece Comics

Customer Favorites in Comics & Graphic Novels

1. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Last Straw
2. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
3. The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb
4. Mercy Thompson: Homecoming
5. Star Trek: Countdown
6. Time of Your Life (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8, Vol. 4)
7. Asterios Polyp
8. Batman: R.I.P.
9. Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
10. The Walking Dead, Vol. 9: Here We Remain

(found via abebooks)

and Jacob doll

which you can carry around in your Edward backpack, so he's always watching.

And if you've had just about enough of Twilight hype, you can find refuge in Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon's spoofy version of book 1:

Pale and klutzy, Belle arrives in Switchblade, Oregon looking for adventure, or at least an undead classmate. She soon discovers Edwart, a super-hot computer nerd with zero interest in girls. After witnessing a number of strange events–Edwart leaves his tater tots untouched at lunch! Edwart saves her from a flying snowball!–Belle has a dramatic revelation: Edwart is a vampire. But how can she convince Edwart to bite her and transform her into his eternal bride, especially when he seems to find girls so repulsive?

Complete with romance, danger, insufficient parental guardianship, creepy stalker-like behavior, and a vampire prom, Nightlight is the uproarious tale of a vampire-obsessed girl, looking for love in all the wrong places.

/Film reports that Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (Half Nelson) have cast the film version of Ned Vizzini's It's Kind of a Funny Story.

(Thanks, KidsLit for the news on both these films!)

School Library Journal honors Esther Hautzig, author of Endless Steppe, who died this week at 79.

At Bookslut Kati Nolfi calls Going Bovine a departure for Libba Bray, "a contemporary dark comedy with supernatural elements ... no ringlet-haired girls and Victorian bodices are on the cover of this book."

Justine Larbalestier is giving young would-be writers tips on how to get through this year's NaNoWriMo: "The world will not end if you don’t meet your daily word count. Nor will it end if you don’t have 50,000 words at the end of November." So is Maureen Johnson (Day 3: Points of view).

Meg Cabot plugs the new Glee Cast Album. She's also doing NaNoWriMo.

This week, the Amazon editors posted their Best of 2009 top 10 picks for teens, and the top 10 customer picks. What book do they have in common? (No surprise!) Catching Fire.

Happy reading!--Heidi

I mentioned the death of Claude Levi-Strauss in the Daily News this morning, and I'd love to be able to add a lot more to the story, but mainly I'll just link to some people who know him better than I. The Literary Saloon points to a few of the substantial obituaries that have already appeared, e.g. the LA Times, the Telegraph, and the WSJ. And Rob(ert) Mackey at the NYT's The Lede (who happens to be a great old friend who I'm still beholden to for, among other things, turning me on to Flann O'Brien), links to Edward Rothstein's NYT obit (which I think is the best of all these, if you're reading just one), as well as a number of French-language tributes and video clips. Here's a short snippet from Rothstein's piece:

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving poststructuralism, just as he survived most of its proponents. His monumental work “Mythologiques” may even ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

And here, for what it's worth, is my experience of C. L-S. Somehow I never took that anthropology course where you hear about his ideas and maybe even read his books, and in six years of grad school I managed to pretty much ignore the whole structuralism/post-structuralism debate (or, as it was assumed, progression) that his name was tied to. But after all that was done, I finally ended up with a copy of Tristes Tropiques and opened it up and was immediately gripped by a brilliantly barbed and detailed storytelling mind that had nothing to do with what I had assumed the great theorist Claude Levi-Strauss was like. I read the first 10 or 20 pages standing up right wherever I was. I still haven't gone further (it's an enormous book, and perhaps I've been afraid to break the spell of that great opening), but I've read those opening pages many times since. Whatever lasting theoretical contributions he may or may or may not have contributed, I do know one thing: that guy could write. Rob has already quoted the justly famous opening paragraph, which begins, "I hate traveling and explorers," and which, really, can hold its own with the opening of Moby-Dick and all the rest of them. So I'll quote instead a passage from the second page, which is nearly the opening's equal. Levi-Strauss has just discussed, with contempt, the recent vogue for traveler's illustrated lectures, but says it was not always so:

Twenty years ago or so, people travelled very little and it was not halls like the Salle Pleyel, filled to capacity five or six days running, which extended a welcome to tellers of tales. The only place in Paris which catered for this kind of thing was a small, gloomy, icy, and dilapidated amphitheatre in an ancient building at the far end of the Jardin des Plantes. There, the Societe des Amis du Museum held--and perhaps still holds--weekly lectures on the natural sciences.

The projector, which was fitted with inadequate bulbs, threw faint images on to an over-large screen, and the lecturer, however closely he peered, could hardly discern their outlines,  while for the public they were scarcely distinguishable from the damp stains on the walls. A quarter of an hour after the advertised starting-time, the lecturer would still be desperately wondering if there would be any audience, apart from the regular attenders scattered here and there among the tiered rows. Just when he was about to abandon hope, the lecture-room would fill up to half-capacity with children accompanied by their mothers or nursemaids, some eager for a free change of scene, others weary of the dust and noise outside. To this mixture of moth-eaten ghosts and restless infants the lecturer was privileged--as the supreme reward for so much effort, care and hard work--to reveal his precious store of memories, which were permanently affected by the chill of the occasion, and which, as he spoke in the semi-darkness, he felt slipping away from him and falling one by one like pebbles to the bottom of a well.

--Tom

Isn't the world ending in 2012?: On the day after an off-year election day, Marc Ambinder notes that the top three GOP frontrunners for 2012 all have books (and big book tours) on the way in the next six months: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, and Mitt Romney.

Speaking for all PWBJHTPMMATOK?s: At the NYT, novelist/ironist Colson Whitehead celebrates the one-year anniversary of Obama's election (and the apparent end of all racism forever) by offering to be the first secretary of postracial affairs: "Some changes will be minor. In television, 'Diff’rent Strokes' and 'What’s Happening!!' will now be known as 'Different Strokes' and 'What Is Happening?'"

You think our Top 100 is long...: The longlist for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award was announced yesterday. The award is notable both for offering the "world’s most valuable annual literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English" (€100,000), and for having the longest longlist imaginable (156 titles, based on nominations from libraries worldwide). 2008 Booker winner The White Tiger received the most library nominations.

Trois livres puissantes: The big literary prize week in France continues, following the awarding of the Prix Goncourt to Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes, with the Prix Médicis prizes given to two North American writers: Haitian-Canadian Dany Laférriere for L'énigme du retour (available on Amazon.ca) and American Dave Eggers for the translation of What Is the What. (Interested Francophones can check out Amazon.fr's literary prizes page for more.)

Moving and shaking: The death at age 100 of anthropology and cultural theory titan Claude Lévi-Strauss (more on that later) sends his books Tristes Tropiques and The Savage Mind to the top of our Movers & Shakers list this morning.

Cherie Priest is a rising star of smart, textured cross-genre fantasy whose latest novel, Boneshaker may be her best yet. She'll be appearing with Cat Rambo and me at the University Bookstore in Seattle tomorrow night at 7pm., as I kick off the northwest leg of my book tour. Here Priest explains why it was necessary to, erm, do bad things to Seattle. -- Jeff VanderMeer

“Why I destroyed Seattle for the sake of Steampunk”
Cherie Priest

As you may be aware, Amazon.com is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. As you are somewhat less likely to be aware, I kind of, sort of, completely demolished this city in my most recent novel, Boneshaker. So at Jeff VanderMeer’s suggestion (and invitation), I thought I’d take a moment and offer some heartfelt apologies and explanations for myself, here on one of Amazon’s exceptional blogs.

You see, it wasn’t personal; it was only convenient. By my tenth or twelfth time on the Underground Tour, I was getting some nasty ideas about the interesting ways this city could host a zombie horde and some very tall tales for my book.  I wanted a wild place with wacky local history, and some persistently gloomy weather, and maybe a rough-and-tumble nineteenth century population from which to draw. And with a checklist like that, where else could I begin?

So Seattleites, please take this as a public and formal apology for my warping of your origin story and the fictional obliteration of your fine city. 

Please understand, I had to move the Klondike gold rush up by a few decades—otherwise, how could I get tens of thousands of residents to torment by the 1860s?  Likewise, it was absolutely necessary for an “accident” involving mining equipment to tear open a vein of yellow-tinged gas that turns people into zombies. 

The subsequent wall that went up around the infected quarters did a very fine job of protecting your surviving population in the “Outskirts.” Though yes, this same wall also transformed your downtown blocks into a veritable dungeon-crawl of poor visibility, acid rain, chaotic-neutral crows, and shambling undead.  It’s a good thing most of your residents had the good sense to stay the hell out of the walled up nightmare town.

Of course...the most interesting and clever—and sometimes the cruelest and most unsavory—of survivors always find a way; and in my version of events, Seattle’s stragglers either stayed inside and let the walls go up around them, or went back to start a new life right in the thick of it.

All it took to survive was a gas mask, some heavy-duty air filters, and a whole lot of ammunition.

Well, come to think of it, there was a criminal overlord, Dr. Minnericht. You had to keep him happy if you wanted to live longer than a flea on a dog’s behind. And you’d also find pirates who came and went, docking their dirigibles at the Smith Tower as they conducted their illicit business deals under cloak of Blight gas and night.  Never mind the food and water shortages, the vicious politicking, and the bizarre weapons created by a mad scientist.

Really, I suppose, I made a mess of things.

But I was confident that even in a bizarre alternate-history version of the 19th century, your hardy pioneer founders would be up to the challenge. And I think I was right! In fact, I borrowed a few of those real life settlers and their contemporaries for this novel, including a few crooks, a few saints, and Chief Seattle’s daughter—the Duwamish princess Angeline.

So again, I offer you my sincerest regrets that I treated your city so roughly. But if you pick up a copy of Boneshaker and give it a read, I hope you’ll take some pride in the pirate-fighting, zombie-killing, kid-rescuing, dirigible-piloting, one-hundred-percent weapons-grade badasses your city has inspired. And maybe then you’ll forget (or at least forgive) all the horrible things I’ve done to my new home town.

New York Times:

• Sunday Book Review cover: Adam Kirsch on Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller: "Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker."
• Alan Furst on Enemies of the People by Kati Marton: "'Enemies of the People,' Kati Marton’s seventh book, [is] a powerful and absolutely absorbing narrative of her parents’ journey — a series of escapes, from Hitler, from Stalin, eventually to America.... [S]ome years after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989, when the records of secret police operations in Hungary became available, Marton knew she had to read the file (one of the biggest, it turned out) on herself and her family. It was, after years of concern for the victims of totalitarian states, her turn. And what came next, 'Enemies of the People,' has all the magnetism and, yes, the excitement, of the very best spy fiction. But would that it were fiction."
• Dave Eggers on Look at the Birdie by Kurt Vonnegut: "In the era of the 'slicks' — weekly and monthly magazines that would pay decently for fiction — a writer had to have a feel for what would sell. The 14 stories in 'Look at the Birdie,' none of them afraid to entertain, dabble in whodunnitry, science fiction and commanding fables of good versus evil. Why these stories went unpublished is hard to answer. They’re polished, they’re relentlessly fun to read, and every last one of them comes to a neat and satisfying end. For transmittal of moral instruction, they are incredibly efficient delivery devices."
• Maria Russo on The Hidden by Tobias Hill: "'The Hidden' is Hill’s fourth novel — in addition to a story collection and three volumes of poetry — and like his previous novels, it’s an unusual, exhilarating hybrid of high-stakes, propulsive narrative; erudite yet breezy summations of specialized historical data; and strikingly evocative language. He excels at the rendering of place, often freezing a scene to make it a charged tableau of wonder and menace."
• Tony Horwitz on The Big Burn by Timothy Egan: "Egan weaves his account of the Big Burn with the creation story of the United States Forest Service. This might seem a dull, bureaucratic yarn, but Egan tells it as the stirring tale of a very odd couple: the irrepressible Teddy Roosevelt, who 'burned 2,000 calories before noon and drank his coffee with seven lumps of sugar,' and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, an ascetic loner who sometimes slept on a wooden pillow and for 20 years mystically clung to his deceased fiancée."

Washington Post:

• Charles on Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving: "Everything that makes John Irving such a wonderful writer is on display in the opening section of his 12th novel, 'Last Night in Twisted River.' And everything that makes him such a maddening one is evident in the 450 rambling pages that follow. It's like signing on for a week's vacation after a great first date only to discover that now you're trapped in a small hotel room. For. Seven. Long. Days."
• Yardley on The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam: "As to Gardam's pair of novels, what the old song says about love and marriage must be said about them: You can't have one without the other. They are a set, his and hers. To my taste, they are absolutely wonderful, and I would find it impossible to choose one over the other. While 'Old Filth' is principally about the man, his dark boyhood at the mercy of a distant, unfeeling father, with the wife a rather shadowy character in the background, 'The Man in the Wooden Hat' fills in her side of the story, in the process revealing itself to be an astute, subtle depiction of marriage, with all its shared experiences and separate secrets."

Los Angeles Times:

• Richard Rayner on The Humbling by Philip Roth: "On the one hand, Roth's 30th book deals with themes that his work, especially his recent work, has made familiar. On the other, it's direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting. 'The Humbling' is divided into three chapters, three acts almost, and near the end the name of Chekhov is invoked, reminding us that a gun that's been shown at the beginning of the tale is likely to go off by the end. And the gun duly does, leaving the reader with feelings of terror and exhilaration in equal measure."
• Denise Hamilton on The Gates by John Connolly: "My 13-year old called it 'a cross between Eoin Colfer and Terry Pratchett,' and I'm stealing his description because he got it exactly right.... There has long been a cornucopia of Halloween-themed picture books for young children. With its endearing protagonist, rollicking plot, and dollops of weird but mostly true science, 'The Gates' has a shot at becoming a middle-school Halloween classic."
• Susan Salter Reynolds on Baddies by David Stromberg: "David Stromberg has created a cozy little planet of alter egos and parallel lives, urban marginals with vaguely Eastern European names. The drawings are a cross between George Grosz and Gahan Wilson, with a touch of 'Beavis & Butt-Head.' The humor is Roz Chast; dry commentary on inside-out characters. Fantastic."

The Globe and Mail:

• William Kowalski on Irving's Last Night at Twisted River: "In Last Night in Twisted River, Irving's 12th novel, his style is anything but cute. Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the old Irving played with language the way a kitten plays with yarn, but the 21st-century Irving uses it to weave a serious yet colourful tapestry of love, guilty consciences, broken hearts and triumphant survival. The result is a flawed but mature work by one of our most accomplished writers."
• Stephen Smith on Gretzky's Tears by Stephen Brunt: "As there was in the excellent Searching for Bobby Orr, there's plenty more here to dispirit even the most heavily Cooperall'd true north patriot love of the game. Gretzky's Tears is as penetrating a book, and as sure in its navigation of hockey's cultural currents, even if it isn't so much a biography as an annotated receipt of sale. It's a book about assets and bottom lines, market forces and bank frauds, wheelers and dealers, a story played out in Ford dealerships and the offices of public relations executives rather than Gretzky's familiar on-ice suite, behind the net, waiting for Jari Kurri to swoop into the slot."

The Guardian:

• Robert Irwin on The Arabs: A History by Eugene Rogan: "Today, Arab fear of the west and resentment at the humiliating and socially damaging effects of westernisation fuels Islamism and the spread of terrorism. How have we come to this pass? Rogan answers this question by tracing the history of Arab hopes and ultimate disappointments from the early 16th century, when the Ottomans conquered most of the Arab world, to the present day.... Rogan was a student of Albert Hourani, the author of A History of the Arab Peoples, an eloquent and predominantly upbeat account of Arab achievements over the centuries. Rogan's version, hard-nosed and sadder, is no less eloquent, and compulsively readable."
• Jerome Boyd Maunsell on Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon: "Boiling biographical subjects down to their symptoms, and life down to health, is potentially a reductive and morbid task. What Dillon has written, though, is a brilliant series of portraits that recalls the original spirit of the literary essay. He never belittles his subjects or their work, while drawing out the pathos and humour of their hypersensitivities."

The New Yorker:

• Elizabeth Kolbert on Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer: "'Eating Animals' closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer’s point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer’s credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us."
• Jill Lepore on American Homicide by Randolph Roth: "As a discussion of the available data, 'American Homicide' is rich, fascinating, and unrivalled. As an explanation, though, it gets dubious. Roth’s work involves three steps: first, he uses his database to count murders (he’s primarily interested in homicides among unrelated adults); then, using surviving censuses to count people, he calculates the homicide rate; finally, he attempts to explain what factors correlate with that rate, across four centuries. It’s the last step that’s the most wobbly."

New York Review of Books:

• Pico Iyer on The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk: "In the many pages describing how Kemal collects 4,213 of Füsun's cigarette butts, visits her family's home for supper over 2,864 days, and recalls their early afternoons together, Pamuk unfolds a classic, spacious love story a little like a Nabokovian version of Love in the Time of Cholera (other books are so much a part of his sensibility that one finds oneself reaching for such comparisons). But for most readers, I suspect, what will bring the long, slow romance to life is the much more particular love story hidden within it, of the author's real passion, for Istanbul. The engaging and somewhat awkward Kemal and his beloved, out of 'old Persian miniatures,' sometimes feel like archetypes; the uncertain, semi-cosmopolitan Istanbul of Pamuk's upbringing is so specific, it comes to seem universal."
• Jonathan Raban on Dorothea Lange by Linda Gordon and Daring to Look by Ann Whiston Spirn: "Linda Gordon's substantial, cradle-to-grave biography of Lange is usefully complemented by Anne Whiston Spirn's careful documentation of one year—1939—in Lange's working life. Both books have their flaws, but between them they add up to a satisfyingly binocular portrait of the photographer as she traveled the ambiguous and shifting frontier between art, journalism, social science, and propaganda. Lange's work is much harder to place than that of, say, Walker Evans, and so is her personality. If neither Gordon nor Spirn quite succeeds in bringing her to life on the page, they do convey her complex and mercurial elusiveness."

The Case for AC/DC:  Jacket Copy reviews Why AC/DC Matters, a "trim but meaty" book from rock writer Anthony Bozza which explores the Australian band's staying power.

Bozza finds the answer to AC/DC's popularity in the band being true to themselves, which explains both their static sound and the fact that this book is mostly an inwardly focused band biography.

Frequent Flier: Social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk has launched a mini-book tour today that will take him to six airport bookstores in two days. For those flying the friendly skies this week, Gary will be signing at LGA, ORD, DFW, DEN, LAX, and EWR.

Riordan Returns:  Young readers rejoice - author Rick Riordan has announced the launch of his new series this morning.

On May 4, 2010, the eagerly-awaited new series from Disney Book Group`s Disney-Hyperion imprint launches with The Kane Chronicles, Book One: The Red Pyramid and a simultaneously released audio edition. When a magical accident unleashes the Egyptian gods on the modern world, siblings Carter and Sadie Kane discover that they are the only ones who can put things right. As descendants of the greatest Egyptian magicians, they must find a way to defeat the evil god Set before he can destroy them.

What a Year:  We've just announced our Best of 2009 lists today, led by Colum McCann's stunning novel, Let the Great World Spin.

Moving and Shaking:  Thanks to some love from the Hungry Girl Monday Newsletter, Nutrition at Your Fingertips is currently #1 on our Movers & Shakers list this AM.

Sorry to make you wait all weekend long (which I'm sure explains why you ate that whole bag of Kit Kats from the trick-or-treat bowl), but today our Top 100 is complete with the announcement of our editors' top 10 books of 2009. Today we also unveil our entire Best of 2009 store on Amazon, which, along with that Top 100, includes our top 10 picks in almost two dozen categories as well as our customer bestsellers in all those categories too. We'll have more to say on many of those lists in the weeks to come, but for now, let's focus on our overall top 10. It's the part of the list we spend the most time thinking about and debating and tinkering with, although I must say this year the top books fell into place with an almost eerie agreement, led by our #1 choice, the closest we've ever come to a truly unanimous pick at the top since I've been here.

The Colum McCann fans among us were clamoring for a copy of Let the Great World Spin when it was first announced, and as soon as copies arrived they passed through our offices like wildfire. Weirdo literary types, pop culture junkies, you name it--everybody found something to love in McCann's lyrical story of ten intricately connected lives in 1970s New York, set against the backdrop of Philippe Petit's audacious tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. We hope you'll agree.

Here is the whole top ten, each accompanied by a quote from our editorial review:

1. Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann: "All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging. And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later."
2. Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder: "Deo's terrible journey makes his story a hard one to tell; his tirelessly hopeful but clear-eyed efforts make it a gripping and inspiring one to read."
3. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel: "Mantel plots with a sleight of hand, making full use of her masterful grasp on the facts without weighing down her prose.... [T]he witty, whip-smart lines volleying the action forward may convince you a short stay in the Tower of London might not be so bad... provided you could bring a copy of Wolf Hall along."
4. Brooklyn, Colm Tóibin: "Colm Tóibín's spare portrayal of this contemplative girl is achingly lovely, and every sentence rings with truth.... Tóibín's haunted heroine glows on the page, unforgettably and lovingly rendered, and her story reflects the lives of so many others exiled from home."
5. Beautiful Creatures, Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl (coming out in December): "Beautiful Creatures is a delicious southern Gothic that charms you from the first page, drawing you into a dark world of magic and mystery until you emerge gasping and blinking, wondering what happened to the last few hours."
6. Crazy for the Storm, Norman Ollestad: "The story itself could take your breath away ... but Ollestad is wise and talented enough to focus his story on the essentials, cutting elegantly back and forth between a moment-by-moment account of the crash and his memories of the difficult but often idyllic year leading up to it."
7. The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson: "Fans of Larsson's prior work will find even more to love here, and readers who do not find their hearts racing within the first five pages may want to confirm they still have a pulse."
8. The City & the City, China Mieville: "What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The City.... Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder."
9. Stitches, David Small (the one on our list we share with PW's top 10): "Early memories (and difficult ones, too) often seem less like words than pictures we play back to ourselves.... In every drawing, David Small shows us moments both real and imagined—some that are guileless and funny and wonderfully sweet, many others that are dark and fearful—that unveil a very talented artist, stitches and all."
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba: "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is an inspiring story of an indomitable will that refused to bend to doubt or circumstance. When the world seemed to be against him, William Kamkwamba set out to change it."

--Tom

More Best Books of 2009:

#100 to #81

#80 to #61

#60 to #41

#40 to #21

#20 to #11

Dr. Seuss-superhero mash-ups. Some strange but cute alternate takes on Seuss covers (found via 100 Scope Notes), e.g.:

The new Horn Book magazine. The latest print edition of The Horn Book is out, with a great-looking holiday cover by Lane Smith. The issue includes an interview with Margaret Mahy, a defense of fanfic, and of course plenty of reviews.

Jeff Kinney interview. The author of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books talks to School Library Journal. On overtaking the Twilight books and Dan Brown on the NYT bestseller lists: "I’m trying to keep it in perspective and appreciate the moment, because Stephen King is coming, and so is Sarah Palin."

Bookjackets without words. Jacket Knack looks at the phenomenon in kids' books, inspired by Jerry Pinkney's The Lion & the Mouse. Weirdly (or maybe it's no coincidence), some of these books go on to win awards with seals that break the visual spell--like this classic Fred Marcellino Puss in Boots (clearly the person who placed the seal had a sense of humor):

Read along with Al Roker. The latest pick in the Today Show personality's long-runnning book club is Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. You can read an excerpt on the Today Show site.

A Very Brave Witch animated. In case you missed it, our own Armchair Commentary had an interview with Alison McGhee, about her kids' book A Very Brave Witch and its adaptation into an animated version.

Fantastic Mr. Fox book tie-ins. If you're excited about the upcoming Fantastic Mr. Fox movie from Wes Anderson, you might want to check out some tie-ins that use the original Roald Dahl story along with new visuals from the film, including an abbreviated storybook for preschool through grade 3.

A dramatic How Do Dinosaurs... trailer. Found via Fuse #8, a fun trailer for the latest installment in the popular Jane Yolen and Mark Teague series:

--Paul

While we've been counting down our top 100 books of 2009 toward our top 10, Publishers Weekly went in the other direction: they are announcing their top 100 books next week, like we are, but earlier this week they revealed their top 10 choices. It's the first time they've narrowed their usual longer list of picks to 10 favorites, and while they weren't quite sporting enough to rank their 10, we like that their list will provide an even more direct comparison (or complement) to ours (as well as other upcoming top 10s, like the NYT's.) Here they are:

• The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes
• Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon
• Big Machine, Victor Lavalle
• Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey
• A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan
• In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniyal Mueenuddin
• Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer
• The Lost City of Z, David Grann
• Shop Class as Soulcraft, Matthew B. Crawford
• Stitches, David Small