PW's 10 Best Books of 2009

The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon)

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon (Ballantine)

Big Machine by Victor LaValle (Spiegel & Grau)

Cheever by Blake Bailey (Knopf)

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War by Neil Sheehan (Random)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (Norton)

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Lost City of Z by David Grann (Doubleday)

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin Press)

Stitches by David Small (Norton).

I'm unimpressed.

Comments

[Thomas]

I am not sure who PW is, but I am unimpressed as well. None of these books have even flickered across my book reading radar. Then again, I am not sure I have read anything this year that was actually published this year.

[Mary Ronan Drew]

Thomas, PW is Publisher's Weekly, magazine to the trade. I can't imagine what criteria they used to pick these books.

md

[Nan]

And I've only heard of one, the Cheever. I live in a different reading world, that's for sure.

[Mary Ronan Drew]

Nan, The only way I can account for these selections is the possibility that PW wanted to choose books from different publishers. But surely there are better books than these from Random House and Norton.

md

[Karen]

I've only even HEARD of two of them -- the Lost City of Z and the Shop Class one. I've read the Lost City of Z and enjoyed it, but am not sure it merits a "top ten" list. As for the others -- huh?!

[Barbara]

I haven't read The Age of Wonder yet but I'm a great admirer of Richard Holmes' writing about The Romantics. Footsteps is easy to read. The Coleridge biography is huge but worth the effort. Unfortunately, there's a military historian of the same name, which is confusing.