Best Books of 2009: Fiction

A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein (Algonquin Books) 304 pages
Not long ago, I reviewed this book in these pages with unbridled enthusiasm, and I'm mentioning it again to drive home the fact that this is truly among the best books of the year. A searing portrait of two families in crisis, Lauren Grodstein’s novel is filled with characters as real as you are and conflicts that both define and undermine them. Her writing is crisp, insightful, and heartbreaking, particularly as we watch Pete Dizinoff, her protagonist, go over the edge of sanity to project his son and his family. What might seem like an easy, quiet, even unassuming book is anything but. You won’t soon forget A Friend of the Family. -- Tony Buchsbaum

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (Doubleday) 470 pages
The fact that The Angel’s Game didn’t quite deliver on expectation -- due either to this author’s previous novel, the sensational The Shadow of the Wind, or to the excitement generated by the book’s flawless first half -- it was still impossibly wonderful, unforgettable and, in a way, unknowable. After it was done, I found that I adored The Angel’s Game, warts and all. In 1920s Barcelona, young hack novelist David Martin receives a compelling offer: the opportunity to write a book above and beyond anything that has come before. He is promised a fortune but that doesn’t even touch the possibilities: it is a book for which “people will live and die.” Though he initially refuses, he is ultimately worn down and sets to work on the book of a lifetime. More: the book of all lifetimes. The Angel’s Game is, in a way, more than the sum of its parts and even Barcelona is a mysterious and magical character. Zafon is the second most read Spanish author of all time (Cervantes gets the title) and it’s not difficult to see why. The Angel’s Game is intricate and intelligent, complicated yet human, magical yet somewhat grounded in reality. Another masterwork. I expected no less. -- Linda L. Richards

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick (Algonquin Books) 291 pages
I reviewed A Reliable Wife for January Magazine last March, and its magic remains with me even now. For me, that alone makes it one of the year’s best. In a world where we read constantly, bombarded by books, to have one stand out is really something. Goolrick’s fiction debut begins on a freezing Wisconsin train platform in 1907. A man receives the wife he’s advertised for, but he gets a whole lot more than he bargained for. He gets a woman with a past and a mission, neither of which he wants. Goolrick builds the suspense until your fingers almost bleed, aching to turn the pages ever faster, until the climax is released with a power that's nearly unbearable. In A Reliable Wife, the author has provided a truly reliable read, and it will leave you wondering why no one’s thought up this simple, tantalizing story before. More, please. -- Tony Buchsbaum

The Book of Fathers by Miklos Vamos (Other Press) 474 pages
Hungarian literary superstar Miklos Vamos here delivers an almost mind-bendingly complex tale. The Book of Fathers is an epic family story that spans 12 generations and almost 300 years. The whole is structured as a family saga -- and each generation’s first-born son bears the weight of the narrative. Vamos touches on almost all of the big ideas: religion and spirituality, politics, music and time. A printer, Cornelius Csillag, is murdered in 1706 and his grandson takes up the family record -- The Book of Fathers -- that Cornelius began. They are, in many ways, an unremarkable family in the way that most families are unremarkable. No royalty or wealthy industrialists among them. As the family works its way through the generations, the history of Hungary -- seldom unremarkable -- spins out around them. In a skillful way, the background becomes a more vibrant character than the humans who walk through it. The Book of Fathers was published in Hungary in 2000 where it has sold 200,000 copies and has since been translated in 13 languages. -- Aaron Blanton

The City & the City by China Miéville (Del Rey) 336 pages
When I reviewed the City & the City mid-way through the year, I honestly felt as though I hadn’t liked it as well as I should have. After all, I have nothing but admiration for author China Miéville (Perdido Street Station, Un Lun Dun) and, even when I reviewed that book I said that I was “disappointed in myself to have been disappointed by The City & the City, a book that I know is better than I think it is.” And it is. Since then, my mind has gone back to Miéville’s disturbing world again and again. In The City & the City, he pushes at the boundaries of both speculative fiction and classic 20th-century noir. Set in a somewhat recognizable world with a starkly Eastern European feel, the two cities referred to in the title are Beszel and Ul Qoma, two places that happen to be in the same place at one time. Citizens of both cities are forbidden to see each other or acknowledge each other’s presence, even though there are circumstances where denizens of both places can be seen. At those times, it is both law and etiquette to unsee the other party and never say you’ve seen anything at all. Now clearly, a murder investigation under such circumstances is going to be a challenge. For one thing, there’s a whole city of potential suspects right over there and you may not ask them where they were or what they’ve seen. Miéville writes beautifully. Few can come close to his way with both meter and metaphor. He seems to hit the dark and gritty noir tone effortlessly and -- aside from the weird circumstances of the city -- his characters are believable and even pleasantly flawed. I remain in awe of this writer. His books are consistently riveting, and he seldom lets you walk away from his work unscathed. -- Lincoln Cho

Endpoint and My Father’s Tears and Other Stories by John Updike (Knopf)
The Grand Master of Suburban Lit saved the best for last. When John Updike succumbed to lung cancer early in 2009, the world lost one of its best chroniclers of marriage and infidelity. He left behind two parting gifts for his devoted readers, however: the poetry of Endpoint and the short stories of My Father’s Tears. Both are remarkable for their flawless language and portraits of men and women nervously stumbling through life. Either book would have reaped deserved praise if Updike had lived to see their publication, but coming like a literary eulogy, they are all the more resonant. In the poem “Requiem,” he writes: For life’s a shabby subterfuge/And death is real, and dark, and huge/The shock of it will register/Nowhere but where it will occur.
He was wrong, of course. We all felt the shock of his obituary. Updike’s passing, just one pebble tossed in the pond of mortality, will continue to send out its rings to the shore for centuries to come. -- David Abrams

Fugue State: Stories by Brian Evenson, art by Zak Sally (Coffee House Press) 205 pages
As I read the 19 stories that make up Fugue State I kept thinking that this is what the future of dark fiction looks like. Now. In his sixth collection (there have also been five novels) Evenson ones again probes deeply and brilliantly into the things that scare us most: madness, amnesia, paranoia. As with Stephen King’s epic novel The Stand, don’t read Fugue State’s title story if you have a cold or anything you suspect might be contagious. You won’t sleep, you won’t rest. You might not get better. Fugue State is dark fiction at its very finest and no one tells a story quite like Brian Evenson. You might not want to turn off the light. -- Lincoln Cho

Generation A by Douglas Coupland (Random House Canada) 297 pages
This is one of two important books with international implications and a strong presence of bees written by Canadian authors and published in the second half of 2009. The other is Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Interestingly enough, neither book received the attention it deserved at home: something I find inexplicable and, in a way, inexcusable. Both books have a lot to say and their authors manage to say it very, very well. Generation A brings the story Coupland began in 1991 with Generation X full circle. Where Generation X was completely concerned with a group of self-indulgent slackers, the five young protagonists in Generation A find themselves forced to be not only aware of the world and its problems, they must also be part of the solution. But this is Coupland, so the young people here do not sit smarmily by while hugging and singing Kumba-ya. They are sharp, acerbic and sometimes slightly homicidal: another group of magnificently drawn Coupland youths. This particular group have only one thing in common: in the not-so-distant future, in a world that is much less wonderful due to the complete absence of honey bees, each of the young people we meet have been stung by a bee. The stings are cause for consternation and study and the youths are whisked to secret facilities to be tested and evaluated. Then they are released and trouble ensues. Coupland is, once again, at his very best here. These are big ideas boiled down very tightly. He distills each thing to its very essence until we are left with a book that, on the surface of things, seems very simple: it’s easy to read, the language is uncomplicated, the chapters short, the concepts seemingly within our grasp. But Coupland is dealing -- once again and in his own distinctive and inimitable way -- with the important questions of our time. -- Linda L. Richards

Homer & Langley by E.L. Doctorow (Random House) 224 pages
Like many people interested in the history of New York City, I’d heard about the Collyer brothers -- Homer and Langley -- long before E.L. Doctorow decided to fictionalize the peculiar but (in his hands, anyway) poignant story of their lives. They were born to a Manhattan physician and his wife, who had deep roots in American history. Well educated (Homer trained in admiralty law, his younger brother studied engineering), the two sons moved with their family into a Harlem brownstone in 1909, back when Harlem was still an upper-class neighborhood. After their parents died, the brothers remained in that Fifth Avenue residence, becoming hoarders and paranoid recluses, with Homer slowly going blind. They eventually died in the brownstone, both of them in March 1947, but their passing took some time to confirm. And a bit of excavation. So filled was the house with newspapers and broken bicycles, specimen jars and old beds, skeletal Christmas trees and rotting food and surplus pianos, that police had to break in through a second-story window, just to see if anyone was still alive inside. (The site is now occupied by a public park.) Over the bare bones of the Collyers’ bizarre tale, Doctorow has stitched a quilt of details -- partially true, partly fictional -- that lend the brothers personalities beyond the fact of their manifest eccentricities. What’s most moving here is the love the two brothers show one another, despite their escalating mental infirmities. At one point, for instance, Langley installs a broken-down Model T under the crystal chandelier in their dining room, upsetting their cook. Homer -- who narrates this yarn, despite his blindness -- quickly rises to his sibling’s defense. “My brother is a brilliant man,” he insists. “There is some intelligent purpose behind this, I can assure you.” But then Homer addresses the reader: “At that moment of course I hadn’t the remotest idea of what it might be.” Extending the lives of his main characters well past their actual obituary dates, Doctorow takes the opportunity to revisit high and low points of the 20th century through their eyes--the rise of speakeasies and gangsters, the emergence of “hippies” (with one of whom Homer finds something approaching affection), the Vietnam War, President Richard M. Nixon’s Watergate scandal and more. Homer & Langley is an enviable achievement of fictionalized history, presented with such human warmth, humor and compassion that you’ll feel compelled to start re-reading it soon after you’ve turned its final page. -- J. Kingston Pierce

John Dies at the End by David Wong (St. Martin’s Press/Thomas Dunne) 384 pages
At a time when many writers are pushing at the edges of the novel, trying to redefine what the word means and what it is, David Wong sort of does. This comes in part from the publication history of his first novel, John Dies at the End, one of those weird Internet success stories you hear about. In fact, this might be one of the best yet. John Dies at the End started out as a Web serial in 2004. The story appeared in book form for the first time in 2007, as a paperback from “Horror and Apocalyptic Book Publisher” Permuted Press, an independent publisher whose area of specialization you can pretty well guess at. John Dies at the End would have fit right in with their line. The action in John Dies at the End all centers around soy sauce, a mysterious and fairly unstable drug that alters not only the mind, it seems to have an effect on time and eventually opens a portal to a pretty hell-like place. After you take it, Wong tells us, “You might be able to read minds, make time stop, cook pasta that’s exactly right every time. And you can see the shadowy things that share this world, the ones who are always present and always hidden.” The story is a first person narrative from the viewpoint of the author who actually isn’t David Wong, but says he is throughout the novel. In real life (and it’s not even a secret) he is National Lampoon contributor and Cracked.com editor-in chief Jason Pargin. That CV might make you think that John Dies at the End is hilariously funny. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s deeply disturbing and even horrifying. And then it’s funny again. In between there are some starkly -- and even surprisingly -- human moments. And all of that sounds like too much for one little debut novel to hold up under, but wait: this is a book that reportedly had over 70,000 downloads when it was free on the Internet. Since it was free, you might think “big deal,” but think again: try to give away 70,000 of anything on the Internet. I promise: it won’t be as easy as it sounds. And so, is John Dies at the End high art? Not exactly. Or maybe, not even. But it’s interesting, compelling, engaging, arresting and -- yes -- sometimes even horrifying. And when it’s not being any of those things, it’s funny. Very, very funny. Next stop for David Wong (or maybe he’ll be back to being Jason Pargin by then), who knows? But, whatever it is, I feel very confident that a lot of people are already waiting to see what he dreams up next. -- Lincoln Cho

The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh (Shaye Areheart) 294 pages
One of the really delicious things about Therese Walsh’s debut novel is that it pushes through to new ground. And even while you are swept away in Walsh’s carefully crafted and constructed story of magic and acceptance and loss, you are aware that you’ve never traveled this way before. I hadn’t realized how rare that feeling could be in fiction until I read The Last Will of Moira Leahy. Are there conventions in fiction? A path you must take in order for people to say: this is this sort of book, shelve it over here. If so, Walsh has forged ahead with no regard for these whatsoever. The result is an intelligent, thoughtful, moving -- and again -- magical, book. Moira was the less bold of a set of twins. Less daring, less spirited, less of the world. When she died in their 16th year, Moira’s twin, Maeve, must come to terms both with the part she played in her sister’s death and with her own path through the world, alone. In adulthood, now a professor of languages, Maeve comes across an antique dagger that reminds her of her childhood. The dagger will open a new chapter in Maeve’s life and lead her to a place of acceptance and understanding. None of that brief description does justice to Walsh’s wonderful creation. It is difficult -- impossible -- to capture that magic in these few words. Nor is it possible to compare it to anything else: Walsh has found her way here alone. The Last Will of Moira Leahy is a wonderful book. Well crafted, beautifully told. A star is born. -- Linda L. Richards

Love Stories in This Town by Amanda Eyre Ward (Ballantine) 224 pages
Readers familiar with Amanda Eyre Ward’s novels -- Sleep Toward Heaven, How to Be Lost and Forgive Me -- already know she can plot herself out of a paper bag with ease. With a relaxed, witty writing style, she has a way of burrowing right to the heart of her characters -- ordinary folks who find themselves caught in the turbulence of unexpected circumstances. The same holds true for her first collection of short fiction, Love Stories in This Town. These dozen tales are sharp-focused family snapshots, catching husbands, wives, children, parents, lovers and ex-lovers in moments of confusion, hope, paranoia, delight, resentment and all the other ingredients of the human stew. This is easily the most enjoyable short story collection I read all year. -- David Abrams

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (Knopf) 384 pages
It never ceases to surprise me that, generally-speaking, the American reading public overlooks Tim Gautreaux. There are very few living novelists who can match what he does on the page and it’s a crying shame that more readers’ eyes aren’t traveling over those pages, turning instead to someone like John Grisham. Gautreaux’ newest novel, The Missing, is my pick for the best fiction of the year and is unmatched in its scope and impact. In the author’s previous masterpiece, The Clearing, he told the story of a man trying to rescue his brother from violence and corruption in the Louisiana bayou. In The Missing, the scope is wider and even deeper, ranging from the horrors of a World War I battlefield to the cinder-polluted atmosphere of a steamboat on the Mississippi. Shell-shocked Sam Simoneaux tries to put the war in France behind him as he settles down with his wife in New Orleans and takes a job as a floorwalker in a department store. After he witnesses the kidnapping of a young girl, he goes on a quest to track her down -- a journey that will take him to several dangerous ports of call along the Mississippi. No mere plot summary can do justice to the magic Gautreaux weaves on each page. This is “total immersion fiction” which gathers us in on the first page and never releases its grip until the final scene of redemption. -- David Abrams

Monstrous Affections by David Nickle (Chizine) 296 pages
The first thing that hits you is the cover. A seemingly innocuous portrait of a man with short cropped hair. But look closer and you see the real picture, something twisted, disturbing. The cover of Monstrous Affections was so compelling that I had to read it. And like the cover, the stories inside are not what they seem. But also, like the cover, the stories inside are brilliant. David Nickle has a talent for writing what, on the surface, appear to be normal stories peopled with characters you can identify with. Stories that on the surface have a feel of the everyday, but upon finer scrutiny outline things seen in a skewed miasma of real life gone horribly wrong. Ghosts, Vampires, mythical beasts and circus sideshows. You’d think that you were reading a book full of what you had always expected a horror story to be, but Nickle takes a left turn and blindsides you with tales that are not of the norm, but are all the more horrific because of surprise twists, darkness and raw emotion. -- David Middleton

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith (Quirk Books)
Though this is meant to be a round up of the books we liked best in 2009, it seems to me that some points can be added for innovation. To be perfectly honest, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies did not sweep me off my feet, but it could certainly be said that -- up until the time it was published in April, there was nothing like this book. How could there be? Honestly, how could anyone even have imagined it? To take a well-loved work of fiction -- a gentle romance, no less, beloved for gentle sighs and add... a zombie component. Early on anyway, part of the appeal had to be the image of poor old Jane spinning in her grave. And then what? Legions of also-rans and wannabes and though there have been a couple of clever contenders, none will ever compare with the weird majesty of that audacious first. -- Linda L. Richards

Raymond Carver: Collected Stories (Library of America) 906 pages
Arguably the most significant publishing event of American fiction in 2009 came with the Library of America’s release of Raymond Carver’s collected stories. Not only does the LoA edition thrust Carver into the pantheon of literary cachet (as if he wasn’t already there), but it provides a fascinating revelation of the writer-editor relationship. As Carver’s long-time editor, Gordon Lish wielded a powerful red pen; just how powerful was not entirely clear until the discovery of Carver’s earlier Lish-less drafts. In its volume, the LoA includes the complete manuscript of “Beginners,” Carver’s version of the 17 stories that were edited by Lish and published in book form as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. The comparison between the two is startling: Lish trimmed not only words, but entire scenes, characters and plot dynamics. Sometimes his cuts are for the better, but other times he reduces Carver’s plumper writing to a perplexing skeleton. The spare (some say “minimal”) versions which we’ve held in reverence as American classics are now revealed to be shadows of their intended selves. The scales fall from our eyes and we see stories like “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit,” “Tell the Women We’re Going,” and especially “The Bath” in a new light. I’m still grappling over the question of where Carver ended and Lish began. The LoA also includes correspondence between the two, including an anguished letter from Carver after he saw the drastic cuts to his stories. He swings like a pendulum in the letter, from praising Lish as “a wonder, a genius” to saying “if the book were to be published as it is in its present edited form, I may never write another story, that’s how closely, God Forbid, some of those stories are to my sense of regaining my health and mental well-being.”-- David Abrams

The Stranger by Max Frei (Overlook) 544 pages
The Stranger is epic fantasy on a quirky philosophical level. But if those words bring Terry Pratchett to mind, just clear your head: Frei’s work is nothing like that. In The Stranger, even the author is a fictional character. It has come to light that the actual author of Max Frei’s books is a woman named Svetlana Martynchik. Max Frei, the quasi author, is also at the center of his tales, which begin in The Stranger with Book One of the Labyrinths of Echo. It took my tightly honed North American sensibilities quite a while to pick up the rhythm of Freis’ writing: the alternate universe of dreams, the fact that he is a sort of magical secret agent who must stop a murderer from our world from getting his way in the new one. North American readers will find themselves slogging through at first: this is not your grandmother’s fantasy. But stick with it: all becomes clear after a while, as well as the density of wit we’re unused to reading with English language authors. The Stranger is a fantastic book and the first of many to be published in English. If I don’t miss my guess, reading it now will put you in the vanguard. -- Lincoln Cho

Sunnyside by Glen David Gold (Knopf) 576 pages
One has to wonder what Glen David Gold (Carter Beats the Devil) really intended when he sat down to work on this novel named after a 1919 silent film. Almost certainly, he couldn’t have meant to compose this marvelous, manic carnival of fiction. Sure, he must have had some idea of where his typing fingers would take him. But Sunnyside is too wonderfully organic, too jam-packed with humorous scenes and unexpected cloudbursts of inspiration to have been tightly outlined on a bulletin board or in a succession of neatly arranged index cards. The cast itself seems ungovernable: actor-director Charlie Chaplin, at the height of his film renown but unable to come up with a brilliant next idea; U.S. Treasury Secretary William McAdoo, trying to drum up funds to fight World War I with help from still-clandestine lovers Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks; movie studio honcho Adolph Zukor; and a dog destined to make movie history. Add to those real-life players Gold’s fictional creations: Leland Wheeler (aka Leland Duncan), the son of a spectacularly failed Wild West star, who craves fame but instead finds love on the European battlefields; Detroit heir and railroad engineer Hugo Black, who volunteers for a secret and ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union; a patently devious Girl Scout; a triple threat of Russian princesses; and a redundancy of adoring -- and sometimes delusional -- film enthusiasts. With his cast of thousands, Gold produces interconnected story lines having to do with the wonders of happenstance, the loss of American innocence, emerging new power balances in Hollywood, and the multiple gifts and frustrations women bring to the world of men. Sunnyside is cinematic in its structuring, yet (like many of the movies Chaplin left behind) so revealing of human nature and emotions that it might be worth sociologists studying. It’s an ambitious fictional undertaking that succeeds on nearly every level. Try to wait for the final credits to roll before applauding, but don’t be surprised if you can’t. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Third Revelation by Ralph McInerny (Jove Books) 336 pages
The Third Revelation is a supremely intelligent novel with Our Lady of Fatima’s revelations as its plot vehicle. This is the first of McInerny’s Rosary Chronicle novels. Beyond the intricacies of plot line, The Third Revelation delivers the reader into the nature of evil, as few people today can imagine it. One of the things that McInerny does so well as a novelist is present the Vatican and the Catholic Church in a light that is not cheapened by the glare of book sales. While other writers and publishers have made it a cottage industry in attacking sheepish Catholics, McInerny takes the time to explain the main tenets of the faith. Ralph McInerny is a historian of the Catholic Church. He was also Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame University from 1955 to 2009. His most memorable books of non-fiction include The Defamation of Pius XII, Miracles: A Catholic View and What Went Wrong with Vatican II: The Catholic Crisis Explained. It is commendable to witness a first-rate novelist entertain and enlighten the reader without having to prostitute himself to the devilish ways of publishers, the temptations of mammon or the call to embrace timely, fashionable theories or ideology. Published later in the year but also terrific, McInerny’s The Relic of Time is a follow-up novel to The Third Revelation, but not a sequel. McInerny’s novels are a fresh substitute to other best-selling, yet highly flawed and clichéd popular novels that deal with fantastic and bogus tales of the Catholic Church. -- Pedro Blas Gonzalez

Under the Dome by Stephen King (Scribner) 1088 pages
Didn’t Stephen King retire? I know that’s probably old news, but still. Writers who retire seldom write opuses that come in at more than 1000 pages. But that’s just what King has done. Under the Dome is a brilliant conceit about what would happen to small town if a huge invisible bubble were to descend on it, cutting it off from the rest of the world. This particular small tow -- in Maine, natch -- happens to offer us readers a little microcosm of the United States during the Bush 2 administration. The bubble comes down, havoc is wreaked, and the scummy politicians see their chance to get all the booty. It’s great fun, with King in top form. This book has more characters than any book should have, and somehow King finds the perfect detail that makes you care about each one, even the ones you hate. It’s one of the best reads of the year. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett (Harper) 400 pages
For this latest Discworld novel, we return to the city of Ankh-Morpork. The characters are a mixture of old favorites and new ones. Each of the novels has had a theme; the theme of this one is football. The wizards of Unseen University discover they have to form a team and play under the terms of a will which supplies the money to pay for most of their meals. It’s either play of be cut back to -- shudder! -- a mere three meals a day! Meanwhile, we meet the new characters, including the head of the University’s Night Kitchen, Glenda, who makes fabulous pies, her friend Juliet, who may just become a dwarf fashion model (well, okay, she’ll have to use a false beard, since she isn’t actually a dwarf, but what-the-heck), Trevor, who could play brilliantly, as long as the football concerned is a tin can and the mysterious Mr. Nutt, who isn’t human, but isn’t sure what he is. I simply couldn’t wait for this one to come out in paperback and got the hardcover. It’s always a joy to see a new Discworld title. -- Sue Bursztynski

Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson (Tor) 592 pages
If you love SF/F and have not yet encountered Brandon Sanderson, you can forgive yourself: the whole thing has happened pretty quickly. That said, don’t stick your head in the sand on this one. He may be relatively new, but expect him to be around for a while. Sanderson is a writer with talent, vision and chutzpah, a combination that put him into awards line-ups and bestseller lists almost from before the first moment. This because Sanderson was hand-picked to write the conclusion to Robert Jordan’s epic Wheel of Time series after Jordan’s death in 2007. Being heir apparent to one of the genre’s most legendary writers did nothing to detract from Sanderson’s reputation, but when you read his work, it’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have gotten there on his own. He is a writer that not only can write, but does. He’s so good, he makes it look effortless, to the point where Warbreaker was more or less written online. The book itself is wonderful. -- Lincoln Cho

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (McClelland & Stewart/Nan A. Talese) 434 pages
Though The Year of the Flood is a gentler dystopic vision than 2003’s Oryx and Crake, there is a pleasantly disturbing darkness to these proceedings. Atwood’s vision of a not-too-distant future seems, in some ways, a cautionary tale. Move forward as you’ve been going, she seems to say, and this is where you might end up. It seems utterly clear that the world Atwood describes here is our own, if only we don’t take pay close enough attention and take sufficient care. But The Year of the Flood isn’t Atwood as preacher, the passionate storyteller is here, as well. In The Year of the Flood, Atwood’s voice is as vibrant and luminous as it has ever been. “The air smells faintly of burning,” we learn on page one, “a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump after it’s been raining.” This is, once again, the familiar and yet utterly strange world Atwood created for Oryx and Crake, and some of the characters and creatures will be familiar, though seen with a different lens and from another place. It is striking to me that, in the year this masterful author turned 70, she would produce this violently fresh tale. This is as good, and perhaps even better, than anything she has written. No one -- no one -- writes quite like Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a masterwork: visionary, beautiful, compelling. Perfect. What a gift. -- Linda L. Richards

Best Books of 2009: Crime Fiction, Part II

Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker UK)
320 pages
I speak from my status as a longtime follower of Indridason’s Icelandic police-procedural series when I say that Hypothermia is, without a doubt, this series’ best installment yet. Why? Because one of the narrative strands in this tale details the childhood tragedy that still haunts Detective Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson. What Indridason does so well in his detective novels is to offer one main story thread, plus three or four story strands in the background that may or may not collide with the main thread. The principal thread in Hypothermia is the tragic suicide of a young woman named Maria. Erlendur believes that there was more to Maria’s demise than the rope found around her neck. After her husband, Baldvin, explains that Maria was depressed following the recent loss to cancer of her mother, Leonora, and desperate enough to dabble in séances, Erlendur decides to go it alone to uncover the truth. His Reykjavik colleagues, criminology expert Sigurdur Óli and policewoman Elínborg, are skeptical of their boss’ tenacity to dig into what is apparently a family tragedy. But he’s been right many times before. During the course of this investigation, we learn more about the snowstorm death of Bergur Sveinsson, Erlendur’s younger brother, and the effects it had on the melancholic detective and their relatives. As with Indridason’s previous novels (including Voices and The Draining Lake), Hypothermia’s narrative is edged with sadness; it’s also shadowed with the paranormal. Although I miss Indridason’s original translator, the late poet Bernard Scudder, replacement Victoria Cribb does a wonderful job here in bringing Indridason’s story to life in the English language. This tale is as chilly as its title suggests. -- Ali Karim

If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (Quercus UK) 455 pages
When we last heard from Bernie Gunther, in The Quiet Flame (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2008), he was departing Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1950, fleeing in the night after solving the gruesome murder of a young girl and falling in love with an enchanting Jewish woman wary of his former Nazi ties. Now leap backwards in time to 1934. Germany’s indulgent old Weimar Republic has given way to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, and Gunther, disgusted with the new regime (“I’m not a Nazi,” he proclaims early on. “I’m a German. And a German is different from a Nazi. A German is a man who manages to overcome his worst prejudices. A Nazi is a man who turns them into laws.”), has quit the Berlin police department to become a house detective at his city’s famous Hotel Adlon. He’s also just accidentally killed a cop, which can’t be good for business. And business isn’t all that good to begin with. For starters, he’s reluctantly helping a hotel guest named Max Reles, a gangster from Chicago, retrieve a 17th-century Chinese box that was apparently lost to the light fingers of a “joy girl” turned stenographer. In addition, he’s playing escort to a woman journalist from the New York Herald Tribune, Noreen Charalambides, who’s looking for evidence of anti-Semitism to stir up an international boycott of Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Games. Gunther would love to cause trouble for Hitler’s government. However, he must move carefully, both to duck blame for that dead flatfoot and because he’s learned that he’s one-quarter Jewish, and is trying to buy himself an “Aryan transfusion” that will expunge that fact from his record. Doing his job while protecting his own ass won’t be easy, especially when he’s called to investigate a couple of homicides. Only 20 years later, though, will this story reach its conclusion, as Gunther encounters both Reles and Noreen in pre-revolutionary Cuba and seeks the justice he was unable to realize earlier. Kerr is a storyteller from whom other storytellers should steal. He has a sharp ear for clever and caustic dialogue, imbues his chief players with egos and emotions enough to make them seem genuine, is economical in incorporating real people into his fiction, and in Bernie Gunther gives us somebody we can always root for -- even when the man does things that ought to land him behind bars. If the Dead Rise Not is not a perfect book: there are too many coincidences in its underdeveloped latter section, and it reaches a too-speedy conclusion. Then again, I’m judging by the high standards Philip Kerr has set for his series over six installments. By lesser measurements, this is Best Book of the Year material. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur) 384 pages
I was bowled over by John Hart’s 2006 debut novel, The King of Lies, and even more impressed with his Richard & Judy-nominated, Edgar Award-winning 2007 thriller, Down River. But as the old saying goes, good things often come in threes. So I wasn’t surprised, soon after cracking the spine of Hart’s latest book, The Last Child, to find myself entranced. When 13-year-old Johnny Merrimon’s twin sister, Alyssa, disappears from a side street in their rural North Carolina hometown, his whole world and that of his family is ruptured. Then it disintegrates, with his father leaving him and his increasingly self-destructive mother behind. While everyone else assumes Alyssa is dead, Johnny decides he will find out for sure. Armed only with his wits and the assistance of two friends -- police detective Clyde Hunt, who’s working the Alyssa Merrimon case, and a giant named Levi -- Johnny goes looking beneath the veneer and into the historical and emotional cracks of his town. A second girl’s vanishing heightens the tension. What Johnny finds as he probes these mysteries will make your skin crawl, I guarantee it. Filled with Southern angst and genuine-feeling family strife, and reminiscent in tone of Harper Lee’s fiction, The Last Child points Hart in the direction of Grisham-level fame. This book already won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. -- Ali Karim

The Lovers by John Connolly (Atria) 352 pages
This eighth novel in Irish writer John Connolly’s Charlie Parker private-eye series pulls together many of the strands he’s been weaving through his preceding installments. Each word, sentence, paragraph and page in The Lovers seems to have been considered, polished and refined to form a picture-perfect narrative, one that is as chilling as it is poignant. The tale starts out with Parker looking into the mysterious suicide of his father, following the latter’s shooting of two young lovers for no apparent reason. Charlie Parker’s investigation will place his own life in context and reveal why shadowy figures from his earlier adventures (The Collector, The Traveling Man, etc.) were interested in him. Making his job more difficult, journalist Mickey Wallace is writing a lurid true-crime book about Charlie Parker’s life, and a Jewish cleric knows more than he’s willing to reveal until dead bodies start to pile up. Parker has to rely on his psychopathic sidekicks, Louis and Angel, to watch his back as the secrets of The Lovers are revealed. This tale is peppered with heart-wrenching vignettes concerning the dark side of our existence. At times, I put the book down and felt my eyes moisten, due to the compassion exhibited in this yarn. On other occasions, I tossed the book aside, due to my growing sense of unease and fear about what lay ahead. Reading The Lovers felt like opening the door to a charnel house, filled with the screams of the dead. But its narrative is enriched by Connolly’s research, evident in some curious observations, historical references and insights into the darker edges of religion. When I reached the novel’s end, all the events in the previous Parker books fell into context like the numbers on a lottery wheel. A most satisfying experience, indeed. -- Ali Karim

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Penguin
Press) 275 pages
It’s always raining on the dream-cityscape that’s the setting for Jedediah Berry’s unusual debut novel, The Manual of Detection, a surrealistic and symbolist book whose mean streets have as much in common with René Magritte and Salvador Dali as with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Protagonist Charles Unwin (sic) labors at a mammoth investigative bureau called “The Agency” -- like the Pinkerton outfit as imagined by Jorge Luis Borges, maybe -- where his unexpected promotion from clerk to detective (“For better or worse, somebody has noticed you”) provokes a carnival of odd events. There are strange doings at the edge of town, and odd shifts in the time-space continuum, as Unwin searches for his illustrious missing predecessor at the Agency, the palindromic Travis Sivart. The plot (as it were) is in constant shift and rain-blurred focus, like a poem written by an automaton or a dream generated by software, in this realm where “every looking-glass is a two-way mirror.” If you’re seeking a standard-issue thriller, drop The Manual of Detection like a hot rock. But if you want an inventive, amusing, Fellini-esque dream-within-a-dream, try this somnambulistic fable. You may never get out awake. -- Tom Nolan

The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Ballantine) 336 pages
“Trauma scene and waste cleaning is a growth industry,” remarks Po Sin, the owner and operator of Clean Team. His observation comes early in Charlie Huston’s terrific neo-noir black comedy, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. It’s such a weird statement that you have to laugh; but it’s true, people die in horrible ways every single day, and someone has to clean it up -- for good money. Someone like Web Goodhue. The protagonist in these pages, he’s an asshole: he admits it, his friends know it, and his family knows it. Fine. The biggest lie about fiction writing is that your protagonist has to be likable. Why? Was Tony Soprano really a nice guy? How about serial killer Dexter Morgan from the Showtime TV series Dexter? They’re charming and charismatic, but not actually good people. They are, however, easy to relate to as humans. Web, too, is human. Fatal flaws and all. He suffered a tragedy that no one should have gone through, and paid dearly for it. Now, he loafs around his best friend’s apartment/tattoo parlor and does as little as he can. But his buddy finally gets sick of it and pushes him toward the first job available, which is cleaning up gory crime scenes. The people he works with are just ordinary folk, trying to make a buck. It isn’t long, though, before Web is summoned to clean up a mess for a woman he just met. And before you can say “trauma,” he’s involved with a bizarre smuggling operation and trying to free a kidnap victim from some very bad people. Gore lovers will find plenty of that here, but there’s also a nice and intricate crime-fiction plot for the rest of us. In the end, what makes The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death great is its searing humanity. Frankly, with such a great premise and character, I won’t be surprised if a network like Showtime or HBO picks up Web Goodhue as a series star. -- Cameron Hughes

9 Dragons by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) 374 pages
It’s tempting to compare today’s Southern California detective novelists to their predecessors, especially to Raymond Chandler. But while it’s said that former journalist Michael Connelly, best-known as the author of several novels featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch, was inspired to write novels in part by the work of Chandler, he has surely long since put his own distinctive stamp on Los Angeles-based crime fiction. No one would mistake 9 Dragons, Connelly’s latest Bosch book, with a Chandler effort. For one thing, much of its action takes place in Hong Kong, where the police detective’s teenage daughter lives, and where he races to save her from what seems to be imminent danger. The author’s characteristic touches are in strong evidence: current cases’ connections with past Bosch mysteries and with other Connelly series; and the sense of doom that seems to dog the detective like a hovering cloud. As fast as Harry Bosch rushes towards the light at the end of his personal tunnel, so quickly he drags his dark shadow behind -- always seeming to succeed and fail in equal measure. Some of the painful personal shocks he endures in 9 Dragons make Chandler’s mean streets look, in retrospect, almost benign. -- Tom Nolan

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux) 208 pages
Denis Johnson is the King Midas of contemporary American literature. It seems there is nothing he touches that doesn’t gleam with the burnish of gold. Carveresque short stories? Check (Jesus’ Son). Central American political thriller? Double-check (The Stars at Noon). Vietnam War magnum opus? Check, check and check (Tree of Smoke). This year, Johnson delivered a novel which could have rolled off the typewriters of Chandler, Cain or Hammett. Set in contemporary Northern California, Nobody Move stars a guy named Jimmy Luntz as a sort of Humphrey Bogart drifter who gets on the wrong side of a man named Juarez, who has sent his trusted henchman, Ernest Gambol, after Jimmy to collect a hefty debt. Meanwhile, Jimmy is ensnared by Anita Desilvera, a femme fatale who’s been framed for extortion by her louse of a husband. In the novel’s first two dozen pages, Johnson sets the stage for a tense dance of pursuit, evasion, sex, revenge and hair-trigger violence. At once a pastiche and an homage to classic noir-lit, Nobody Move is a novel that snaps its sentences like a stick on a snare drum and barrels through 200 pages with the accelerator pressed to the floor. Compared to the hefty Tree of Smoke, Nobody Move is a stiletto. But it cuts just as deep. -- David Abrams

The Professional by Robert B. Parker (Putnam) 304 pages
Robert B. Parker makes it look easy. Too easy, in a time when the pain and agony of writing has become just another marketing point, and any author who dares to be prolific runs the risk of being dismissed as somehow inferior, of being a mere entertainer, of being a hack. As though the time spent writing a book is a better indication of its literary merit than the book itself. Well, the hell with that. In 2009, while other, often more highly regarded novelists were allegedly sweating over every comma and clause (pausing only to whine publicly about the agony of writing), Parker published four books: Night and Day, another in his popular Jesse Stone series; Brimstone, the third is his acclaimed western series, featuring town tamers Hitch and Cole; and Chasing the Bear, a Young Adult novel featuring a teenage version of Spenser, Parker’s bread-and-butter private-eye hero. Chasing the Bear was a solid and effective work, dealing -- as do almost all of Parker’s books -- with matters of honor and morality, courage and compromise, and love and autonomy. And all rendered in Parker’s lean, tight prose, with little in the way of fat, and with dialogue -- Parker’s one real literary indulgence -- that’s right up there in the George V. Higgins/Elmore Leonard category. The Professional offers more of the same. The 37th installment of his long-running Spenser series, it follows the Boston gumshoe as he investigates a handsome stud who’s simultaneously bedding and putting the squeeze on four married, middle-aged women. Pro that he is, Spenser tracks down the cad fairly quickly. But then the real fun begins. Were this the work of a hack, stopping the blackmail would be the end of things; but Parker, as always, has a few buttons to push. The scoundrel turns out to be surprisingly affable, piquing Spenser’s curiosity. And the question of why, not who, becomes the point -- at least until, in a deft change of focus, we see what Parker’s really after this time: a mediation on masculinity and friendship, and its limits. Granted, anyone familiar with Steinbeck may see what’s coming, and the plot shifts and the “likable” blackmailer may throw some readers. But somehow Parker pulls it off, offering a smart, literate mystery that provokes and challenges, while never failing to entertain. And it didn’t take him 100,000 words and three years of hand-wringing to accomplish. That’s because Parker, like Spenser, is a professional. -- Kevin Burton Smith

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) 448 pages
After being given his pink slip at the Los Angeles Times in a downsizing move, cop-shop reporter Jack McEvoy is not about to start feeling sorry for himself. Instead, he chooses to go out with a bang. And as we see in The Scarecrow, he has just the attention-grabbing article in mind. Sixteen-year-old Alonzo Winslow stands accused of killing 23-year-old stripper Denise Babbit and stuffing her body into the trunk of her car. Los Angeles police detectives claim that Winslow confessed to the killing, and the authorities are set to charge him as an adult. Although McEvoy initially envisioned his article as a large exposé on how a young man is turned into a killer, his subsequent investigation leaves him convinced that Winslow didn’t actually do Babbit in. But very quickly, he runs into problems. First off, Angela Cook, his younger replacement on the cop beat, convinces the assistant city editor to let her co-write the article and grab a piece of McEvoy’s byline and thunder. Secondly, Babbit’s real killer -- “The Scarecrow” -- becomes aware of McEvoy and Cook’s interest in the homicide. The Scarecrow makes it his priority to stop them before they dig too deep and discover his sordid history. After things go south with deadly consequences, McEvoy calls in the one person he can trust to help: his ex-lover, current FBI agent Rachel Walling. Walling is a recurring character in many of Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, and a fan favorite. It isn’t long before she and McEvoy pick up their romance where it stalled years ago, a romance that nearly ended her law-enforcement career. Walling is a prototypical Connelly character: she has been to the dark side and back. The sublime joy of Connelly’s newest novel is watching McEvoy and Walling track down their quarry. The reader feels an increasing dread, knowing that The Scarecrow has them outwitted at almost every turn. This is a taught thriller that makes clear why Connelly’s name so often appears on bestseller lists. -- Anthony Rainone

The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central) 416 pages
The bigger the first book, the harder the second. The next fence, as any jockey will tell you, is always the toughest. It’s hard to get away from adages, except to say that British writer Tom Rob Smith clears the second obstacle better than the first with another blockbuster set in the mid-20th-century Soviet Union. This time around, Joseph Stalin is dead, and Nikita Khrushchev decides it is time for a change. His “Secret Speech” is meant to herald a new era and condemn the recent past, but it brings immense chaos. Author Smith revels in it. Child 44 -- based on the true story of Andrei Chikatilo, who murdered a huge number of Russian children over many years -- was the super hit of last year’s crime list. It brought Smith the sort of success that every new writer hopes for on his or her debut. The fact is, though, that I didn’t like Child 44 very much, and was surprised so many people did. I found Smith’s fictional “solution” far-fetched and unsatisfactory. It stuck too close to the true story for much of the time, and then wandered off into adolescent fantasy at all the crucial points. I mean to say, does one man murder an army of children for no better reason than to trace the brother he hasn’t seen for ages? The strong points of Child 44 were respected secret policeman Leo Demidov, his wife, Raisa, and Smith’s tense prose. All of those elements are back in The Secret Speech, tighter and tougher than before. The story is a rollicking rollercoaster ride of a teenage adventure filled with rooftop escapes, Siberian death camps, Hungarian revolutions and hand-to-hand fighting on the high seas. It is all very Robert Louis Stevenson-esque, with hunks of Joseph Conrad’s Typhoon thrown in. Who needs a film script? Hollywood should already be hopping. -- Michael Gregorio

Shadow and Light by Jonathan Rabb (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 384 pages
Family and film share the spotlight in this intricately wrought sequel to Jonathan Rabb’s first historical crime thriller, Rosa (one of January’s favorite books of 2005). Again, we’re in Berlin, this time in 1927 at the height of the Weimer Republic, watching beleaguered Kriminal-Oberkommisar Nikolai Hoffner go through the paces of probing a murder. The dead man -- a supposed suicide -- is Gerhard Thyssen, a producer at the famous Universum Film AG (Ufa) studios outside the city. One expects to learn that Thyssen didn’t off himself. What’s less predictable is where Hoffner’s investigation will lead: to the disappearance of a movie starlet, the discovery of a secret room at a sex club where pornographic flicks are shown, and a criminal plot centered on technology allowing sound to be recorded synchronously with what had been silent pictures. It seems Thyssen was responsible for Ufa’s top-secret work in the “talkies” realm, and now that he’s gone, so is the device he’d sought to perfect. Everyone wants to find the thing, including Ufa’s most prominent director, the real-life Fritz Lang (Metropolis), because they can imagine how it might revolutionize entertainment (and, of course, make possible Nazi propaganda newsreels during the coming decade). Pursuing inquiries that lead him deep into Berlin’s seamier corners and expose a plot to rearm post-war Germany, Hoffner seeks assistance from one of a powerful local criminal, as well as from the captivating Helen Coyle, who may or may not be a talent agent with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the States. At the same time, the chief inspector must contend with his two estranged sons, one of whom has gone to work for Ufa, while the other, angrier boy has fallen under the sway of Joseph Goebbels and the right-wing German Workers’ Party. Rabb does an excellent job in Shadow and Light of painting Weimer-era Berlin in all of its multifarious and corrupt hues, and does much to elaborate on the character of his protagonist, who is beset on all sides by his failures and the painful reminders of them. One can only imagine what challenges and disappointments might yet befall Nikolai Hoffner, as the author prepares what he insists is the final part of a trilogy. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (Random House) 288 pages
Alan Furst gets better, book by book. Each one reveals some new, intriguing aspect of his immense talents. When his first historical spy novel, Night Soldiers, appeared in 1988, it hardly seemed possible that his work could get any better. But Dark Star (1991), with its effortless painting of the complexity of middle-European politics, would be difficult to beat, while the ironic poignancy of The Polish Officer (1995) put him into the top bracket of contemporary spy novelists. Yet here we go again. Best books of 2009. (Yes, I know that The Spies of Warsaw came out in hardcover last year, but its publication this year in paperback makes it fair game for this listing.) Although Furst’s chosen genre is ever more clearly defined, there is nothing reductively “spy” about his storytelling. It all comes down to the solidity of the characters he creates, his consistent eye for detail and the natural vivacity of his plotting, which is the true essence of his narrative style. The Spies of Warsaw is as similar to -- and as unlike -- his other books as anything could be, though it is distinctively “Furstian.” Which is to say that it has a recognizable bouquet, like the finest of wines. Spies is the detached, understated memoir of Colonel Jean-François Mercier, a French aristocrat working in Warsaw, Poland, as a military attaché in 1937, making the embassy rounds of social events, picking up tidbits from colleagues, lovers and men who happen to work in Nazi arms factories, watching the “storm-clouds gather over Europe,” and yearning for his country estate and his favorite hunting dogs. The novel is a consummate achievement, a page-turner of astounding literary quality. In the end it all boils down to one driving impulse: Mercier wants to rescue Anna Szarbek from Warsaw and carry her off to Paris. And that is what he does. He gets the girl, despite the gathering storm clouds, knowing that it won’t be long before the Nazi’s tanks come rolling down the Champs Élysées. Was ever a plot more simple, or more satisfying? -- Michael Gregorio

Stardust by Joseph Kanon (Atria) 512 pages
Publisher-turned-novelist Joseph Kanon’s latest book -- his fifth -- is as good as any of those that have come before, including the Edgar Award-winning Los Alamos (1997). It’s about a young man, Ben Collier, the son of a famous German director, who has returned to the United States from service in Europe with the Signal Corps. Ben travels to California in 1946 after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his B-movie director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious tumble from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives just in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects that someone pushed Danny to his early death, and he turns amateur detective in order to identify the culprit. Liesl and Ben soon begin a scorching affair, which is of course too good to last. Toss in the atmospherics of Los Angeles’ German émigré community and revelations about Danny’s role in an anti-Communist crusade launched by a congressman against the American film industry, and you’ve got all the makings of a box-office, er, bookstore hit. -- Dick Adler

Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Touchstone) 370 pages
Author Gruley is the Chicago bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, but don’t expect any business secrets to be revealed in his smashing debut thriller, Starvation Lake. Gruley has either played or been obsessed with the lower depths of amateur hockey, and he’s as familiar with the backwaters of Michigan as he is with his computer keyboard. He also knows how to drag you kicking and screaming into a story so gripping that you’ll probably devour it in one gulp -- like the heavenly sounding egg pie served at Audrey’s Diner (“Cheddar cheese and scrambled eggs bubbled up through a golden cocoon of Italian bread ... Steam billowed from the sausage, bacon, potatoes, green peppers, mushrooms and onions baked inside ...”). In this yarn, Gus Carpenter is the associate editor of the local newspaper, a man who’s been forced home to Starvation Lake (where his shrewd mother still lives) after a promising investigative reporter’s job at a Detroit broadsheet imploded. One freezing night, the remains of a snowmobile are discovered in the titular lake -- the same machine in which Carpenter’s former hockey coach died some years back after crashing through the ice on another, nearby body of water. Evidence of the coach’s murder is discovered, and the mystery of how the snowmobile got into Starvation Lake adds another baffling element. Carpenter’s efforts to solve these mysteries promise to shake up more than a few people. This one’s a definite keeper -- especially when served with egg pie from Audrey’s. -- Dick Adler

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley (Delacorte) 373 pages
Flavia de Luce, the feisty 11-year-old English girl at the heart of Canadian author Alan Bradley’s debut crime novel, may be the most engaging such precocious protagonist since Dick Lochte’s Serendipity Dahlquist or even Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew. This hectic but charming tale set in 1950 is told in Flavia’s commanding voice, and few openhearted readers will likely resist her particular combination of candor and hauteur. The youngest daughter of an aloof, tolerant, stamp-collecting widower with limited means and a colorful past, Flavia -- a resourceful loner with a bent for chemistry -- suffers (and exacerbates) the sibling frictions of living with two sisters in a dilapidated Georgian manse in the countryside. When a furtive visitor drops dead in the backyard cucumber patch, the apparent victim of a poisoned custard pie, Flavia’s singular traits and talents come into bloom. The result is an adventure that rockets (by bicycle) from village shops to college cloisters to police headquarters and back, with Flavia doing her de Lucean best to exonerate her father and save her own pre-adolescent skin. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (and its planned sequels) should delight clever 11-year-olds of all ages. -- Tom Nolan

The Taken by Inger Ash Wolfe (McClelland & Stewart) 415 pages
I have yet to read a review of The Taken that doesn’t mention, even as an aside, the mystery of the author’s identity. In truth, though, the guessing is less strident this time out than it was for Inger Ash Wolfe’s “debut” outing, The Calling, when that book was published early in 2008. Part of the reason for this has to be that both books are beyond good: they’re fantastic. And there comes a moment very early on when you realize, the who matters less than the what in this instance: The Taken is just a terrific book, no matter whose name you slap on the cover. In our second visit with rural Ontario police Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef, we find her recovering from back surgery and wallowing in pure and palatable misery, partly from pain and partly from the humiliation of having to live with and be cared for by her ex-husband and his new wife. The discovery of a body in a local lake refocuses Hazel’s attention. Not only was it not the drowning accident it first seemed, but it appears to have occurred in just the same way as a death described in their community newspaper: in a work of fiction. The deeper Hazel digs the less she feels she knows ... and the more there is to unravel. The characterizations here are brilliant and crystal clear. Like The Calling, The Taken is a novel of living, breathing beings -- though sometimes, perhaps slightly too real. DI Micallef is brilliant and perfect in her imperfections. She is grumpy, uncomfortable and impatient in her pain, and these things inevitably creep into her work. And that work is demanding and surprising. The suspense here is perfectly wrought, but not overworked. The Taken stands with the very best of contemporary crime fiction. Period. -- Linda L. Richards

Woman With Birthmark by Håkan Nesser (Pantheon) 336 pages
Are some sins unforgivable, some people unredeemable? Such are the questions attached to the brutal deeds of apparent vengeance in Woman With Birthmark, Håkan Nesser’s latest account (to reach American shores) of the cases of police Inspector Van Veeteren (as translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson). Someone is murdering certain male citizens in a grotesque way that implies an element of payback. What former wrongs are thus recalled? And where will the killer strike next? Van Veeteren imagines his quarry to be “a bit cheeky, a little bit roguish even, but at the same time, serious. And very, very determined.” And the thoughtful detective sees the murderer’s acts as emblematic of social trends destined to play out in his native land: “The veneer of civilization, or whatever you preferred to call it, could begin to crack at any moment, crumble away and expose the darkness underneath. Some people might have imagined that Europe would be a protected haven after 1945, but Van Veeteren had never been one of them.” In such a morose place and time, Håkan Nesser’s 60-something police investigator -- a solitary chess aficionado and Bach-listener -- proves a most apt, able and sympathetic character. -- Tom Nolan

Best Books of 2009: Crime Fiction, Part I

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell (Little, Brown) 320 pages
Peter Brown is an intern at a crappy Manhattan hospital, and he’s got a secret. A big one. He’s really a former hit man, now in the U.S. Federal Witness Protection Program. Things are going smoothly ... until he comes across an old associate who threatens to blow the whistle on him and have him killed if he doesn’t save him from the cancer that’s eating his organs. Josh Bazell’s debut novel has its flaws: the supporting cast is shockingly thin; you can predict every single plot twist in this novel if you’ve read or seen any mafia-related fiction (or, really, any crime fiction at all) over the last three decades; and the book feels weirdly short, and it’s even shorter on heart and soul. Nonetheless, I love it. I learned something this year: Books grow. They change. This time last year, I didn’t think Beat the Reaper would find a place on my Best of 2009 list. I didn’t even think I’d remember it a year from then. Yet the book stayed with me. I even re-read it, and now, understanding all the flaws it contains, I can get past them and enjoy the author’s voice. And Bazell may have the best new writer’s voice I’ve discovered in a long time. It’s quick and snappy, with a great smart-ass tone to it. And he employs footnotes to great effect: they’re funny, they’re educational (I now know that it’s really hard to murder somebody with air bubbles in a needle), and best of all, they serve the plot. The writing actually gets better as this book moves along, and toward the end, Bazell starts to show the heart that I often find lacking in this sort of book. I can’t wait to see what’s next from this author. -- Cameron Hughes

Black Friday by Alex Kava (Mira) 304 pages
Alex Kava’s newest Maggie O’Dell book, Black Friday, is a brilliantly executed page-turner. The story opens with a series of backpack bombs going off in Minnesota’s giant Mall of America on the busiest shopping day of the year. The explosives were carried by unsuspecting college students who thought they contained only computer-jamming equipment. Now, three survivors of that disaster find themselves in a race for their lives. One of them is Patrick Murphy, the stepbrother of FBI profiler and series heroine Maggie O’Dell. Assigned to track down the terrorist mastermind behind these bombings -- nicknamed The Project Manager -- is O’Dell, one of my favorite protagonists in thriller literature. She is still hurting emotionally in this book because her past supervisor, Assistant Director Kyle Cunningham, died in the previous novel. Her new boss doesn’t trust her at first, and then leads her in a strange direction: the possibility that The Project Manager is the mysterious John Doe #2 seen with Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City shortly before the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Although many people were killed in the mall blast, significantly more are endangered as The Project Manager plans his next big attack, this time in Phoenix, Arizona. Author Kava (Exposed, Whitewash) provides plenty of intriguing complications, including the involvement of a U.S. senator, who may want to quash the truth here under the guise of national security interests. One thing is certain however: Don’t ever discount O’Dell’s tenacity and grit. This thriller should be at the top of your list. -- Anthony Rainone

Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (Amistad/
HarperCollins) 434 pages
Before I read Attica Locke’s debut novel, I was intrigued to see her compared with Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley and Greg Iles. Would it have been possible to measure her against three more different writers? And yet, when you read this ambitious, muscular and ultimately triumphant work, you understand. In a way, protagonist Jay Porter was broken by the African-American Civil Rights Movement. In college, he was filled with passion for the cause that ultimately landed him in trouble with the law: wrongfully imprisoned and abandoned -- and perhaps even turned in -- by his white girlfriend. Ten years on, it’s 1981 and he’s a lawyer with an office in a Houston strip mall with bad carpet, a surly secretary and not enough clients to help him keep his wife and their unborn child in the style to which he would like them to become accustomed. And Porter is haunted by the circumstances that landed him in legal trouble. He sleeps with a .22 under his pillow and drives with a .38 in his glove compartment. He is paranoid and neurotic and otherwise deliciously flawed. But he is holding things together, despite the odds. One night, against his better judgment and on his wife’s insistence, he saves a woman from drowning. His act of unwilling heroism sets off a chain of events that are nearly his undoing ... or are they to be his redemption? Even when the story is entirely told, we’re not completely sure. Like all remarkable books, Black Water Rising works on every level. The portions of the story that deal with the Civil Rights era are well researched and tautly told. Those that deal with Jay’s present are suspense-filled and keep us on the edge of our seats. There are important issues in play here, but Locke is skilled enough that those lift the story; elevate it, never bogging it down. Attica Locke is a wonderful storyteller and Black Water Rising is a perfect book. -- Linda L. Richards

Blood Money by Tom Bradby (Bantam Press UK) 384 pages
Slowly but surely, British TV political editor Tom Bradby is stitching together a fictional universe of his own design. Over the last nine years, he’s seen four of his historical thrillers published: The Master of Rain (shortlisted for the 2002 Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger Award), The White Russian (one of January Magazine’s favorite books of 2003), The God of Chaos (another January pick, this time from 2005), and his newest book, this year’s Blood Money. What’s interesting about these novels, in addition to the fact that they’re all brimming with nefariousness and memorable characters, is that their casts tend to overlap, even though their time frames are different. For instance, one of the New York City cops in Blood Money, which is set in 1929, is the brother of a “Chicago-hardened” officer who, in The Master of Rain, helped pursue Chinese warlords and murderers in Shanghai in 1926. And this new novel’s protagonist, Joseph Quinn, was last seen in The God of Chaos, set in Cairo in 1942. These overlapping players give some continuity to Bradby’s stories, even though he isn’t committed to writing a series. Blood Money begins near the outset of America’s Great Depression, when Quinn reaches the scene of an apparent suicide: a banker has tumbled to his death from a Wall Street tower. However, the fact that he landed on his back, and that he was dressed against the day’s rainy weather (“Who puts on a coat to kill himself?”), suggest his last leap wasn’t made without assistance. Further complicating matters is the discovery in the dead man’s office of a photo showing a beautiful but under-attired woman who may or may not have been the deceased’s lover, and who may or may not know why he perished ... but who is definitely Quinn’s adopted sister and his brother’s fiancé, Martha. With Gotham’s latest mayoral race heating up, and the possibility of links being made between that “suicide” and stock market manipulations, organized criminal activities, and at least one cop on the take, Quinn’s superiors want his investigation wrapped up fast and quietly. But Quinn won’t let go, even though his determination to solve this puzzle threatens to end his own career, do further damage to his former celebrity cop father and cause Martha -- who he’s lusted after for years -- to hate him forever. Powerful storytelling, made all the more interesting by Bradby’s precise period atmospherics. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry (Metropolitan
Books) 112 pages
Write down this name and remember it: Hannah Berry. Her moody, atmospheric and astounding Britten and Brülightly may just be the best (and most unsettling) film noir since Chinatown. And it isn’t even a movie. It’s a graphic novel, a gloriously gloomy, deliciously cinematic tour de force, boasting almost-black-and-white artwork and measured, tight prose that “gets” noir in a way most current denizens of NoirLand never will. New kid on the block Berry straddles both the cinematic and the literary with her first effort. When Fernandez Britten, a dour, disillusioned 1940s London “private researcher” is hired by a woman to investigate her husband’s apparent suicide, he sees it as a chance for redemption. His long string of tawdry domestic cases has left him spiritually bruised and battered, teetering on the brink of an emotional and existential collapse, ostracized and alone. Except, that is, for his long-suffering, smart-ass partner and partner, Stewart Brülightly, a horny and rather acerbic teabag that Britten carries in his pocket. Yeah, a teabag. After all, this is England. This out-of-nowhere touch of surrealism, the occasional burst of humor and the large format of the work itself might suggest a child’s storybook, but don’t get suckered in. Britten and Brülightly’s unapologetically grim conclusion (and the deliberately beaten-down, washed-out art that makes the entire world look like it’s crying) is definitely not for kids -- or overly sensitive adults. Forget it, Jake -- it’s Lipton. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker (Knopf) 288 pages
This scenic, sharply written series debut stars the head policeman in a small village called St. Denis on the River Vézère, in the Dordogne region of southern France (where the astounding caves of Périgord are located). Benoît Courrèges, or Bruno as his many friends known him, is a fellow of many parts and talents. A former soldier who has embraced the pleasures and slow rhythms of country life, he lives in a restored shepherd’s cottage, shops carefully at the weekly market, coaches the local children in rugby and tennis, makes excellent foie gras and pickled walnuts, and outwits bureaucrats from the European Union who try in vain to enforce their ridiculous laws governing local produce. Bruno has wit and charm that appeal to many of the local women, including a memorable character known as the Mad Englishwoman. But he also solves the occasional crime, as he must do after the peace of St. Denis is disturbed by the brutal slaying of an elderly North African who fought in the French army. The man is found with a swastika carved into his chest, leading Bruno and his friend and mentor, the Mayor, to fear that militants from the anti-immigrant National Front are responsible. -- Dick Adler

Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster) 240 pages
Nobody combines historical fact with bravura fiction the way that Megan Abbott does. In The Song Is You, she gave her own distinctive stamp to the true tale of a young Hollywood starlet: Jean Spangler, a sexy-longlegs who disappeared one night in 1949 and was never seen again. The papers called her the “Daughter of Black Dahlia,” connecting the mystery of her fate to another notorious case from two years before. The true parts of Bury Me Deep are based on a criminal investigation that filled the tabloids in 1931, when a young doctor’s wife from Phoenix, Arizona, Winnie Ruth Judd, gave herself up to police, saying that sexual jealousy had led her to kill two of her female friends, dismember their corpses and then pack those off in a couple of trunks to a Los Angeles railway station. Judd -- dubbed “The Trunk Murderess,” “Tiger Woman” and “The Blonde Butcher” -- was found guilty and sentenced to death. Later, though, her lawyer asked for an amended verdict of not guilty on the grounds of insanity. Judd was finally relegated to a mental hospital, from which she escaped seven times. After the final escape, she went to work as a servant for a wealthy San Francisco family. Abbott’s fictionalized version of Judd, renamed Marion Seeley, is both a scarier and more touching figure than the original. In her pared-to-the-bone prose, Abbott brings Marion to vivid life as a woman whose innocence is bared and broken after she falls in with “the wrong crowd,” but who learns from that experience how to protect herself. No matter what it takes. All four of Abbott’s novels so far have been nominated for Edgar Awards, and Queenpin picked up the 2008 Edgar for Best Paperback Original. She deserves another Edgar for Bury Me Deep, a stunning work that shows her performing a dark magic all her own. -- Dick Adler

The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth (Viking) 416 pages
One of my favorite debut novels of the last 10 years was Rennie Airth’s River of Darkness (1999), which introduced John Madden, a thoughtful Scotland Yard detective inspector and World War I veteran. Madden went on to star in a second book, The Blood-Dimmed Tide (2003), which found him retiring from the force and settling down in Surrey, and lacked the pulse-racing suspense of his earlier adventure. Fortunately, I can report that The Dead of Winter shows Airth returning to the headlong pace he established originally. On a cold evening in 1944, a Polish girl is brutally murdered on the streets of wartime blacked-out London. Lacking clues to the identity of her assailant or a motive for her killing, the police figure it for a random crime. But as it turns out, the deceased, Rosa Nowak, had been working at Madden’s country farm. His interest in the case keeps it from being buried. And it isn’t long before there are connections realized between Nowak’s slaying and similar garrotings on the Continent. It appears that Madden and his former Scotland Yard colleagues are after a professional assassin and master of disguise, who’s been linked to anarchists and has lived under the radar in England for years, only now to risk exposure by killing Nowak. Airth does an excellent job of heightening suspense around the identification and pursuit of this hired gun. And though his sharing of viewpoints between several of the players here deprives us of the opportunity to get much inside Madden’s noggin, Airth still manages to give his protagonist an emotional presence and stake in the outcome of the investigation. Don’t be surprised to find yourself holding your breath as the denouement approaches. Airth had suggested that the Madden series would be a trilogy, but recently he’s hinted there might be at least a fourth book. I couldn’t be more happy at his change of mind. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Death Was in the Picture by Linda L. Richards
(Minotaur) 288 pages
After enjoying Death Was the Other Woman, the opening installment of Richards’ historical mystery series, and including it among my Best of 2008 crime fiction picks, I eagerly awaited the sequel, Death Was in the Picture. I wasn’t disappointed. The year is 1931, and secretary Katherine “Kitty” Pangborn -- a child of privilege who’s been forced into lesser circumstances by America’s Great Depression -- is investigating some dark dealings in Hollywood with her boss, hard-drinking Los Angeles gumshoe Dexter Theroux. Dex has been employed by mysterious parties to keep his private eyes on Laird Wyndham, a cinematic heartthrob whose moral standing may not be totally upright. When a promising young ingénue is murdered during a party (shades of the Fatty Arbuckle scandal), and Wyndham is spotted leaving the room where she died, only to be arrested, Dex smells a rat. But has Wyndham merely been framed, or does he perhaps have an agenda of his own in all of this? I love Richards’ detailed grasp of the alternately glitzy and glum era about which she writes, and the slang that goes along with it. However, my heart is most captured in this series by Kitty Pangborn. She’s modest but certainly resourceful, and she can handle herself in tight spots -- which is good, given that her boss tends to spend a bit too much time with the boys (Jim Beam, Johnnie Walker, etc.). As Death Was in the Picture enters its later reels, Kitty and Dex go poking inside the workings of the Hollywood machine and see just how power -- and the hunger for it -- can lead to abuse and corruption. There are twists and turns enough for a carnival in these pages, along with some delightfully comic scenes. And Richards leaves the door open for more Kitty adventures -- which can’t come too soon for me. -- Ali Karim

Dope Thief by Dennis Tafoya (Minotaur) 304 pages
So many among the new breed of noir writers seem to have been weaned on pulp fiction cartoons and second-rate Jim Thompson-like fireworks, that’s it’s a real rush to discover newcomer Dennis Tafoya pays as much attention to character as he does to mayhem and glib nihilism. Not that his fierce debut, Dope Thief, is all Dr. Phil or anything, but Tafoya’s idea of action aims higher than a few “cool scenes” and some penny-ante existentialism. In these pages, loser buddies Ray and Manny pose as agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in order to rip off Philadelphia dealers even lower on the evolutionary scale than they are for their stash and cash. At first, it seems like a sweet gig, but Ray knows better: “It couldn’t go on forever ... Everyone was high. Everyone was stupid. Everyone had guns.” And sure enough, it’s not long before these two criminal masterminds inadvertently rip off someone smarter and far more deadly than they are: members of a ruthless biker gang who want more than just their pound of flesh. Forced to flee, the two friends split up, and the story takes a deliciously wicked hop, becoming a brooding, character-driven study with a peculiarly philosophical bent, as 30-something Ray tries to make sense of both a raw, hard-scraped world of “fucked-up people” and his own wasted life. Yeah, there’s a girl, and enough of the sort of rough, brutal nastiness you’d expect; but the real pleasure in Dope Thief lies in Tafoya’s willingness to dig into the lies and sorry justifications that Ray -- and by extension, all of us -- tell ourselves. Anyone can write about a character pulling the trigger, but it takes real chops to make us care not just about where the bullet’s going but about the man who’s holding the gun. Fans of the young man blues, as played by Richard Price or George Pelecanos, take heed -- there’s a new kid in town. -- Kevin Burton Smith

The Draining Lake by Arnaldur Indridason (Thomas Dunne/Minotaur) 312 pages
The Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö really started something in the 1960s with their smart, socially conscious police-procedural novels involving Superintendent Martin Beck; the success of their books began a long-lasting boom in Scandinavian police crime fiction, a creative movement whose products, in translation, are this decade showing up on American bookshelves and bestseller lists. One of the most compelling Beck successors is Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson, the Icelandic police detective chronicled by Arnaldur Indridason in such works as The Draining Lake (translated by Bernard Scudder). Divorced, haunted by the childhood memory of a vanished brother, pained by the disappointing behavior of his two grown kids, the inspector brings a heightened emotional sensitivity to the investigation of his police-puzzles -- in this instance, the discovery of a decades-old skeleton at the bottom of a lake, weighted down by a Cold War-era radio transmitter. The inspector and his colleagues trace the skeleton back to East Germany and a time when that country’s citizens were encouraged by authorities to spy on their own friends, families and lovers. The dogged Inspector Sveinsson doesn’t fail to get to the heart of the matter, in this subtle and moving work in which the detective’s contemporary melancholia complements the private sorrows of postwar Europe. -- Tom Nolan

Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay (Bantam) 416 pages
Noir hits hardest when it hits where we live. Which is why domestic noir is big right now. Mouth-breathing sociopaths, terrorists (both homegrown and foreign), serial killers and hit men are all credible bogeymen. But the loss of a child? The guilt over a failed marriage? The dashed dreams of a life gone awry? That’s what really makes us squirm. Which is why Linwood Barclay’s latest novel, Fear the Worst, is so unnerving. It’s the sheer familiarity that brings it all back home. A broken family, a good daughter, a wild friend, a fragile ex-wife, new relationships, the shards of old ones, a mopey stepbrother, bullshit office politics, a cookie-cutter subdivision -- is any of this honestly unfamiliar to anyone out there? Even the divorced couple at the story’s core, used-car salesman Tim Blake and his ex, Suzanne, aren’t the perpetually squabbling wolverines so often depicted in literature and film, but recognizable human beings simply trying to patch together their tattered lives, hoping they haven’t permanently scarred their 17-year-old daughter, Sydney. They carry on, trying to do as right as they can. But we all know where good intentions can lead. And for Tim, hell is that moment when Sydney doesn’t come home from her summer job. Tim’s increasingly frantic search (rooted in such day-to-day concerns as maxing out a credit card) eventually strips bare the safe, smug suburban banality that passes for the pursuit of happiness. Lies, hate, deceit, fraud, alcoholism, jealousy, prostitution, loneliness, rape, even murder -- none of it is quite as far away as you might think. By the time Barclay jacks up the tension to Hitchcockian levels, you’ll be peering through the shades, wondering what that car’s doing there at this time of night. Or where your child is. -- Kevin Burton Smith

Feelers by Brian M. Wiprud (Minotaur) 320 pages
New York author Brian Wiprud has been poised to be the Next Big Thing for awhile now, and if there is a God, Feelers will be his breakout hit, because it’s absolutely fantastic. It contains one of the oldest plots in fiction: A regular person comes across a large stash of money, takes it for himself and then learns why greed can be a very bad thing. Morty Martinez is a “feeler.” Officially, his job is to clean out the houses and apartments of old people who just died, in order to lessen the burden on their relatives. But his real purpose is to search around for any money hidden in coffee cans or shoeboxes, where elderly folk distrustful of banks might secret it. While on a routine job, Morty discovers the largest stash of his life, and instead of telling his employers, he keeps the dough for himself and buttons his lips. Morty is such a great character, humble yet proud of his Mexican heritage and fiercely loyal to the Brooklyn streets where he grew up. His world feels old and worn and lived in, as authentic as anything, and there isn’t a stock player among his cast of friends and associates. Even Wiprud’s baddie here seems genuine, a guy who was once a kid with a bright future, but who had some poor influences and wound up in prison, where he learned to be a killer (an unfailingly polite one). The humor and vivid players in these pages put me in mind of the Coen brothers’ film work, particularly their latest flick, Burn After Reading. The Coens might do well by Wiprud’s many creations -- the regular people, shysters, cons, killers and folks just trying to get by with their heads down, hoping not to cause a stir. -- Cameron Hughes

Get Real by Donald E. Westlake (Grand Central) 288 pages
I’m still reeling from Donald E. Westlake’s death just a year ago. There are a lot of authors whose work I loved, and who passed away in recent years, but none I idolized more than Westlake -- a novelist who, for my money, was the best plotter alive. Get Real is a very nice parting gift from the great man. Affable criminal genius John Dortmunder and his gang are feeling the squeeze of the new world. The sagging economy has made robbery less lucrative and security in most places has gone way up. Executives at a TV studio are feeling the heat, too. They have launched a string of successful reality shows (including one about a farm stand in the little town where Westlake’s 1990 novel, Drowned Hopes, took place -- just one of the many in-jokes here), but they desperately need a new hit. Perhaps up-and-coming executive Doug Fairkeep has the ticket: Why not a reality show about a real heist? At first, Dortmunder and his gang are hesitant to participate; being watched while committing theft isn’t usually a good idea, and the risk seems too high for a little reward. But details are worked out and the gang members are assured that everything will be fine, as far as legal niceties go. So they accept -- and meanwhile scheme to rob the production company of its hidden assets. There are lots of running gags in this story: the reality show’s title keeps changing; new characters (such as a gun moll) are added to “spice it up”; and Dortmunder’s gang keeps breaking into Fairkeep’s apartment to express their concerns about the show. The real comedy, though, comes straight from the world of reality television, where it seems perfectly normal to discuss at length the details of an S&M dungeon show. No doubt about it: I’m going to miss you, Mr. Westlake. -- Cameron Hughes

The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville (Soho) 336 pages
Just when you thought the invasion of excellent Irish crime writers -- a group nicknamed “Celtic Noir” -- had ended, along comes Stuart Neville with his first novel. Such impressive colleagues as John Connolly, Ken Bruen and Gene Kerrigan have joined in praising The Ghosts of Belfast (which was published last summer in the UK as The Twelve). Bruen calls it “the book when the world sits up and goes ‘WOW, the Irish really have taken over the world of crime writing.’” This novel’s central character is Gerry Fegan, a former Irish Republican Army (IRA) “hard man,” a killer in Northern Ireland, who has now been reduced by the coming of peace to a shambling drunk, haunted by the ghosts of 12 victims who follow him everywhere. The only way that Fegan can kill off his ghosts is by tracking down his IRA superiors, the people who ordered that he commit those murders. This he does with violent precision, one by one, until he is alone again. Along the way, author Neville condenses the fear and hate that troubled Ireland for so long, at the same time creating a memorable character with ease and a cool, deceptively straightforward writing style. -- Dick Adler

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson (Knopf) 512 pages
Following the incidents described in Larsson’s debut novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), Lisbeth Salander, the 20-something partner of Swedish journalist-publisher Mikael Blomkvist, “inherited” a vast sum of money, so she’s decided to see something of the world. Distanced from her love interest, and feeling jealous of Blomkvist’s relationship with a business associate, the misfit Salander cuts herself off. While exploring the Caribbean island of Grenada, danger approaches, thanks to a tornado called Matilda. During that storm, Salander encounters other threats, these in human form. Afterward, she returns to Sweden and resumes a physical relationship with an old girlfriend. However, like Batman or Superman, our Ms. Salander has her own secret retreat, an expensive flat registered under one of her secret identities. Meanwhile, Blomkvist is puzzled by Salander’s disappearance and her refusal to return his calls. He plans to publish a special edition of his magazine, Millennium, to coincide with a book being written, one that exposes the illicit business of people-trafficking and the damaged women sucked into that world. Blomkvist knows that this exposé will destroy some senior people in Swedish society, but being every inch the moral crusader, he can’t see beyond his wish to shed light on the hypocrisy such individuals exhibit. Things take a turn for the worse, though, when the two journalists hired for the job are murdered, and the description of their fleeing assailant matches Lisbeth Salander. From there, we’re offered a multifarious web of dark doings that seem to originate with, or at least relate to Salander and her strange behavior. To investigate this case, Swedish police assign a motley bunch headed by the wonderfully crafted Inspector Jan Bublanski (known behind his back as “Officer Bubble”). The novel’s conclusion is truly shocking, as we learn why Lisbeth Salander became such an outcast. Despite its convoluted and violent narrative, The Girl Who Played with Fire shows why Larsson’s name will one day be spoken with the same reverence currently reserved for the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and others. -- Ali Karim

The Hidden Man by David Ellis (Putnam) 336 pages
If you’re the prosecutor who just hung Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich out to dry, what do you do for an encore? If you’re David Ellis, you write your best legal thriller yet, creating a new series hero who should be around for a long time. Jason Kolarich, a Chicago criminal defense attorney easing the pain of a personal tragedy by taking on no-brainer cases and drinking himself into a stupor most nights, has come down in the world. A college football star, he landed a good job with one of the Windy City’s most prestigious law firms after serving as a county prosecutor. Fame and fortune came his way in the wake of his second-chairing the successful defense of a state senator who had been charged by the feds with extortion and taking bribes. But then came tragedy -- the car-accident death of his wife and child. Kolarich is only just getting back on his feet, when he’s handed a nightmare of a case. It begins when a man known to him only as Mr. Smith offers the attorney a very large retainer to defend Sammy Cutler. Cutler was Kolarich’s closest boyhood friend, but he hasn’t seen him in 20 years. Now Cutler is up on a murder charge, accused of killing the sexual predator who everybody believes stole Cutler’s baby sister, Audrey, from her bed a quarter-century before. Cutler wants Kolarich to get him off, but it’s not going to be easy. The case will “require dedication, consistency and full work days,” Kolarich explains -- and the price of screwing it up will be that his old friend spends the rest of his life behind bars. -- Dick Adler

Hollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh (Little, Brown) 352 pages
Several years ago, I read The New Centurions (1971) and The Choirboys (1975), and declared that the latter was the best police novel ever written -- a sentiment I haven’t changed since. Both books were real, funny and mature reads. So I rejoiced when, after 10 years of semi-retirement, cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh returned to fiction-writing in Hollywood Station (2006). And Hollywood Moon, his third and final book in that series (after 2008’s Hollywood Crows), feels like a fitting end to the fictional world he’s created. We find Hollywood Nate still trying to break into the movie business, surfer cops Jetsam and Flotsam still searching for that perfect wave, and female cops still struggling to win respect in a male-dominated field. As in many of Wambaugh’s ensemble cop “dramadies,” Moon is told in a succession of vignettes that tie together seamlessly at the end. The main thrust of its plot is identity theft committed by a seemingly normal married couple, and how things get out of hand and deadly. The heart of this and other Wambaugh novels, though, lies with the beat cops. As much as the next guy, I like books about homicide detectives, when they are done well; but there’s a fascination to be found in reading about the wholly separate world of the boys in blue who work the grunt jobs, and the deeds they commit that only rarely win them recognition, and usually earn them derision -- and far less money than they deserve. Wambaugh’s famous dialogue skills are fully on display here, and his characters threaten to leap off the page, sweating and irritable. The author understands the culture about which he writes so well, you can’t help but become immersed in his tale. A lesser writer would have made this series a flat-out comedy. But Wambaugh is smart: he understands that there is a truth and humanity in even the funniest scenes. God, I’m glad Joe Wambaugh is back and at full speed! -- Cameron Hughes

Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed by Marc Blatte (Schaffner
Press) 275 pages
Hip hop is the music of the new and increasingly ugly world. The best of it is political and moving, with vivid characters and provocative writing. I’d like to see somebody like Jay-Z or Nas pen a crime novel. Go listen to Common’s song “Testify,” about a black man on trial: It features a beginning, a middle and a twist ending with a femme fatale. There were a lot of places in Humpty Dumpty Was Pushed, Marc Blatte’s hip-hop-related debut novel, where I wanted to check the cover to see if this wasn’t an 87th Precinct story by Ed McBain. That’s high praise, and understandable, since McBain was Blatte’s mentor for many years and is considered one of the most influential crime writers who ever lived. In Blatte’s tale, we meet Sal Messina, aka Black Sallie Blue Eyes (a hip-hop sort of a name if ever there was one), a New York City homicide cop who’s very good at his job. One night, Messina is called to investigate the gun slaying of a man outside a Manhattan nightclub -- a crime that incites a refugee from Kosovo to seek revenge. Meanwhile, Messina and his team look for the gangsters behind a music producer’s stabbing. Blatte creates a huge world in these pages, populated by young and hungry rappers and old pros in the music game, as well as immigrant thugs and a diverse cast of cops. I love it that Blatte just lets his characters talk amongst themselves, sometimes about really inane stuff. McBain was famous for his written dialogue, and Blatte follows his lead, while never actually copying his mentor. Blatte’s Manhattan is both real and on the edge of reality. A lot of the players in his yarn are outrageous, without being cartoony. By the end of the book, I knew these folks, I grieved for them when bad things happened and I laughed in joy at their victories. That is rare behavior for me when it comes to an author’s debut. My only question now: When do I get to read Blatte’s next novel? -- Cameron Hughes

Best of 2009: Non-Fiction

The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society by Frans de Waal (McClelland & Stewart/Harmony) 291 pages
If half the things Dutch-born biologist and bestselling authors Frans de Waal posits in The Age of Empathy is true, it might just break your heart, even while it lifts it up. The world-renowned primatologist argues that, like all animals and despite societal evidence to the contrary, humans are wired for empathy. de Waal takes it all a step further, saying that, with a new American president and a new agenda, “Greed is out, empathy is in.” Whether or not you buy what de Waal is selling, The Age of Empathy is a thoughtful and even joyous book. “The emphasis is on what unites a society,” de Waal writes in his preface, “what makes it worth living in, rather than what material wealth we can extract from it.” I want to live in the world in which de Waal believes. Read this book and you will, too. -- Linda L. Richards

Along the River that Flows Uphill: From the Orinoco to the Amazon by Richard Starks and Miriam Murcutt (Haus Publishing) 257 pages
“I’ve nearly died three times in my life -- which is funny in an ironic way, since I was once accused of never taking any risks.” This first line of Along the River that Flows Uphill sets the tone completely. We understand, just from that, that we’re about to embark on an adventure. The other thing that we understand is that we’re in the hands of a storyteller or, as it turns out, a couple of them. In 2005, the authors were commissioned to write an article for Geographical, the magazine of the London-based Royal Geographical Society. Their assignment was to travel the length of the Casiquiare River in Venezuela, the river that joins the Amazon and the Orinoco by apparently flowing uphill. One can see, however, where the material the pair were assembling might have overflowed from the article they’d been assigned. The book the two produced is both enjoyable and informative: and so much beyond the travelogue one might expect. It is creative non-fiction. It is literature. It is history. It is geography. It is adventure. And it is cracking good fun. -- Aaron Blanton

An American Trilogy by Steven M. Wise (Da Capo) 304 pages
I think it’s possible that the publication date of Steve M. Wise’s latest book was unfortunate. The best laid plans. An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery & Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River was published about a week before the strain of influenza most popularly known as swine flu started getting a lot of ballyhoo from CNN and other experts in the art of the sensational. That is to say that the book was published at a time when even staunch animal activists weren’t feeling especially compassionate about the fate of pigs. And, really that’s a shame because, once again, Wise has written a trenchant and important book. Wise is a lawyer who has taught at Harvard, Lewis and Clark and other places. He is president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. And he cares very deeply about both human and animal rights, as he demonstrated in several previous books, including Though the Heavens May Fall and Rattling the Cage. In An American Trilogy Wise trains his sharp eye on Tar Heel, North Carolina, home of the largest slaughterhouse in the world, once the site of atrocities to African American slaves and before that home to indigenous Americans. At times, An American Trilogy is a difficult book to read. There are some things here a lot of people don’t really want to know. In the book’s prologue, Wise explains that he was deeply affected by the material that moved him to write the book. That passion shows up on every page, as he tells us, “In this book, I do not recite the atrocities we perpetuate on pigs. Instead, I discuss why we think it’s okay to inflict them. And that discussion will bring us to the study of history.” In that study, Wise examines why Americans accept the type of cruelty he shows us in Bladen County, North Carolina. More: he connects it with cruelty to native Americans as well as African American slaves. He does all of this with the style and grace that always marks his work. An American Trilogy is a remarkable book. -- Monica Stark

Annie’s Ghosts by Steve Luxenberg (Hyperion) 401 pages
The say everyone has a story. Not everyone has the talent to tell that story well. Fewer still have the skill and experience to tell it both well and properly. Editor and journalist Steve Luxenberg has all that stuff and in Annie’s Ghosts: A Journey Into A Family Secret he invites us into the hidden places in his own family history. It really is a great journey. “The secret emerged without warning or provocation, on an ordinary April afternoon in 1995,” Luxenberg writes in his prologue. “Secrets, I’ve discovered, have a way of working themselves free of their keepers.” Those first lines hint at the magic that Luxenberg will weave with his tale, a story as compelling as anything found in fiction. After Luxenberg has written his mother’s obituary describing her as an only child, he discovered she’d had a sister who had been institutionalized. And not, as one might expect, when they were small children, but when the sisters were in their early 20s. Annie’s Ghosts is a meticulous reporter’s journey to put all the pieces in their proper place. But it is with a storyteller’s panache that he leaves us breathless while he spins his tale. -- Sienna Powers

Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller (Nan A. Talese) 592 pages
Ayn rhymes with “mine,” and that about sums up everything you need to know about the author and this wonderful biography of her. Though a few Rand bios have appeared before, Heller went farther and dug deeper to create Ayn Rand and the World She Made, specifically into long-closed Russian archives. (Rand was a nice Russian Jewish girl before she became a global phenomenon.) Through her girlhood poverty, to her early work as a Hollywood screenwriter, to her first novel, Anthem, then the ones that made her name forever -- The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged -- Ayn Rand and the World She Made deconstructs the author as never before, laying bare her writing process, her abominable extra-marital love life, which ended her own marriage and another, and the struggle to keep control of Objectivism, the philosophy that gives her books their scaffolding. Love or hate her, there’s no denying that Ayn Rand was a force of nature, and this book is like reading an amazingly detailed account of the storm. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown by Jennifer Scanlon (Oxford University Press) 288 pages
Bad Girls Go Everywhere is not quite the sexy tell-all of author and journalist Helen Gurley Brown’s life that the cover might hint at, but in some ways, it is a great deal more. Author Jennifer Scanlon is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Bowdoin College, an award-winning teacher and scholar as well as the author of books with titles like Significant Contemporary American Feminists and The Gender and Consumer Culture Reader. In some ways this authorship -- as well as Scanlon’s academia-informed approach to the former Cosmo editor’s life -- makes Bad Girls Go Everywhere the definitive work on Gurley Brown. One can not imagine anyone exceeding it. Even though the book lacks the puerile tone and surface facts of biographies written with a more popular readership in mind, Bad Girls Go Everywhere is a very interesting book. Even without the author’s obvious passion and knowledge of her subject, Gurley Brown’s life provides plenty of fuel for a well-stuffed biography. Most surprising of all -- at least, for this reader -- was the fact that, despite her reputation as a tough-as-nails professional women who never ate enough, Gurley Brown emerges Scanlon’s portraiture as a second wave feminist. Someone whose contributions to the women’s movement and to her gender’s real-world emancipation are perhaps too great to calculate. Other books on 87-year-old Helen Gurley Brown’s life may well emerge over the years, but I imagine Bad Girls Go Everywhere will remain the definitive record of a remarkable journalist’s life. -- Aaron Blanton

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 336 pages
Until reading New York Times writer Timothy Egan’s latest work, I had never even heard of the Great Fire of 1910, which consumed 3 million acres of Pacific Northwest timberlands (an area slightly smaller than Connecticut) in only two days, and killed more than 80 people. But the drama and humanity Egan brings to that history make it hard to forget. The best-recognized players here are recently retired U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt and his friend and sparring partner, Yale-educated forester Gifford Pinchot, who together created the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and fought to strengthen its authority after Egan’s “big burn.” And the villains are embodied in U.S. Senator Weldon Heyburn, an Idaho Republican who “stood in the way of nearly all Roosevelt’s progressive initiatives,” and who sought to defund and destroy the Forest Service and turn all of the forests it managed back to industrial use. However, the real heroes in The Big Burn have to be the Forest Service rangers who, outmanned and outgunned at every turn, nonetheless fought valiantly to stop a disastrous blaze that had been wind-whipped and stampeded across acreage grown dry after months of sunny summer. While thousands of residents fled the danger zone, racing away on trains that threatened to tumble from charred and wrecked trestles, the rangers found help from prisoners released for the onerous duty of firefighting and a segregated U.S. Army unit that, against tremendous odds, managed to save one town and safely evacuate another. Although the final chapter of this book is a bit too reportorial, not quite matching the pace of what precedes it, Egan (best known until now for his 2006 book, The Worst Hard Time) shows that he has mastered the fine art of fetching new color and life even from history that never lacked for vividness. The Big Burn is nothing if not a scorcher. -- J. Kingston Pierce

Eiffel’s Tower: And the World’s Fair Where Buffalo Bill Beguiled Paris, the Artists Quarreled, and Thomas Edison Became a Count by Jill Jonnes (Viking) 368 pages
One French critic called it “an inartistic ... scaffolding of crossbars and angled iron” with a “hideously unfinished” appearance. Another denounced it as an “odious column of bolted metal.” Hard as it is to believe, the 1,000-foot Eiffel Tower -- built as the centerpiece of Paris’ 1889 Exposition Universelle -- was considerably less appreciated at the time of its raising than it is nowadays. In her entertaining new history, Eiffel’s Tower, Jill Jonnes recounts the myriad difficulties that engineer Gustave Eiffel encountered in finishing his monumental erection. But she also offers a three-ring circus of contemporaneous characters. Prominent among those is Buffalo Bill Cody, who brought his Wild West Show -- complete with stampeding Indians and sharpshooter Annie Oakley -- to the Paris world’s fair at the start of what would be a highly profitable European tour. Appearing here, too, is bad-boy newspaper publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr., who lorded over what had been his father’s New York Herald, while also establishing a Paris edition of that broadsheet, which promoted the ’89 expo -- and eventually became part of today’s International Herald Tribune. Further animating this volume’s narrative are artists (including the tortured Vincent van Gogh and the mercurial James McNeill Whistler), and inventor extraordinaire Thomas Edison, who delighted Parisian dignitaries with his new talking phonographs. Jonnes notes here, as well, that the Paris fair was important in educating the French about their colonial empire’s foreign acquisitions. Quoting from one newspaper account, she writes that “Fairgoers were lured by the ‘smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite [Vietnamese] gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.’” Amid such exotic enticements, it’s a wonder that anyone found time to scale Eiffel’s tower -- then the tallest manmade structure in the world. -- J. Kingston Pierce

The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names by Andrew Scott (Harbour Publishing) 661 pages
Though The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names has a very tight focus and thus would be of interest to only a narrow band of January Magazine’s readership, it is an absolutely splendid -- perfect? -- example of what a book like this one should look like and how it should be. The book celebrates the 100th anniversary of a landmark work by one Captain John T. Walbran called British Columbia Coast Names. Andrew Scott’s new book takes Walbran’s seminal work and expands upon it... exhaustively. “We navigate the world with names,” Scott writes in his introduction. “Names familiarize the world, make it intelligible to us, help us live in it.” And, as Scott also points out -- in words and deed -- the names that places are given are often a key to their history and so, in entry after entry, we cover the nooks and crannies of Canada’s southwestern coast and get to know it in a much more intimate way. Scott is a journalist, photographer, editor and the author of several books on the history of British Columbia. -- Linda L. Richards

Farewell, My Subaru by Doug Fine (Villard) 224 pages
One of the things that’s struck me about the green movement: it can be a little dour. And, actually, I get it. Really, I do. There’s a lot of serious stuff going on, after all. Climates changing. Polar icecaps melting. Food supplies dwindling. It’s all enough to put you in a really bad mood. As a result, a lot of Earth save-related stuff is strident. Unsmiling. You get the feeling you better put up or shut up: the planet is not going to save itself. If you’re not going to do something about it, you’d better stand aside or get trampled in the angry green parade. Farewell, My Subaru isn’t like that. The first hint, of course, is that title. A perfect title, when you think about it. A little bit romantic. A little bit evocative (the whole fossil fuel thing). Certainly a little bit fun. The title hints at all the things this book is and means and accomplishes. But it’s not an idle reference either. In fact, you meet the late, lamented Subaru at the very beginning of the book. The car is dying. And it’s not dying well. Author Fine watches it happen while wondering how much he actually cares. The opening lines of Farewell, My Subaru: “As I watched my Subaru Legacy slide backward toward my new ranch’s studio outbuilding, the thought crossed my mind that if it kept going -- and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t -- at least I would be using less gasoline.” NPR contributor Fine’s print work has appeared in The Washington Post, Wired and Salon. His voice is gentle, his humor sharp, his message clear. Farewell, My Subaru is an easy, enjoyable read. And that’s a good thing, because this is a book that everyone needs to read. -- Lincoln Cho

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter (Penguin) 288 pages
When I heard Novella Carpenter call chickens “the urban farming gateway animal” on a local radio show, I cringed. I’d about had it with the twee artisanal food revolution here in Oakland, California. And now this person with the strange name had not only created a farm in an area of the city I wouldn’t drive through, she’d written a book about it. I bought Farm City with a sneer in my canning, confit-making heart, expecting my disgust with all the moneyed folks slumming it for cheap real estate and restaurant-level cookery to be validated. Instead I was charmed. Novella Carpenter is fiercely dedicated to farming her plot, a formerly vacant lot in what locals call “Ghostown.” Further, she is vehement in her defense of Oakland’s poorest, whom she lives among. People are free to pick her greens; she teaches the local children rabbit husbandry. Her pig-raising adventures will make you laugh aloud; the shrine to a young gangster’s death will make you weep. Along with her steadfast boyfriend, Bill, Carpenter raises chickens, turkeys, a couple pigs, rabbits, and enough vegetables to feed half her impoverished neighborhood. Written with humor, sweetness, and honesty, Farm City stands transcends the foodie genre. It’s just a plain terrific book. -- Diane Leach

The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser (Smithsonian) 272 pages
Art lovers and Bostonians know the significance of St. Patrick’s Day, 1990. That was the evening two men dressed as police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and emerged 90 minutes later with art that is estimated to be worth over $600 million in today’s market. Stolen were Rembrandt’s only known seascape, Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and 12 other masterpieces by artists such as Vermeer and Degas. In his book The Gardner Heist, Ulrich Boser picks up the trail left by the thieves, interviewing the police assigned to the investigation, federal officials, and more than a few shady underworld types to try and find out what happened to the stolen art. Boser categorically rejects the “Dr. No” theory, espoused by many, that the theft was commissioned by a rich art collector wanting to hoard the works for himself. Instead, Boser believes that the heist was perpetrated by Boston-area gangsters and makes a credible circumstantial case in support of his theory. Still, the treasures remain missing, as evidenced by the empty frames still on the walls of the Gardner Museum. -- Stephen Miller

The Last Founding Father by Harlow Giles Unger (Da Capo) 400 pages
Harlow Giles Unger is one of those authors with the talent and skill -- not to mention passion -- to breathe life into history. You don’t have to read very far in his 16th book, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness, to understand this. In The Last Founding Father, Unger builds a case for the importance of a vastly overlooked and underrated figure, America’s fifth President, James Monroe. Unger delivers his material on a wave of adventure and a compelling sense of importance. You won’t ever see the early history of America in quite the same way. -- Aaron Blanton

Losing Mum and Pup by Christopher Buckley (Twelve) 272 pages
Despite the fact he died in 2008, William F. Buckley, Jr. became the subject of two memoirs in 2009. The first and more prominently reviewed book was this one by his son Christopher Buckley, who is best known for satirical novels set in Washington, as well as for not necessarily espousing the conservatism of his famous family. Losing Mum and Pup is young Buckley’s story of the 11 month period of time between the death of his mother, the dowager socialite Patricia Buckley, and the force of nature that was WFB. In this affectionate but by no means artificially sweetened remembrance, Christopher Buckley shows many sides of his parents that are notably cringe-worthy: Patricia’s outright lies about her connections to British royalty and her family’s upbringing; William’s habit of urinating in public (and out the door of a moving limousine, to boot), and the fact that Christopher’s upbringing was largely subcontracted by his globe-trotting parents to servants. However, despite the occasional whiff of dirty laundry being aired, “Christo” as he was called by his father, manages to send his parents on a fond and moving farewell, noting that they were flawed but loving and highly entertaining. -- Stephen Miller

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women by Harriet Reisen (Henry Holt) 363 pages
It wasn’t until I sat down to read Harriet Reisen’s biography of Louisa May Alcott that I realized, A/ How little I had known about this writer and B/ How deeply interesting her story might be. Because, when you think about it, it only stands to reason that her journey through life will have been an interesting one or, at least, that an author as well loved as Alcott has been in the 140 years since Little Women was published would merit at least one really great book about her life. Then I got more deeply into the book and my jaw dropped: there was so much more to Alcott than I could ever have imagined. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I really just had no idea. Here Reisen shows us Alcott the pulp fiction author (!), the poet and playwright. Alcott the actress, the activist, the Civil War nurse. Alcott the drug user who, as a teenager had crushed on both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, who walked with the young Alcott on Walden Pond. Reisen, known more for her screenwork than for other types of writing, wrote and produced a documentary on Alcott that premiered on PBS during December. This is a remarkable book. -- Adrian Marks

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line by Martha A. Sandweiss (Penguin Press) 384 pages
Clarence King was a famous 19th-century geologist and mountaineer, the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and the man who exposed the notorious (and, really, incredible) Great Diamond Hoax of 1872. Born in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1842, a confidante of the privileged, a friend of onetime presidential aide and future U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, and a bestselling author to boot -- “the best and the brightest of his generation,” as Hay pronounced -- King also led a secret life. For 13 years, while his real name was featured in newspapers and rode the lips of government officials in need of scientific expertise, the unmarried King engaged in a parallel existence as “James Todd,” a supposedly light-skinned black Pullman porter with a much younger common-law spouse, Ada Copeland, the daughter of former Georgia slaves, and a home and family in Brooklyn, New York. Feeling confined by the upper-class life into which he’d been born, King first studied and toured, and then daringly leapt the border between white and African America -- but never told his closest friends, or even his aged mother, what he’d done. Only after his death in 1901 were the facts of his double life revealed, thanks to a court case brought against his dubious estate by his black wife. Author Sandweiss, a Princeton University history professor, uses the story of Clarence King and Ada Copeland to explore the bigotry, economic disparities and racial “passing” pervasive in post-Civil War America, and raise the question of whether even King -- for all of his intelligence -- could admit “the paradoxes of his life.” She presents here a haunting tale, made all the more intriguing by a mystery raised in its later pages: Who was responsible for maintaining the payments on Ada King’s residence even after husband Clarence/James died? In other words, who knew about his secret life before the newspapers made it a sensation? -- J. Kingston Pierce

Right Place, Right Time: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement by Richard Brookhiser (Basic Books) 272 pages
William F. Buckley’s protégé at the National Review, Richard Brookhiser, produced his own remembrance of Buckley in Right Place, Right Time: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley. Jr. and the Conservative Movement. While Brookhiser lacks Christopher Buckley’s wit (not to mention a checklist of possible grievances), it’s Brookhiser’s book that comes off as more of a score-settling work. Hired by National Review at age 22 (his first piece appeared at age 15), Brookhiser was informed by Buckley that he would be the successor editor-in-chief upon the latter’s retirement. That promise was broken several years later, leading to Brookhiser’s decision to leave National Review’s full-time staff and begin work as a freelance writer (he has gone on to write a magnificent series of short historical works on subjects such as Alexander Hamilton and the Adams family dynasty). Brookhiser is smart enough to realize that things worked out for the best, but the sting of rejection by one’s mentor still clouds what is otherwise an interesting look inside the premier publication of American conservatism. The two Buckley books published in 2009 should serve as appetizer to the main course currently being prepared -- a full length biography of Buckley coming from New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus. -- Stephen Miller

Stitches: A Memoir by David Small (McLelland & Stewart/W.W. Norton) 336 pages
David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir is fantastic. As good or better than the most celebrated graphic novels that it has been compared to. Stitches is all the more compelling because it is not a novel at all. Rather, it is a graphic telling of author and illustrator David Small’s early life. This is David through the Looking Glass as seen by David Lynch or perhaps Tim Burton, a dark and often disturbing graphic glimpse at a childhood that many of us might have thought was best left alone. Small takes us through the dark corridors of growing up in Detroit in the 1950s, the son of a radiologist father whose constant x-raying ultimately gives the boy cancer. And things go downhill from there. Stitches is a huge distance from the work Small is best known for. He has illustrated over 40 children’s books and won the most prestigious awards available to him in the process. It’s not hard to see why: Small is hugely talented and his understanding of visual storytelling is complete. -- David Middleton

Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman and Elizabeth M. Norman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) 480 pages
A horrible, brave, compelling and some ways awful book. And a brilliant one. You want to stop reading. You can’t look away. The topic has been covered before and it’s been covered well. But Tears in the Darkness is an expertly wrought passion play. One part history, one part journalistic retelling, one part literary non-fiction, Tears in the Darkness is likely the best (or worst, depending upon perspective) account of the Bataan Death March of 1942 when more than 76,000 troops under American control laid down their arms. “The single largest defeat in American military history,” the authors tell us. “The sick, starving, and bedraggled prisoners of war were rounded up by their Japanese captors and made to walk 66 miles to a railhead for the trip to prison camp, a baneful walk under a broiling sun that turned into one of the most notorious treks in the annals of war, the Bataan Death March.” -- Aaron Blanton

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals by Gillian Gill (Ballantine) 480 pages
When a biography is very good and is also big and muscular, it’s common to compare the book to a novel. And what makes such a comparison valid? Certainly not -- or hopefully not -- a strong element of fabrication. Rather, how the book impacts the reader draws compare. A very good biography -- well researched, written with passion and competence, on a subject worthy of close examination -- will sweep the reader away. Take him or her to the special place in the imagination that good books inhabit. The characters -- or in the case of biography, the subject -- seem emotionally to leap off the page. They become real. If, in fact, this is what is necessary for a biography to be crooned over as novel-like, then We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals will be. Author Gillian Gill is that rarest of combinations: an academic who knows just how to spin a tale. She demonstrated same with earlier biographies of Florence Nightingale, Agatha Christie and Mary Baker Eddy. In We Too she tells the story of one history’s most important and complicated royal couples: Queen Victoria and her Prince Consort, Albert. Gill reveals a relationship much more complex than has popularly been thought. A passionate marriage, but one fraught with power struggles as well as a family trying to find its way through the confounding corridors of a life lived on center stage. -- Linda L. Richards

Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Da Capo) 264 pages
Exactly what does Einstein’s famous equation mean? How does time work? Are time and space the same thing? And how about mass and energy? What would happen if we could travel at the speed of light? If you have ever tried to find out the answers to these questions but thought the explanation would either put you in a boredom-induced comma or cause irreversible brain damage due to overly deep thinking, then you need to read Why Does E=mc2? Written by a couple of brainiacs with the propper creds to perhaps even outwit Albert, the book explains in simple, but not patronizing language, the whys and whatnots of particle physics and why it is -- or should be -- important to all of us. Can I even begin to explain a portion of some of the theories and scientific principles covered in this book? Not a chance. But if you read Why Does E=mc2? it’ll all be deciphered for you in nice, elegant, and often humorous prose. -- David Middleton

Where Underpants Come From by Joe Bennett (Overlook Press) 252 pages
New Zealand-based educator, journalist and travel writer, Joe Bennett, explores the intricate path a five-pack of underwear take from the cotton fields of China to his own suburban supermarket. It’s a humorous journey in some ways, and Bennett is a very good and often funny writer. But it also becomes a very interesting a comment on how much the West has come to depend on the East. It also inevitably raises some ethical questions about why, first of all, underwear should be required to make such a perilous journey in the first place and why, when they do, they’re much, much less expensive than if they were made across town. Every aspect of the book is riveting: the back country travel Bennett does in China in search of the roots of his underpants; his visits to various factories and, most importantly in many ways, his exploration in and observations of the new China, how it works and how we all fit together. Frightening, funny and fiercely interesting. -- Adrian Marks

Best of 2009: Art & Culture

Adrift on the Ark by Margaret Thompson (Brindle & Glass) 203 pages
There is something sweet and unassuming in Adrift on the Ark. And the book itself is physically small. These two things -- the sweetness, the size -- work together to mask the power of the topic at hand and, ultimately, of Thompson’s little book. In lush yet charming prose, Thompson examines pets and peacocks, swans and bats, and there’s even a chapter called “Pigs Might Fly” (though they actually do not). These are deeply personal essays that examine, as the subtitle suggests, our connection to the natural world. They look at our relationship with the animals in our lives and what we provide each other. In her introduction, though, Thompson corrects this. “In my mind,” teacher and birdwatcher Thompson tells us sternly, “this is a bestiary for a confused modern world.” -- Monica Stark

The Artist’s Mother, introduction by Judith Thurman (Overlook) 160 pages
Like exhibitions loosely grouped around a theme, books with a themed core seem to come in one of two categories. They’re either lame excuses to connect that which probably shouldn’t have been connected in the first place, or wonderful triumphs that have us looking at the topic in a new way. In almost every regard, The Artist’s Mother falls into the latter camp. “Maternal love takes many forms,” author and journalist Judith Thurman writes in her introduction, “not all of them benign, but one of the most essential is to provide an experience of attunement.” We don’t experience that attunement in all of the work collected here, but one does get a glimmer of what Thurman means as well, in some cases, the connections some painters maintain with where they’ve been as well as how they’re getting where they’re going. The book opens on a fantastic portrait of Albrecht Dürer’s mother, Barbara. Painted when the artist was just 19, it is a masterwork that clearly lays the groundwork for the genius still being developed. For a later glimpse of that genius, a charcoal sketch of Dürer’s mother done just months before her death captures the woman as she was, not idealized as was dictated by the fashions of the time. Both works are remarkable, but it’s terrific to see them almost side-by-side. Delivered chronologically, the book ends on Andy Warhol’s 1974 portrait of his mother, Julia Warhola. In between is a history of art in maternal form: John Constable, Rossetti, Paul Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, and that most famous mother-painter of all, James Abbott MacNeill Whistler whose “Portrait in Gray and Black” has come to be known as “Whistler’s Mother.” The Artist’s Mother is a wonderful short course in art history as well a terrific tribute to one of humankind’s most lasting bonds. -- Aaron Blanton

The Bedside Book of Beasts by Graeme Gibson (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday Canada) 368 pages
Author Graeme Gibson follows up 2005’s magnificent The Bedside Book of Birds with a less gentle offering. The Bedside Book of Beasts collects some of the very best writing -- ever! -- on the relationship between predators and prey. “They are central to us,” Gibson writes in his introduction, “and to our understanding of our place in nature, because the primal fact of hunting and/or being hunted, and the inescapable demands of hunger, have largely defined animal life on earth, and are undoubtedly one of the key energies driving evolution.” That’s the theme, in the words of the author. The reality is somewhat more beautiful. The work of around 100 artists is represented here, from people as diverse as Franz Kafka and Marian Engel, both Pablo Picasso and Pablo Neruda, Barry Lopez, Leo Tolstoy. William Blake and Wayne Grady. Slender threads of writing -- fables, stories, sacred texts, essays, travel writing -- wind their way around carefully selected artwork. The resulting book is a work of art in itself, capturing the very soul of the topic Gibson has chosen to editorially muse upon. -- Sienna Powers

The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants by Wolfgang Stuppy, Robb Kesseler and Madeline Harley (Firefly Books) 144 pages
This new coffee table book compiles the very best of three books published in a slightly larger and more spectacular format over the last few years. All three were named to the January Magazine best of the year lists in their respective years. And why? In their class, they are as good as it gets. The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants is slightly more compact in format than the three that went before, but it is no less spectacular. What has contributed to this series’ stellar nature is a combination of dream-team authorship and world class design and production. A seed morphologist at London’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Wolfgang Stuppy brings straight up solid plant knowledge and the books have all benefited from being filled with rock solid information not readily available from other sources. Artist and art professor Rob Kesseler is responsible for the stunning microscopic photography that really sets the book apart. And so each book -- and this book -- are dynamic tours through a fantastic alien world punctuated by incredible explanation and information. The Bizarre and Incredible World of Plants will dress up a coffee table, start a conversation or fill a young heart and mind. -- Linda L. Richards

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley (Vintage) 304 pages
Shockingly lucid, surprisingly good, unexpectedly funny, The Book of Dead Philosophers meets its initial mandate, then passes it by a country mile. I liked it a lot. I find it difficult to imagine anyone with even a passing interest in philosophy who would not enjoy it. Author Simon Critchley looks chronologically at those who dedicated their lives to thinking about intellectual matters of life and death and how they themselves exited the material world. “Very simply stated,” writes the author, “this is a book about how philosophers have died and what we can learn from philosophy about death and dying.” But it’s more than that, too. Critchley points out that we, as a society, are almost ridiculously frightened of death. And what can we do about that? Critchley has the answer: philosophy. The author brings together short profiles of close to 200 philosophers, a little about how they lived and -- more importantly in the context of this book -- how they died. We encounter all that life has to offer: wit and wisdom, tragedy and comedy. There are bizarre ends and others that are pathetically unexceptional. In short, he gives us the tools we need to begin to “learn to have death in your mouth, in the words you speak, the food you eat and the drink that you imbibe.” It’s a remarkable book. -- David Middleton

The Dark Hunters, Vol. 1 by Sherrilyn Kenyon (St. Martin’s Griffin) 208 pages
Everywhere you turn, it seems, there’s another vampire: waiting for teenage love or some other quasi sympathetic situation brought on by a lot of romance regarding princes of darkness. However Sherrilyn Kenyon has risen to the top of the paranormal wave by writing books about vampire killers. In this first volume of her Dark-Hunter manga, Kenyon has worked with Joshua Hale Fialkov (Afro Samurai) and Claudia Campos (Tokyopop) to reimagine the Dark Hunter world as a manga. It really works. Campos’ illustrations are vivid and fierce and, thankfully, the story Kenyon and Hale Fialkov have worked out manages to keep pace. Amanda Devereaux has been mistaken for her sister, the vampire slayer, and is being stalked by the most dangerous vampire that didn’t ever live. And while Amanda’s life is in danger, so is humanity more or less as we know it. Tense stuff beautifully handled, the manga approach here seems fresh, original and exceedingly well done. I enjoyed every bite. -- Lincoln Cho

Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim (St. Martin’s Griffin) 288 pages
Elissa Stein and Susan Kim’s marvelous Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation is a tour de force of sub-cultural revelation. So forceful, in fact, that it brings what has long been a part of the dark subculture of shame into the fully-lit culture of womanhood. Menstruation, long misunderstood, long maligned, long cringe-inducing, is finally given its due in this wonderful illustrated book that’s perfect for everyone, whether they have monthly periods or not. (In other words, folks, it’s not just for girls.) Read it and you’ll be entertained, shocked, surprised, and (best of all) educated. Flow is the real deal, a book brave enough to tackle a topic that most people probably think isn't worth tackling. The thing is, now that it's been wrestled to the ground, it's a vital resource, to be referred to again and again. It’s impossible to imagine not having it. -- Tony Buchsbaum

Inklings by Jeffrey Koterba (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 272 pages
The debut work of writer, musician and political cartoonist Jeffrey Koterba tells the author’s own story with the aid of strong graphic elements, yet without the maudlin self-pity often associated with works of that genesis. In his bio, Koterba tells us that “during the summer of 1978 [I] was struck by lightning and lived to tell about it.” He makes it sound like an advantage -- a thing to have survived and gained strength from, rather than a horrid obstacle which had to be overcome. That pretty much describes all of Inklings. Koterba’s inky stylings are bright, as is the spirit that drives them. Inklings is an almost rabidly optimistic look at a difficult childhood and coming-of-age from the hands of a fiendishly talented artist. If Inklings is just the beginning, I can hardly wait to see what is yet to come. -- Lincoln Cho

Life As We Show It: Writing on Film edited by Brian Pera and Masha Tupitsyn (City Lights) 290 pages
Author and filmmaker Brian Pera and critic and fictionist Masha Tupitsyn together help rekindle the wonder and magic of the movies in Life As We Show It: Writing on Film. This is a vibrant collection that uses all of the mediums available to it to tell its vigorous tale. The contributors here pull out all the literary stops: poetry, fiction, essay: you name it. At the heart of things, though, there is a philosophical question at play here. “Thus, the genre of assemblage and insertion, fictions about fictions, fiction from fictions, or more specifically, fictions affixed and inserted into already existing fictions ... might be an interesting and useful way to describe what the writers in this collection are doing.” And though, admittedly, all of this sounds a little too much like someone is trying to wean himself from his leather elbow patches, it’s also -- with all of the extra bits washed away -- exactly what this collection is about. Not necessarily film itself, but film at its essential and highest self. Is Life As We Show It sometimes almost laughably self-indulgent and youthfully self-conscious? Well, yes. But, in the spirit of such things, it also pushes the envelope about what we’re thinking now. With a lot of syllables. But still. A thoughtful exploration on the art and the influence of film. -- David Middleton

The Maxims of Manhood: 100 Rules Every Real Man Must Live By by Jeff Wilser (Adams Media) 224 pages
Sit down with The Maxims of Manhood: 100 Rules Every Real Man Must Live By and you’ll realize it’s more than just about being a real man, it’s about being a real good, decent human -- from a man’s perspective of course. It has nothing to do with eating or not eating that egg pie-casserole-flan thing that was so popular to hate in the 1980s and then okay to eat in the 90s -- who can keep up with that kind of crap? It’s about being clean, polite, loyal and able. It goes over everything from how to treat your fellow guy (maxim 78: Cockblock and die) to how to treat your fellow woman (maxim 87: Being considerate doesn’t make you a wimp) and nearly everything that might fall in between. That doesn’t mean that this book is all froofy and fey and polite . There is still funny-ass stuff like maxim 2: You only recognize primary colors, maxim 94: Your dog must be larger than a toaster or 46: Spend more on beer than haircuts. In fact most of this book, when not being just plain practical about nearly everything having to do with owning a penis, is funny. Pick up a copy and be a better man. -- David Middleton

Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve Parker (Firefly Books) 288 pages
If you wanted to commission the penultimate book on apes, the name Desmond Morris would come up. Many books and paintings and years ago, zoologist, ethnologist, artist and brilliant thinker Morris wrote The Naked Ape. It was 1967 and it shocked the world by writing about man in the same way one would write about animals. It was a ground-breaking work, an international bestseller and it led to a 1973 film of the same title as well as wide-spread reconsideration of the way we think about humans and animals and the little that can separate them. In the meantime, Morris has written about many things, including dogs, horses, cats, babies and other things. Many of those books have been bestselling. But none could compare with that first all-important bestseller and more than 40 years later, and with Morris now into his 80s, he’s come back to some of the ground he covered in The Naked Ape, with Planet Ape. This time out, though, it’s the hairy apes that have focus: the naked ones get the (justifiable) blame. This is a fantastic book. One can not imagine a better one on this topic. A portion of the profits generated by Planet Ape are earmarked for charities who are working to conserve the apes Morris and co-author Parker deliver to us so vividly. -- Linda L. Richards

Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas (Douglas & McIntyre) 120 pages
Even if it were not so skillful, Red: A Haida Manga would be special just for being first. Set in the islands off the coast of Northern British Columbia, Red is a full color graphic novel that references classic Haida narrative. Red is stunning and in its way quite perfect. The traditional Haida-style images have been twisted by Yahgulanaas’ skilled and considered interpretations. This is Japanese-style Manga, yes. But one doesn’t need to be an expert in West Coast indigenous people to see Yahgulanaas’ inspiration and even -- perhaps? -- instruction. His colors are brilliant -- sometimes even lurid -- his lines bold and true and his storytelling instincts without flaw. I loved Red: A Haida Manga for everything it is and is not. It’s a wonderful blend of old and new, all in support of a captivating story. -- David Middleton

The Red Book by Carl Jung (W.W. Norton) 416 pages
What does it say about our culture and economy when one of the hits of the year is a nearly 100 year old book on psychology published for the first time in an almost $200 volume? There are so many possible messages to be gleaned there, Carl Jung himself might well have had a party with it. The Red Book is one aspect of the work Jung called his confrontation with the unconscious, a journey with self he took between 1914 and 1930. The Red Book as presented by Norton is spectacular and provides some deeply interesting reading. Before you even begin to read though, The Red Book is almost startlingly beautiful: an art book on a par with any published this year. But read the book -- especially in a certain frame of mind -- and doors open. This is how modern psychology was created. More: the book exhibits the energy and power that was Jung’s genius. Jung’s archetypes, his work on the collective unconscious and the process of individuation: you see the ideas unfold here almost in fetal form. The Red Book is a rare and important work. It’s exciting that everyone can now share in it. -- David Middleton

Slang: The People’s Poetry by Michael Adams (Oxford University Press) 256 pages
Michael Adams is that guy. He teaches English language and literature at the university level. He is the editor of a magazine that focuses very tightly on speech. He is the author of a book on the slang of the now defunct hit television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, you’ve got it right: Adams is a word geek. So, clearly, if he writes a book called Slang: The People’s Poetry, it’s not going to be the expected compendium of slang that anyone else might do. Especially if said book is published by Oxford University Press. So take those hints, and construct them into the book you would imagine Slang might be and you’re almost there. First of all, there is no aspect of compendium to Slang. In some regards, it is an erudite love letter to a verbal form. With footnotes. And joy. Those things might sound separate -- footnotes, that is, and joy -- but Adams pulls it off. Sometimes Adams is playful, sometimes he is verbose (“Whereas the impletive interposing with meaningful infix is a marginal variety of a marginal feature even of slang, let alone English at large, nonpletive infixings and interposings may be trendy.”), sometimes he is insightful (“Saying the wrong thing or saying the right thing in the wrong way, just generally lacking in social finesse, can mean social isolation.”) but there is never a moment when you think he got it wrong. Slang will not make you laugh from end to end, but I’m quite sure that was not Adams’ intent. This is an intelligent book, executed with passion. Slang offers important comment and documentation on an aspect of our culture that is very often overlooked. -- Sienna Powers

Best Books of 2009: Cookbooks

Araxi by James Walt (Douglas & McIntyre) 256 pages
There has never been a better time for a cookbook from and about Araxi, the well-known restaurant at Whistler, British Columbia, established in 1981 and a local and even international favorite ever since. Between the upcoming Winter Olympics -- portions of which will be held at Whistler -- and the patronage and smiling eye of famed chef and television personality Gordon Ramsay who has called Araxi the best restaurant in Canada -- Araxi is sure to get more than its share of attention over the next year or so. Locals -- or even those like myself who are local-ish -- have been enjoying Araxi for many years. The Whistler eatery has been a long-time favorite of mine and, in my memory, the menu has always been reflective of the seasons and the locale: beautiful food, beautifully presented and evocative of the season in which the meal was consumed. Stunningly photographed, well-designed, produced and even printed, I think Araxi is also meant to be one of those cookbooks you moon over and, certainly, if you’re the type who does like to do that sort of cookbook dreaming, you could not pick one better. From beginning to end, a terrific job has been done on the Araxi cookbook. -- Linda L. Richards

Atlantic Seafood by Michael Howell (Nimbus) 133 pages
In many ways, Chef Michael Howell’s Atlantic Seafood has all the right ingredients to be a very important seafood cookbook. As things are, Howell certainly has the right stuff to be taking his place among the ranks of notable chefs. And since he was an actor before he ever took over a kitchen, one can only wonder why some production company hasn’t gotten the idea to create some cleverly named seafood show with Howell at the helm. In 1992, the Nova Scotia-born Howell enrolled in cooking school in Chicago. After graduation, he took a job in that city’s noted French restaurant, The Everest Room under Chef Jean Joho. After nearly two years learning to prepare proper French food properly, Howell began a cooking exodus that would take him all along the eastern seaboard, a journey that eventually led to a stint as executive chef at the Green Turtle Club in the Bahamas. I recite a bare bones version of Howell’s resume only to instruct as to why, when Howell returned to his native Nova Scotia as owner/chef of Tempest, he would develop a menu -- and later a book -- that would reflect all that he had learned on his travels, as well as his own martime heritage and the ethical eating principles he had embraced along the way. As a result, of course, Atlantic Seafood doesn’t look like just any seafood cookbook from the Maritimes, though some of those traditional thoughts and flavors are reflected. And so you have, for instance, Yuca-Crusted Salmon with Pirri Pirri Sauce, Salt Cod Croquettes and Finnan Haddie and Chorizo Chowder. Each section is prefaced with a discussion about the type of fish or shellfish that will be under discussion, and the book begins with seafood cooking basics, including the preparation of some of Howell’s kitchen staples like fish stock, lobster stock, mango coulis and dill cream sauce. The writing is clear, the recipes interesting and approachable. I’ve enjoyed my cooking forays into Atlantic Seafood very much and anticipate many more. -- Adrian Marks

The beerbistro Cookbook by Stephen Beaumont and Brian Morin (Key Porter) 264 pages
Much of the time, cookbooks attached to a restaurant the author either owns or cooks for end up feeling like a big, glossy ad: a come-on for those who happen to pick the book up to actually go on down to the restaurant and enjoy what’s on offer in person. In short, many of those types of book have a very limited appeal, both regionally and, in a way, spiritually. Despite the title, The beerbistro Cookbook is not that book. If anything, linking the book tightly to the popular Toronto eatery seems like a mistake. Sure: beerbistro patrons are likely to want a copy. But what about the rest of us? What’s in it for us? The fact is, though, The beerbistro Cookbook is without doubt the very best book on the topic of cooking with beer that I’ve seen. And, sure: I’ve haven’t actually seen a lot of them. When it comes to alcohol and cookbooks, wine has beer beaten by an acre of hops. But this is how good The beerbistro Cookbook is: once you’ve immersed yourself in these great recipes and the fantastic food styling and great photography, you’ll wonder why more people don’t cook with the stuff. Some personal highlights: I love mussels but had never baked them before. The beerbistro Cookbook offers several variations and every one I tried produced fantastic results. The Belgian Ale Steak Stew produced one of the simplest and richest stews I’ve ever enjoyed. It’s really nothing like an Irish strew, but neither is it meant to be. This stew seems worth the price of cookbook alone. The beerbistro Cookbook was a delightful find. My favorite new cookbook of the year. -- Adrian Marks

Clean Food: A Seasonal Guide to Eating Close to the Source (Sterling Epicure) 304 pages
Clean Food explores the beauty and adventure of local eating in a truly wonderful book. Author Terry Walters is a certified holistic health counselor and it shows. Clean Food is gorgeous, beautifully produced and while it is long on intent and sustainability, the recipes are more serviceable than inspired. In truth, though, and considering the thrust, for this particular book, that may be enough. At one point Walters writes that “a perfect diet alone will not fully nourish us. What we need is connection -- to our bodies, hearts and spirits, to our families, to community, to the environment, the land, the season and to a purpose.” This spirit is echoed throughout the book, which is long on recipes that will help round out the repertoire of someone just begin to play with the idea of a vegan diet or who wants to add a few vegan and veganish dishes to their old standbys. What Clean Food lacks in flights of foodie fancy it makes up for in sheer volume. As the subtitle says: “With More Than 200 Recipes for a Healthy and Sustainable You.” There are many options here and a lot of the bases are covered and covered well. -- Monica Stark

Cooking for Two by Jessica Strand (Chronicle Books) 120 pages
It’s not that the idea behind Cooking for Two: Perfect Meals for Pairs is so unique. In fact, lots of cookbooks have been published on this theme. Author Jessica Strand hits her mark perfectly, though, creating a book that will meet the needs of chefs at many levels. And when Strands says Cooking for Two, she means it. She doesn’t just mean dinner for two or recipes for two, but rather food that you can build together, right down to a list of tips to ease the way for couples cooking. Strand’s food choices are perfect, as well. From the complicated and time-consuming (Two Pizzas with Two Toppings would qualify as one -- or two -- of these. And the Chicken Tagine isn’t complicated, but there’s a bit of work involved) to recipes so simple, they practically make themselves (Antipasti Dinner for one. Quesadillas for another.) For the most part, though, the recipes are about medium in the complicated department. Easy for the accomplished home chef, challenging but not impossible for those less experienced in the kitchen. -- Monica Stark

Field Guide to Candy: How to Identify and Make Virtually Every Candy Imaginable by Anita Chu (Quirk) 318 pages
While it would be misleading to suggest that Field Guide to Candy has changed my life, it wouldn’t -- in some ways -- be entirely wrong. From early childhood, I have always had a sweet tooth and I’ve even allowed myself ample opportunity to indulge it. However, not before Field Guide to Candy did I feel myself in a position to gain some real expertise, both in identifying candy in the wild and in creating it for myself. Like the title says, this is a field guide, which means it’s small enough to fit in a big pocket or a small car so you can take it with you wherever you go to identify any candy you might find when you’re out and about, then source ingredients in the field for your next candy making foray. It’s a fun book on a fun topic. But it’s also a very well done book, with terrific photo illustrations and easy to follow recipes. I’d say more, but there’s a certain batch of fudge that needs my attention. -- David Middleton

The Foodie Handbook by Pim Techamuanvivit (Chronicle Books) 224 pages
For various reasons, 2009 was a fabulous year for cookbooks but, even in a rich and fabulous year, food blogger Pim Techamuanvivit’s The Foodie Handbook provided a new benchmark for food writing. This is who M.F.K. Fisher would have grown up to be had she survived to encounter the Internet: excited about all she found and anxious to share it. Many foodies have met Techamuanvivit through her food blog, Chez Pim, where the Silicon Valley dropout brings foodie stuff to many thousands of visitors every week. The Foodie Handbook is better than that blog because it is the physical embodiment of Techamuanvivit’s passionate, knowledgeable spirit. Foodie lore, recipes, advice from Techamuanvivit and other, more famous, chefs: it’s all here, just as on Chez Pim. But the book stuffs the blog into the shade. You can hold the book in your hands, flip through it, bury yourself in it and learn. And enjoy. The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy is what the book is subtitled. And it’s that -- sure it is. And, oh, so much more. -- Monica Stark

Fresh with Anna Olsen (Whitecap) 199 pages
In a year that was all about fresh, clean food, Anna Olsen, Canada’s beloved lady of the sweets, was a standout. Anna first came to FoodNetwork viewer’s attention as the host of Sugar. Seven years later, Olsen has been restyled and retooled: she is slim, svelte and fresh and all of this is reflected in this wonderful new book that might as well be sub-titled: the way we live now. The warm, sunny style combined with an expert touch that has served Olsen so well on television is also to be found in her books. In a cookbook bursting with new century, locavore goodness, Olsen has us comfortably roasting root vegetables, mixing up muesli and warming camembert to float on frisée. One recipe, though, nearly caused me to fall off my chair when I saw it and has since caused guests to fall of theirs: the Beet & Goat Cheese Terrine is a triumph of both taste and presentation. This recipe alone is worth the cost of admission and, in a book of standouts, it made it impossible for me to pass this one over as one of my selections for best of 2009. -- Linda L. Richards

The Jewish Princess Feast & Festivals by Georgie Tarn and Tracey Fine (Sterling Books) 208 pages
There’s almost spirit and humor enough in The Jewish Princess Feast & Festivals to match anything written by Amy Sedaris (you’ll note I said “almost”: Sedaris is really funny!). The bonus, of course, is that The Jewish Princess Feast & Festivals is also a very real cookbook and, despite the focus, the food is surprisingly non-denominational. Though in this book authors Georgie Tarn and Tracey Fine are working up feasts for Purim, Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Chanukah and others, there are recipes here that almost anyone would find interesting and useful. As well, of the 120 recipes included, a very high percentage are vegetarian in nature. In fact, vegetarians looking for a different approach might find a peek through Tarn and Fine’s book very rewarding. -- Monica Stark

Vegan Lunch Box Around the World by Jennifer McCann (DaCapo) 296 pages
I’m not a vegan, but I love the challenge of vegan cooking. I love being able to create really wonderful food under what a lot of chefs would think were adverse conditions. It charges me, creatively, to take a little and make a lot. I can only think that Jennifer McCann feels the same way. Despite the title, Vegan Lunch Box Around the World is so much more than what you might make for lunch. It’s a terrific exploration of possibilities but, because it’s lunch, it’s on a sort of micro level: a level a lot of people will find accessible. This book is her second collection of vegan lunches. Though I have yet to see the first one, 2008’s Vegan Lunch Box, I suspect that it’s terrific, because the sequel is no one’s idea of an also-ran: it’s really very good. McCann’s success lies in her approach to cooking without animal products: she treats it like a big, fun challenge. As a result the food she creates -- and would help us create -- could be enjoyed by anyone. Potato salads, sushi rolls, tagine, African-style greens, orange couscous: 125 recipes in all. The fact that all of this great food is vegan makes us want to stop and think: in a world possessed of this much abundance and all of these wonderful possibilities -- without even eating meat products. If you’ve ever wondered how to shake up your noontime meal, have a stroll through Vegan Lunch Box Around the World. It’s possible you’ll come away from it looking at many foods in an entirely new way. -- Linda L. Richards

Best Books of 2009: Children’s Books

Alphabeasties by Sharon Werner and Sarah Forss (Blue Apple) 48 pages
Authors Sharon Werner and Sarah Forss are graphic designers at the helm of Werner Design Werks in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is a fact that will surprise collectors of children’s books not at all. A classic animal alphabet book with several important twists, I suspect that designers and aficionados of typography will be this book’s biggest market. The animals in Alphabeasties are created with the letters that spell their names: camels made of Cs, dogs made of Ds and so on. In addition there are cut-outs and die-cuts and other fun and creative exercises in paper. The resulting book is just about perfect and a treat for almost all the senses. -- Monica Stark

A Small Surprise by Louise Yates (Knopf) 40 pages
Every year among the children’s books that January Magazine designates as the best of the year, there tends to be one or two that make it on the illustrations alone. These are the picture books that we figure most of the first edition ends up in the hands of collectors. It’s not that kids won’t like the book -- in fact, I have no reason to think that children do not respond to brilliant illustration. And it’s not that these books don’t have a worthwhile story. But, for our purposes -- or, at least, for mine -- the art is so great, it’s practically frameable. And it practically stands alone. Louise Yates’ debut effort, A Small Surprise, is such a book. There’s a rabbit (rabbits were big, big, big this year!) and he runs off to join the circus. A fun premise. But Yates’ circus animals steal this show. Her style is loose, yet considered; somewhat anthromorphized, yet quite real. This, from Yates’ bio, is telling: “One of the things I love most about picture books is the silences, the moments when the text shuts up and the pictures either tell you something that the text hasn’t or something totally different.” Exactly. Yates gets it. This one will be high on collector’s lists, but there’s every chance that kids will like it, too. -- David Middleton

The Choir Boats by Daniel A. Rabuzzi (ChiZine Publications) 406 pages
It will surprise no one who has read this book to discover that author Daniel A. Rabuzzi has a strong background in mythology and folklore. It seems that all of what he learned is in play in The Choir Boats, a fantastic and deeply entertaining debut novel that promises to be the first book in a series: “Volume One of Longing for Yount” is what it actually says on the cover. Be that as it may -- and while I might look forward to further volumes -- The Choir Boats is perfectly contained on its own. In London in 1812, a merchant named Barnabas McDoon is sent on a voyage to the world called Yount with a key that can only be used by him to unlock their prison. It’s not, of course, as easy as all that. In McDoon’s way are a wizard, a fallen angel and other obstacles -- some monstrous, some magical -- threaten to compromise McDoon’s mission. Part steampunk adventure, part classic fantasy, The Choir Boats might be earmarked for young adults, but anyone to whom this sounds like a rich ride will be surprised and delighted. -- Lincoln Cho

The Devil’s Paintbox by Victoria McKernan (Knopf) 368 pages
In the blood-soaked year 2009 was in children’s literature, it was a delight to come across The Devil’s Paintbox. Set in 1865, orphaned brother and sister, Maddy and Aiden Lynch, must struggle through a 2000 mile journey along the Oregon Trail. McKernan captures the danger and beauty of the American West with time-traveling accuracy. Older children will enjoy this new adventure from the author of the award-winning Shackleton’s Stowaway. The Devil’s Paintbox is a wonderfully crafted story rich in historical detail: you can almost smell the saddle leather; feel the pangs of hunger and the sharp bites of fear. And not a fang or a wand in sight. -- Monica Stark

Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld (Chronicle Books) 40 pages
There’s an almost crazy amount of charm in every inch of Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld. It’s a children’s picture book intended for people three and up and -- somehow, as if by magic -- it is more than the sum of its parts. I suppose you could say that the “story” involves conflict and the resolution of it but, to be honest, even calling it a story takes things a little far. More like a conversation -- all off-screen -- on the nature and identity of the title creature. “It’s a duck and he’s about to eat a piece of bread.” “It’s a rabbit and he’s about to eat a carrot.” The only reason those two lines are worthy of remark is that they’re said about the exact same image. And that same image crops up again and again with different backgrounds and different ideas of what it is (“Duck! Rabbit!) and what it’s doing. While that doesn’t really sound like enough on which to base a book -- or, for that matter, a review -- there’s something about how it all comes together that small children will find comforting. There’s not enough here for older children to call “story” but they’ll find it amusing and new readers will be able to master all of the simple words before long. -- Sienna Powers

The Genius Wars by Catherine Jinks (Allen & Unwin) 396 pages
Cadel Piggott (now Cadel Greeniaus), the hero of Evil Genius and Genius Squad, just wants to live a normal life like any other teenager -- you know, parents, studies, hanging out with friends. Unfortunately, it’s not going to happen when you are a genius computer hacker and a criminal mastermind thinks you shouldn’t be wasting your God-given abilities on something as boring as everyday life. And said criminal mastermind, Prosper English, may have a point. Cadel isn’t going to be able to use his skills for dull stuff, though he can’t resist hacking a few systems to help his friend who suffers cerebral palsy. This in itself causes him grief. It’s a good ending to an intriguing trilogy which was well worth the read. -- Sue Bursztynski

Guinevere’s Gamble by Nancy McKenzie (Knopf) 368 pages
The Arthurian legends have inspired countless tellings and retellings though few of those have been for children. Nancy McKenzie corrected that a couple of years ago with Guinevere’s Gift, intended to be the first book in the series she is calling the Chrysalis Quartet. Guinevere’s Gamble is the second book in that series. The strong female heroine in this series is likely to make this a book favored by girls aged 10 to 14. As Booklist said, this series puts a “feminine spin on a tale more typically focused on men.” And though Guinevere’s Gamble is the second book in the series, you will understand what’s going on with no trouble if you’ve not yet read the first one. -- Sienna Powers

Me and You by Geneviéve Coté (Kids Can Press) 32 pages
Me and You is pure, simple charm. A lovely story. Primitive but skillful illustrations. Even a sweet message. All in a smaller-than-usual format that would fit quite nicely into tiny hands. Two friends -- a rabbit and a pig -- spend the book trying to be like each other, then, by journey’s end, discover that their differences contribute to the things they share and that they appreciate each other for what they each bring to their relationship. Deceptively simple and unassuming, Me and You is very, very good. -- David Middleton

Me, Myself and Ike by K.L. Denman (Orca Books) 194 pages
In Me, Myself and Ike, K.L. Denman (Perfect Revenge, Spiral) brings us the first person view of a teenager descending into madness. It is, at times, a difficult book to read but narrator Kit Latimer’s heartbreaking and compelling tale is equally difficult to put down. After seeing a television show about a 5000 year old man, preserved in the ice, Kit determines to become the next ice man; a source of information for the future generations who will find him. With his friend, Ike, Kit sets about accumulating everything he will need for his expedition, including artifacts that will give those who find him some idea of what life was like in the 21st century. As Kit becomes more obsessed and self-isolated, his family begins to worry though, in some ways, the worst of their fears can’t match Kit’s new reality. Me, Myself & Ike ends with an Author’s Note that explains that, in the book, Kit is experiencing the onset of schizophrenia. She goes on to explain what it is and give Internet sources for readers who might be interested in researching further. “It was often emotionally exhausting for me to continue imagining what my character was experiencing, and if it was hard to imagine, I believe it must be incredibly harsh and stressful to live with.” Denman does a credible job of sharing the experience in a memorable book. -- Sienna Powers

Smudge’s Mark by Claudia Osmond (Simply Read Books) 384 pages
From the outset, Smudge’s Mark is dense and meandering and at first seems quite incomprehensible. And I couldn’t put it down. If you think those things don’t seem to go together, welcome to the club and read on. I’m still not sure I understand how it happened, but I do know I’d read another book by this author. One of the most powerful things about Smudge’s Mark is the strong and personable voice of the narrator, Simon, a.k.a. Smudge. “My grandpa was a wicked prankster,” Osmond-as-Simon begins. “Usually after working the part-time midnight shift at the mushroom farm, he’d make his way home to 49 Stone Elements Drive in the darkness of the early morning.” And the correct response would seem to be: who cares? At this point -- the beginning -- Osmond has seemingly done nothing to insure we care at all. And yet, oddly enough, we do. It is as though, with those first simple words, Simon waltzes into our lives as though he hasn’t a care in the world. And then, layer upon layer, we learn of all the dark places: all the things that are at stake and by then we realize that while we weren’t paying attention, Osmond has somehow -- magically? -- made us care. Smudge’s Mark is, in its own strange way, a very good book. At story’s beginning, we meet Simon in a moment of quiet, almost introspection. By journey’s end, Simon has more or less preserved life as he knows it as well as Emogen, a hidden realm with a strong connection to Earth. -- Aaron Blanton

Time of Trial: Volume 4, The Laws of Magic by Michael Pryor (Random House Australia) 432 pages
Oh, joy, another of Michael Pryor’s delightful steampunk adventures of Aubrey, Caroline and George! Magical enemies are on the rise again, the evil Dr. Tremaine is back, this time with golems. Unlike the golems of legend and film, these are unable to be distinguished from the real thing until you smash them -- and there's none of this nonsense about magical or religious rituals or holy words to bring them into being -- hell, no! This is the (early) 20th century, isn’t it? The only good news is that Aubrey seems finally to have overcome his serious medical condition (the fact that he’s technically dead). You really can’t read this without having read the rest of the series, so if you haven’t yet read them, what are you waiting for? -- Sue Bursztynski

This Little Bunny Can Bake by Janet Stein (Schwartz & Wade) 40 pages
It’s a new day of classes at Chef George’s School of Dessertology. Everyone is goofing, except Little Bunny, who is careful to pay attention, follow the rules and measure. Meanwhile, Poodle weighs herself on the kitchen scale, cat uses dog as a cookie cutter, and mouse plays with the brulée (you just know that will end badly!). Through all this din and brouhaha, Little Bunny goes on her tidy little way and, by the end, has created an impressive masterpiece, while not being the least bit smug about it. This Little Bunny Can Bake is a rare creative treat. Writer and illustrator Janet Stein has chosen to give her charming illustrations a vintage look and it really works. It feels like a classic: like something we perhaps all read (or had read to us!) when we were kids, then forgot about and have now, happily, found again. -- Linda L. Richards

The Tree That Time Built selected by Mary Ann Hoberman and Linda Winston (Source Jabberwocky) 309 pages
It’s rare for a book to meet every goal set out for it but it seems to me that The Tree That Time Built works so well, it might have done just that. The book calls itself “a celebration of nature, science, and imagination” and it really is all those things. More, too, because what The Tree That Time Built does is say it in poetry. U.S. Children’s Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman has worked with author, teacher and cultural anthropologist Linda Winston to collect the very best work on environmental awareness. And though I’m generally not enthusiastic about children’s books with a strong message The Tree That Time Built is so skillfully constructed and so expertly executed, it works on every level. Though the focus here is on environmental awareness, the voices used are among the best known in the English language. Emily Dickenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandberg, Ogden Nash, Marilyn Singer, Sylvia Plath and many, many, many more, making The Tree That Time Built an absolutely wonderful -- and perhaps essential? -- contribution to children’s literature. A nice addition: the included CD allows kids to hear many of the poets included in the book read from their own work. If you and your child care about the environment and are interested in books for children, you are quite likely to enjoy The Tree That Time Built. -- Sienna Powers

Willow by Julia Hoban (Dial) 329 pages
Even in a year when books for young adults was the most dynamic portion of the market, Julia Hoban’s debut novel was a stand-out. You don’t have to read very far to understand why. Willow is brutally -- even shockingly -- honest. The book is about a cutter, the title’s Willow, who is trapped in a life she didn’t expect when her parents die in a car crash: they were too drunk to drive and Willow was at the wheel. Where do you go from there? Despair, dysfunction, desperation. While the topic, and much of Hoban’s handling of it, is appropriately dark, we encounter just enough love and light to make this a deeply satisfying book. There is little here of the moralistic. Willow’s cutting is real and logically symptomatic within her situation. Willow is unforgettable. -- Sienna Powers

January Magazine Holiday Gift Guide 2009

Books are easy to operate and to maintain. No special instructions or tools are required. But what a gift! Worlds and lives and entire universes can live between those modest little covers.

So what makes a good gift book? That’s easy: it must be just what the recipient wants, needs, desires or -- at the very least -- one that will amuse. And just as there are millions of people with differing dreams and interests, there are also millions of books reflecting all of those dreams, addressing all of those interests.

The gift of a book can be extremely intimate, demonstrating your love and affection with your choice. Or it can be the most generic present in the pile -- a beautiful coffee table book that says: “I don’t know much about you, but I like you well enough to get you something good.”

We hope you have a wonderful holiday 2009! And if you’re still hunting about for that perfect last minute gift, remember: what could be more perfect than a book?

January Magazine’s 2009 Holiday Gift Guide is here.

Have a wonderful Holiday!

Holiday Gift Guide: Freedom: A Collection of Short Fiction Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human from Amnesty International

This is the best gift, the ultimate gift, the gift that gives forever.

Freedom (Key Porter Books) is an Amnesty International collection that includes the work of some of the world’s top authors. Each writer reimagines a single right from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations after World War II.

The anthology is movingly introduced by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “And what have art and literature to do with human rights?” Tutu asks. “They are all bound up with this wonderful talent we humans have: to empathize with others. If, by reading any one of the stories in this anthology, we are enabled to step, for one moment, into another person’s shoes ... then that is already a great achievement.”

Considering that the book includes work by some of the foremost contemporary storytellers in the world, it’s hard to imagine anyone leaving this collection entirely unmoved. Contributing writers include Kate Atkinson, Ishmeal Beah, Paulo Coelho, Nadine Gordimer, A.L. Kennedy, Henning Mankell, Yann Martel, Rohinton Mistry, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Banana Yoshimoto and several others.

It’s a fantastic collection for a wonderful cause: an important book.

Fiction: Grace River by Rebecca Hendry

There is something almost inexplicably charming about Rebecca Hendry’s voice in her debut novel, Grace River (Brindle & Glass). Her sentences are long and muscular. Strictly speaking, many of them are too long, but this somehow adds to the charm of the voice and enhances the small town themes of the book.

Here, for instance, on the very first page, the fictional town of Grace River is described:

The main street is what the town has put all its high hopes into. The storefronts are redone with that heritage look everybody’s so hot about these days and the hanging flowerpots, which makes it kind of feel like you live in a decent place with decent people, if you forget about the rat foo yung and the pot-selling just around the corner.

Grace River is a small town in the interior of British Columbia where everyone is either employed by the local smelter or in an industry that supports it. When an environmentalist shows up and begins poking around, trouble is inevitable.

But wait: that almost makes Grace River sound like a humorous story, and it’s certainly not. In fact, there’s a certain humorlessness about the navel-gazing of youth that is, at times, faintly disturbing. Everything is dire for the four friends whose stories make up Grace River. Everything is slightly larger than life. That’s part of the charm here as well, I think. A certain youthful energy that gives the book its power. And does that energy come from the author or her characters? Well, that’s the magic in a good story, I think. You can just buckle up, and let the author take you on her well-crafted ride.

The Best Unread Books of the Decade

As many in the media present their lists featuring books that defined the decade, I often ponder upon the books that missed my radar. January Magazine will be unveiling its best of 2009 lists shortly. While sending my crime and thriller choices to Rap Sheet editor, J. Kingston Pierce, I pondered on the games fate and luck play in life. Many highly successful writers have often indicated that much of their success can be laid down to “luck” or “fortune” and that it took many clicks on the wheel of fortune to get success. I know many worthy books remain on the shelf because fortune and fate didn’t play a hand. I enjoy books that give me challenge and I am always on the look out for something that can alter or reinforce my view of life.

It was rather interesting to read The Guardian’s decade’s best unread books:

While people are busy ranking the hit books of the last 10 years, many a publishing insider is quietly mourning a volume that unnaccountably never made the 'best of' or bestseller lists, but should have. Here publishers, agents and translators speak up for the ones that really shouldn't have got away.

I read this listing and selected the following to purchase this afternoon as they intrigue me and I am surprised I missed them:

From Christopher MacLehose, MacLehose Press publisher:

Journal by Hélène Berr, published in 2008, deserves to be read and studied in every school in the civilised world, read and reread for what it tells of the circumstances of the arrest of a young and brilliant Jewish girl in Paris and her eventual murder in Bergen-Belsen, days before that camp was liberated. The story of how the text of her journal came to light so many years later is remarkable enough. The journal, which is a love story too and an account of inescapable horror, is beautiful and beautifully translated by David Bellos, whose Afterword entitled France and the Jews is also essential reading.

From Isobel Akenhead, Hodder & Stoughton women’s fiction editor:

The one book I would say I felt almost physically heartbroken about not succeeding with in the last decade was The Girl Who Stopped Swimming by Joshilyn Jackson. She's the most phenomenally talented (and bestselling) American author, whose unique voice just sings off the page, and this brilliant novel tells the tale of a woman who has to search through her own past to uncover what really happened to a little girl who has just been found dead in her swimming pool. It's as pacy as a thriller, but so rich that you feel you're reading something much deeper. There were a number of reasons it wasn't the success we hoped for -- primarily I think that it trod the line between commercial and literary in a way that made the retailers struggle to understand it. But I'd urge anyone to read it -- I feel absolutely sure they wouldn't be disappointed.

Here’s The Guardian’s complete list of books that may have missed your radar.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming by Guy Dauncy

Issues of climate have been in the news a lot in the last few weeks, sometimes for better reasons than others. We’ve never spent quite this much time thinking about where all of this is leading. For a lot of people, the realities of global warming are difficult to accept because, if we acknowledge that the Earth is melting, then what? Where do we go from there?

While there is no shortage of books on the topic, few are both as informational and lucid as The Climate Challenge (New Society Publishers), energy maverick Guy Dauncy’s take on the topic.

Dauncy (Stormy Weather, Enough Blood Shed) is an author, speaker and futurist who attacks his topic with passion, knowledge and a surprising amount of humor.

Dauncy tackles the of topic climate change at the source: with a brief history of Man on Earth. Historic photos show blast furnaces in the forest and charcoal burner’s huts. Then we are told -- in-depth but in an entirely clear way -- about various gases and black carbon. In short: before he gets to the solution, Duancy carefully looks at the problem, A sort of “how did I get here” moment that will explain the seriousness of the situation to all but the most skeptical of watchers.

While the problem is well explained, most of the book is given over to solutions. “What then must we do?” he asks before going on to answer his own question. The answers are clear, if not always easy, but Duancy does a memorable job of getting us off the couch and into the field. As Duancy says at the beginning of Chapter 86: “Scramble! This is serious.”

Holiday Gift Guide: Chocolate: More Than 50 Decadent Recipes by Dominique and Cindy Duby

Chocolate: More Than 50 Decadent Recipes (Whitecap Books), the latest book from world renowned chefs and cookbook authors Dominique and Cindy Duby, came out in October but, somehow or another, the food styling and even the recipe choices seem very Christmas-sy. Or maybe that’s just me. Lots of reds and greens. Lots of shiny foils. It all looks distinctly... seasonal.

It’s not true, of course. Chocolate is intended for year ‘round enjoyment. But if you only had one book to get you through the sweet part of the season, you could do a lot worse than this one.

In many ways, Chocolate is a natural progression from the cookbooks the Dubys have already written. From their first book, 2003’s Wild Sweets: Exotic Dessert and Wine Pairings to Wild Sweets Chocolate in 2007 to last year’s Crème Brulèe with Chocolate. Now here we are at Chocolate, a book that touches almost every aspect of cooking with and using that ever popular ingredient.

The recipes here range from ultra simple -- like Baked Chocolate Custard Pudding -- to comfortably old-timey -- Dark Chocolate Pots de Crème -- to silly -- Chocolate “Chips & Salsa” -- to perfectly sophisticated -- Hazelnut Chocolate Mousse Patè.

Like the recipes themselves, instructions range from suitable to the beginning chef to a few that probably only those with a fair amount of kitchen time logged will want to attempt. In both cases, though, the instructions are clear and non-hazy and the food styling and photography is so fantastic, it’s difficult to not want to try everything.

The recipes are varied and terrific but two sections at the back of the book really elevate Chocolate: one chapter offers some serious words on how to pair wine with chocolate. Another chapter offers tips and techniques for getting professional looking results.

The book is from Whitecap’s Definitive Kitchen Classics series. It is not over-reaching to suggest that Chocolate will live up to that promise.

Holiday Gift Guide: A Guide to Fantasy Literature by Philip Martin

Author, editor and folklorist Philip Martin knows his fantasy literature. The newly published A Guide to Fantasy Literature (Crickhollow Books) is a reworking of The Writers Guide to Fantasy Literature, first published back in 2002. This new work reorients Martin’s take, opening it up to a broader audience of writers and readers. It was a good idea and it works.

In addition to talking about specific authors and works, Martin addresses the genre in new and interesting ways:

By and large, this field of literature is a lot of new wine in old bottles. Fantasy is a form of traditional culture. Like all vibrant, living traditions, it allows a tolerable amount of experimentation, adaptation, and acceptance of new forms over time.

Though in some ways, Martin’s work is a scholarly one, he never seems to lose sight of his readership, bringing interesting, learned and accessible thoughts on all aspects of fantasy fiction, from the history, through patterns, places, characters and so on. A Guide to Fantasy Literature is a very good book. Anyone with a strong interest in fantasy literature will come away from Martin’s guide knowing more than what they arrived with.

Holiday Gift Guide: Planet Ape by Desmond Morris with Steve Parker

If you wanted to commission the penultimate book on apes, the name Desmond Morris would come up. Many books and paintings and years ago, zoologist, ethnologist, artist and brilliant thinker wrote The Naked Ape. It was 1967 and it shocked the world by writing about man in the same way one would write about animals. It was a ground-breaking work, an international bestseller and it led to a 1973 film of the same title as well as wide-spread reconsideration of the way we think about humans and animals and the little that can separate them.

In the time between, Morris has written about many things, including dogs, horses, cats, babies and other things. Many of those books have been bestselling. But none could compare with that first all-important bestseller and more than 40 years later, and with Morris now into his 80s, he’s come back to some of the ground he covered in The Naked Ape, with Planet Ape (Firefly Books). This time out, though, it’s the hairy apes that have focus: the naked ones get the (justifiable) blame.

This is a fantastic book. One can not imagine a better one on this topic. It is gorgeous enough to sit on a coffee table, yet informative enough for the reference section of a library. Wonderful photos illustrate page upon page of facts and thoughts and ideas. And in the true tradition of a book by Morris, you not only learn about the subject at hand, you are also pushed to think independently about what all these facts might mean. The information is shared in a thoughtful, intelligent way and, without even realizing it, we end up learning as much about ourselves as we do about the apes Morris obviously has a very real affection for.

A portion of the profits generated by Planet Ape are earmarked for charities who are working to conserve the apes Morris and co-author Parker deliver to us so vividly. Once you’ve experienced Planet Ape, you’ll understand just how important that is.

Holiday Gift Guide: Jack Kennedy: The Illustrated Life of a President

Is there anything we don’t already know about JFK? I doubt it. Yet year after year, authors find new angles with which to tantalize us about the man, his family, and his legacy. This year’s entry is Jack Kennedy: The Illustrated Life of a President (Chronicle Books), which relates the late president’s story in cogent prose, but the real prize here is the facsimile of personal memorabilia and documents. Postcards, holiday cards, personal latters, diary pages, drafts of key speeches, JFK’s Navy ID card, handwritten notes for Profiles in Courage, and much more. This treasure trove is shows us JFK in a whole new way, letting the evidence of his charmed, cursed life stand for itself, with no explanation or embellishment. The book also features photographs of other artifacts, as well as the iconic images of the subject’s life, from childhood to Dallas. It also includes a look at what happened after the assassination: how LBJ assumed the role of President, how he carried on JFK’s efforts, Bobby’s and Jackie’s and Teddy’s lives, and even the lives of John and Caroline. Though there’s no shortage of Kennedy books, this special addition to that library is something to be seen and cherished.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Dread Crew: Pirates of the Backwoods by Kate Inglis

Growing up in a family where books were firmly part of the culture, it was unthinkable that a Christmas should pass without at least a few of the neat, flat packages that indicated a book. The ones from my father were always extra special. He’d pay special attention and know just what I was hoping for -- usually something with horses, so I guess it wasn’t that much of a challenge -- and he’d buy the prettiest edition he could find.

I thought of all of these things when I first saw Kate Inglis’ The Dread Crew (Nimbus). It’s a good book -- sure it is, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But before you ever experience the story, you see that it really is a pretty book. One I think my father might have selected for me, with all the other circumstances being right. There’s something lasting and promising and deliciously old-timey about the cover and binding of The Dread Crew. And that’s all right, because Inglis and her band of merry men deliver on all of those promises.

“Under the darkest cloak of night,” Inglis begins, “her cats are first to sense the rumble.”

The Dread Crew is a tale of imagination and friendship. Having found some fairly unmistakable signs, young Eric Stewart sets himself up as a pirate hunter. He tracks a band of backwoods pirates and -- just as he’s sure he’s about to come upon them -- all of the signs disappear. It turns out Grampa Joe has been hiding the band of pirates on his property, but even Grampa Joe might not be able to hide them when the Pirate Union tries to track them down.

This is a spirited tale, gorgeously rendered. A debut work from a confident writer I feel sure will delight us again in the future.

Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2009

Over at The Rap Sheet, January Magazine’s sister publication, editor J. Kingston Pierce has announced the finalists in that blog’s annual contest for the best crime fiction covers. Says Pierce:

Every year since 2007 (which seems like a rather long time ago just now), The Rap Sheet has hosted an annual “Best Crime Fiction Covers” competition. We’ve gotten in the habit of keeping track each year of book jackets that we think stand out from the crowd of egregious copycats, trendy duplicates (this year’s overused theme being shadowy running men), and downright lame fronts that substitute ominous imagery for honest reflections of the stories contained within. By the end of each twelvemonth, we usually have a file of 25 to 30 distinctive jackets. Then we trim that down to a mere dozen covers we think are the best of the breed.

If you’d like to vote for your favorite, you can do so here prior to December 28, after which the winners will be announced.

Holiday Gift Guide: The Indie Rock Coloring Book by Yellow Bird Project

This is not so much a review as a mention: a great project for a great cause that makes a great gift!

The Yellow Bird Project is a Montreal-based non-profit organization who have, since 2006, worked with a number of indie rock acts to create T-shirt designs that, in the end, benefit a wide range of charities.

The Indie Rock Coloring Book takes it to the next level, offering up 28 coloring and activity pages by created for the project by UK-based artist, Andy J. Miller. Each page represents an indie icon, including Rilo Kiley, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, The New Pornographers, Broken Social Scene and a bunch more.

A quibble (seems like I can’t not do something reviewish each time out): like the T-shirts, it would have been nice to have seen at least some of these illustrations created by the indie artists themselves. Some of them are multi-talented and would have been up to the task. It’s a small quibble, though: Miller’s illustrations are mostly bright and innovative and would be lots of fun to color.

A foreword, hand-lettered by Rilo Kiley’s Pierre de Reeder sets the tone and the intent: “This wonderful coloring book,” writes de Reeder, “is yours to enjoy and be inspired by, and is a great example of how you can turn your love for music and art into something that can really help.”

The Yellow Bird Project Web site is here.

Holiday Gift Guide: Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers by Arundhati Roy

On the one hand, it might seem counterintuitive to offer Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers (Haymarket Books) as a gift idea. Yet these thoughts on the very nature of democracy are a powerful gift, indeed. And what better time to read Booker Award-winning author Arundhati Roy’s examination of India’s crumbling democracy?

While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration, I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.

So is there life after democracy?

In this series of themed essays, Roy explores the questions and political challenges probably most important to India today: the marginalization of religious and ethnic minorities and the neo-liberal economic reforms that Roy argues are turning India into a police state.

“The idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced with extermination they have the right to fight back. Perhaps they’ve been listening to the grasshoppers.”

The author of The God of Small Things, Roy writes with a rare and confident beauty. Passion rings through every line, passion and the belief that the things she’s writing about here are important, they need to be said. I think that’s true. In many ways, it’s true not just for India but the world.

Holiday Gift Guide: Precious Metal: Decibel Presents 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces edited by Albert Mudrian

Understand going in that this is a book for the already converted. If you -- or the person you’re trying so hard to find the perfect gift for -- is not already deeply infected by heavy metal music, then Precious Metal (Da Capo) is not for you. Or them. But if they are... if they are this is seriously the best gift a metalhead could get.

And why? These are the untold stories. Okay: that’s not strictly true. These are the selectly told stories, originally told in Decibel Magazine -- the voice of extreme music. The 25 tales collected in Precious Metal are the best of the best of Decibel’s Hall of Fame pieces. As a result, they’re pretty great. If you’re unfamiliar with Decibel’s Hall of Fame and how it works, in the words of editor Albert Mudrian, it goes like this:

Take a classic extreme metal record (as determined by our staff) released at least five years ago, track down and interview every band member who played on it, and present them questions exclusively about the writing, recording, touring and overall impact of said album.

The result is, well... obvious, right? There’s a reason Decibel is simply the best in its field. It pushes itself beyond the readily apparent, beyond the everyday and comes up with stuff like this.

So who did Mudrian determine should be included in this round up of best of the best? Well, as I said, there are 25, so I’ll just hit some of the albums that I feel are the highlights: Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell, Morbid Tales by Celtic Frost, Napalm Death’s Scum, Paradise Lost’s Gothic, Eyehategod’s Take As Needed. It’s an incredible list and since it combines not only some of metal’s top stories, but also some of the top writing about metal around, it’s just an incredible win-win.

Precious Metal is an absolute must for the metalhead on your list.

Holiday Gift Guide: 12,167 Kitchen and Cooking Secrets by Susan Sampson

It seems safe to say that no one -- but no one -- is going to know all the tips in 12,167 Kitchen and Cooking Secrets (Robert Rose). That’s one of the things that makes the book a terrific gift: the would-be home chef and the kitchen star will both find things to interest them in this book. It’s the sort of tome that real food lovers will be able to spend hours with.

With 12,167 tips to choose from, I don’t even know where to start. Every time I put my nose back into the book, it’s in there for another half hour’s grazing. What’s the difference between mayonnaise, hollandaise and béarnaise? (Not a lot when you come down to it: “All three members of the ‘aise’ family are emulsions made with egg yolks, an acid and a slowly incorporated fat.”)

How to make perfect choux pastry.

How to pick a perfect avocado and -- once you’ve got it -- how to pit it.

Eight keys to cooking with sucralose.

How to choose the right cooking oil for the job at hand.

Should you use pot barley or pearl barley?

Buckwheat groats or kasha?

Block or deli cream cheese?

Food editor Sampson says she was pressed into writing this book by friends who were astonished at the little things she knew, the “secrets” that she says are never really secrets. “Just undiscovered territory. What’s obvious to one cook is a revelation to another.”

The revelations are here -- one simple “secret” at a time. A terrific gift for anyone interested in the fascinating world of cooking and food.

Holiday Gift Guide: Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

When we think of space travel, people of my generation think of the Apollo missions. Starting in 1969, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, we reached beyond our own planet to look deeper into the world beyond home. This book comes at that idea from a new vantage point, that of the astronauts themselves. In essays and stunning photographs, Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts (Abrams), lets us experience those missions from the inside, getting to know what Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Alan Bean, and the other astronauts were thinking and doing at that time in our common history. Each has chosen a favorite photograph, as well, one that crystalizes their own experience.

Apollo: Through the Eyes of the Astronauts is an eye-popping book that brings tangible glory to a time that seems almost quaint and ancient now. The grandeur of those missions, the seat-of-your-pants wishful thinking they embodied, and the venturing into truly unknown territory all make NASA’s troubles of recent years seem almost -- but only almost -- beside the point.

Non-Fiction: The Green Chain by Mark Leiren-Young

Regular readers of January Magazine may already know that I’m a major fan of journalist/author-turned-filmmaker Mark Leiren-Young. I’ve been reading Leiren-Young in our mutual hometown alternate weekly, The Georgia Straight, for... well, for a real long time and he is just all the things a journalist of his ilk should be (sez me). He is smart and worldly, but not in an irritating, tweed-and-elbow-patches über-literati kinda way. His world view is sophisticated, certainly, but you imagine he wears soft clothes and that he knows how to laugh and -- more importantly, perhaps -- he knows how to make his readers laugh, as evidenced by his win of the 2008 Stephen Leacock award for his debut book-length work, Never Shoot A Stampede Queen.

It turns out that, while Leiren-Young was hatching Never Shoot A Stampede Queen, he was also working on a film (if you want to call writing, producing and starring in working, and I think you might) that has since been released into wild success. Since its debut in 2007, The Green Chain has been a sweetheart on the international film festival circuit and, when you consider, how could it not? The Green Chain takes seven fictional tree killers and has them explain why they love trees. It’s fictional and it’s fun, yet it tells the story -- from both sides, now -- exceptionally well.

In the book of the same title, The Green Chain: Nothing Is Ever Clear Cut (Heritage House) , Leiren-Young takes the idea on the road, in a way: asking 22 people who might have opinions on such things “How do you feel about trees?” The resulting book is, in many ways, surprising. Leiren-Young himself observes that when he began these interviews -- with noted thinkers, writers, activists, doers -- he imagined that he would come away depressed. But, he notes, “most of the interviewees were surprisingly optimistic. They think the solutions are out there, and now that we’re living in the age of Al Gore and green is the new black, our society might be willing to embrace the solutions. Or at least attempt them.”

Leiren-Young’s journey of discovery is inspiring. And I’m not the first to note that it’s lovely and refreshing to encounter someone who sees both forest and trees.

I’ll Be Tweeting You

Some of the January crew has been spending altogether too much time on Twitter lately. Part of this is due the fact that so much interesting has been happening. The trouble is, with everything going down on Twitter practically in real-time, sometimes it’s difficult to get up the gumption to actually write about the stuff that’s interesting. By the time you formulate a thought, the world is on to the new thing.

A case in point came yesterday when it was announced that two staples of American publishing, the periodicals Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews, would be discontinued. We saw it on Twitter first and read about it here and here and here. While people were quick to wonder what this might be saying about the publishing industry, it really does look very much as though the loss of the two respected publications were little more than collateral damage. Sad -- and pointless enough in itself, but not sufficient to start changing your career path. And even though the rise in citizen journalism is possibly not the cause of these two deaths, it’s interesting to look at that phenomena -- as has been done here -- and think about what it might mean for all of us in the long run.

While e-books and all that go with them are very much on everyone’s mind these days, I’m quite confident that the final race will not be between Amazon’s early entry, the Kindle or Barnes & Nobles’ “half-baked” nook. (Nook? Really? Who lost a contest in order for them to stick that name on it?) A lot of electronics companies are running around these days, trying to come up with Kindle killers. But Apple’s announcement that they will finally launch their Tablet computer this coming spring is likely striking fear into the hearts of all who would sell devices that help consumers read electronic books and -- in a way -- the industry. And why the fear? One word (or is it two?): iPod. ‘Nuff said.

With the end of the year and decade drawing closer, everyone is scratching out lists. While most outfits are offering up their best ofs, The Guardian scrapes out their cookie jars and shows us their worst. And while we’re on the topic, how about the top ten books of 1709?

Here’s something short and wacky: There are more Wikipedia entries about Middle Earth than about many countries in Africa. Hmmm.

Were you still thinking Oprah had mondo influence on book buyers? Forgetaboutit and check out the Tiger Effect.

The Huffington Report tells us about Eight Books That Predicted the Financial Crisis & Huff readers respond.

The third Twilight film will be six stories tall in IMAX. (Zoiks! Great, nasty teeth!)

Boing Boing offers up the most delicious tidbits. Take this one, for instance, without Boing Boing, how would we know The Nation was auctioning off a Noam Chomsky garden “Noam?”

Edit in motion: Charles Dickens’ manuscript for A Christmas Carol with author revisions. Cool.

Holiday Gift Guide: 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life by Cami Walker

When she was in her early 30s, Cami Walker was living the dream. A young bride, she was doing a job she liked, living in a city she loved and she could see where all of this was leading. She thought. What began as a few pesky symptoms gradually worsened until she began a series of tests that led to the diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

Fast forward two years. Walker was constantly in pain, depressed, suffering from insomnia and battling an addiction to prescription painkillers. She tried everything to help her cope with the incurable disease. Finally, in desperation, she called a South African medicine woman of her acquaintance, hoping for comfort. What she got instead was the advice that would change her life:

“Cami, I think you need to stop thinking about yourself.”

For a few seconds, I’m shocked silent. I imagine Mbali on the other end of the phone, sitting near her unique altar, her silver hair and bronze skin reflecting in the soft light of her apartment. She’s probably wearing one of the beautiful, colorful necklaces she makes and smiling at my stunned reaction.

“Thinking about myself?” I howl. I start in on her about what a wreck I am, what a wreck my body is, telling her I don’t have room to think about anything except myself right now.

“I know, that’s the problem,” she says. “If you spend all of your time and energy focusing on your pain, you’re feeding the disease. You’re making it worse by putting all of your attention there.”

In the same conversation, Mbali prescribes the thing that will ultimately change not only Walker’s life, but many others. The thing that will come to form the very heart of 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life (Da Capo) and along with it begin a movement that has fans comparing it to the secret of The Secret.

In this season of giving, 29 Gifts cuts to the very heart of the thing: giving to enrich and share rather than receive. If it doesn’t change your life, it will at least make you think.

Holiday Gift Guide: Daylight Noir by Catherine Corman

Raymond Chandler at least lived in Los Angeles during the time he wrote his seven Philip Marlowe detective novels (beginning with 1939’s The Big Sleep), and knew well the landmarks that fueled the fiction he wrote. But for most of us, either the setting or the time period, or both, is foreign. We can do no better than to imagine the surf-slapped piers and lushly landscaped estates and fleabag hotels in which he set his action.

While there’s certainly delight to be found in making up images of those locations for ourselves, it’s also interesting to see some of the actual places Chandler had in mind as he sent Marlowe out to question suspects, bitch-slap cops with sarcasm, and fend off bruisers intent on making his body a masterpiece in black and blue. Elizabeth Ward and Alain Silver took on this very task when they published Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles (1987), a photographic tour of Southern California’s largest burg, with excerpts from Chandler’s novels. And now Catherine Corman, the daughter of filmmaker Roger Corman and the editor of Joseph Cornell’s Dreams (2007), offers her own take on that subject in Daylight Noir: Raymond Chandler’s Imagined City, published by Charta.

Photographer Corman has assembled here more than 50 black-and-white studies of everything from Lido Pier to the iconic Hollywood sign, from MGM Studios to Musso and Frank’s Grill, from Union Station to the old Bullocks Wilshire department store (those last two being credited to architects John and Donald Parkinson). Some of the sites in Corman’s collection were identified in Chandler’s work; others were lightly fictionalized. Many of these shots are fascinating, even without considering their association with one of America’s foremost detective novelists. But the Chandler excerpts Corman employs bring another creative dimension to her Daylight Noir spreads. I only wish she’d identified which books they come from. My other quibble: There’s at least one instance here (see pages 56-57 and 88-89) where parts of the same building -- Santa Monica City Hall (another Parkinson creation) -- are used twice. Surely, Corman could have substituted a different landmark and quotation in one of those cases.

Writer Jonathan Lethem (Chronic City, Motherless Brooklyn) supplies a short but pithy preface to Daylight Noir that sets the haunting scene for these images. However, it’s a quote from English novelist J.B. Priestley, contained in Corman’s own introduction, that reveals the most about Chandler’s P.I. and his world:

Despite the pervasive solitude and moral wasteland at the heart of Los Angeles, Chandler does find meaning in it. As James said, he loved the city for its pathos. There is a kind of desolate candor, a tragic sense of honor, in the insistence on perpetuating a façade long after everyone knows it lacks substance. This is what Marlowe’s enemies, the ruthless city fathers and low-life gangsters, are ultimately doing. Eventually, like Conrad’s Marlow in Heart of Darkness, Marlowe discovers the truth but loses the impulse to expose it. He falls in line with illusion.

This may be a volume of real-life photography, but it’s illusion -- the unpredictable artistry of imagination -- as much as substance that is at the heart of it all.

Children’s Books: Great Teacher Projects: K-8 by Laura Mayne

Though clearly intended as a classroom aid for working educators, Great Teacher Projects: K-8 (Boston Mills Press) should not be overlooked by home schoolers or parents with even a small group of active kids on their hands.

Each project or activity is given one or two pages. Here author, 27 year teaching veteran Laura Mayne, looks at each project in depth. She includes the age the activity is suitable for, materials needed, if any and an overview of the project itself and how it might be expected to benefit the children it is aimed at.

“Planet Walk,” for instance, is intended to give kids an idea of the vastness of the solar system using models and some simple materials. “Pumpkin Study” uses that favorite fall-time gourd to teach a number of things, including some basic math and measuring skills and other areas of the K-6 curriculum. “Tap Dancing with Bottle Caps on Shoes” is pretty much self explanatory (which might be why it only scores a single page) while “Hibernation Day,” intended for kids in K to 3, teaches many lessons and delivers a lot of fun all focused around the activity of hibernation. I especially liked the emphasis Mayne puts on books and reading; from a simple sharing time to an elaborate junior book fair equivalent, literacy takes center stage in not less than six of Mayne’s included activities.

Teachers and parents will find a full store of great ideas to help broaden young minds while filling their days. Highly recommended.

Holiday Gift Guide: Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book

Let’s be honest: there is not enough book here to even begin to write a review. Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book (Sterling) is a small and sweetly snarky book of seasonal postcards. I’m writing about it for two reasons: both important. Reason one: It’s clever. It says what a lot of people are thinking in a way that can be cheerfully shared with friends. Reason two: In a year where we are, more than ever, encouraging people to buy books during the holiday season, this is one you can buy easily and share with a lot of people.

Viewed from one angle, though, Merry Christmas, Even If You Don’t Buy This Book isn’t even really a book. It’s a collection of 45 postcards -- bound together as a book, hence the ISBN and book-like form. And I don’t know for certain that each card is based on classic Christmas clip-art, but it certainly looks that way to me.

And then the sweetly snarky part. The image is Santa Claus sitting at a piano and laughing so hard it looks as though he might fall down. The caption: There’s nothing like holiday cheer to offset devastating seasonal affective disorder.

Another: Santa is speaking while popping out of (or into?) a chimney. “I hope your Christmas display doesn’t incinerate your home and loved ones.”

Or a couple, sitting next to a Christmas tree, speaking to the child at their feet: “I want a menorah for Christmas.”

There are a lot more, obviously. Forty-two more, to be precise. It seems likely that most everyone will find at least a handful to inflict on their friends. A fun, arms akimbo way to meet holiday 2009.

Holiday Gift Guide: Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names by Soraya Peerbaye

The thing that first attracted me to Soraya Peerbaye’s debut collection was its title. Let’s face it: Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (Gooselane Editions) is, on the surface of things, such an odd thng to call a collection of poetry, it’s almost ludicrous. As much as I might have wished to walk away from the slender volume, I couldn’t. The name held me fast.

As it turns out, the title comes from the book’s fourth section, the part that deals with a trip Peerbaye took to the Antarctic Peninsula. “Horizon pulls: a trick knot. The seal undoes itself.”

As much as the crazy title might have been the thing that initially drew me, Peerbaye’s writing convinced me in a moment. I offer the opening stanza of “Zistoire,” the first poem in the collection, by way of example:

I’ve learned that the story comes from the invitation to come in. The embrace, his cheek against mine, the stubbled feel of a sun-hollowed sea urchin. He leaves his shoes at the door, hangs hit coat on the banister; I put on the kettle. The story comes from the invitation to come in.

Though the poems that make up the collection are quite different in style and meter and substance, Peerbaye’s writing is consistently muscular and ephemeral, two adjectives that would seem not to belong together in the same sentence yet, somehow, with this writer’s work, it does. As I said, this is a debut, and it’s wonderful. I can’t even imagine what comes next.

New in Paperback: Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando by Stefan Kanfer

I didn’t get around to seeing Streetcar Named Desire until earlier this year. If you haven’t seen it, you simply must. It is, of course, a classic. And it’s a great film. But Marlon Brando? He’s electric. He smolders. At the time the film version of Streetcar was made, Brando was just 27, and when he’s onscreen, you can not take your eyes off him.

In Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando (Vintage), Stefan Kanfer has plenty to say about Streetcar and Brando’s place in it as well as how the film was made, cast and the transition it took from the stage to the screen.

The Streetcar material alone would illustrate so much about Brando’s character and the way that he handled movie stardom. Even in the stories Kanfer relates about Brando, he conveys the essential truth of the actor’s “reckless” life: that being that there isn’t a single truth, but many and sometimes the ultimate story is complicated by facets and wrinkles and shades of many colors and of grey. To me, the one big truth about Marlon Brando is encountered very early in the book:

There was screen acting before Brando and after Brando, just as there was painting before Picasso and after Picasso ... and even the casual observer can tell the difference. As film historian Molly Haskell pointed out, the film star’s legend “is written in one word. BRANDO. Like Garbo. Like Fido. An animal, a force of nature, an element...”

I think more time will pass before all of the details of Brando’s reckless life are properly told. He died in 2004 and many salient pieces are still too recent for those who were close to him to have processed or be willing to share. But Kanfer, an esteemed film critic and biographer, does a credible job of capturing the Brando to whom Haskell referred: the animal, the force of nature and the talent so great, more than a half century after some of his best known roles, he still has the power to take our breath away.

Holiday Gift Guide: Kitchen Scraps by Pierre A. Lamielle

What happens when you take a talented designer and illustrator and send him off to cooking school? If you’re lucky and the stars are aligned, you get Kitchen Scraps: A Humourous Illustrated Cookbook (Whitecap Books).

This is the perfect gift book. To be very honest, I can’t imagine very many people buying this book for themselves. It just isn’t that sort of cookbook: yummy photos, cozy write-ups, inspirational stories. Kitchen Scraps does none of those things, yet the things it does do, it does very well. Lamielle describes what Kitchen Scraps is and is not in his introduction:

It is not a cookbook for busy families, it will not make you a kitchen deity, and it will certainly not make you lose 10 pounds. Kitchen Scraps will delight, offend, and make you hungry.

The recipes are terrific: well thought out and engagingly shared. If some of the recipe names are ridiculous, they are also the point. Additionally, those recipe names will indicate if you share Lamielle’s sense of humor. (Not all will.) Steak and Kidney Cowpie has nothing to do with the business end of a cow. Suzette’s Massacre is an updated (Lamielle says “massacred” ) version of Crepes Suzette. And Lamielle does Brussels Sprouts not one, but three ways: in beer, in junipers and gin and in brandy. And it’s not just the booze that differs: these are three very different approaches to handling an unpopular yet delicious vegetable.

Lamielle’s illustrations are just as impressive as his recipes, but in an entirely unexpected way. These aren’t illustrations of food -- at least, not really. But rather lighthearted riffs through a style and on a subject clearly close to the author’s heart.

A fantastic gift book.

Holiday Gift Guide: Lakeshore Christmas by Susan Wiggs

People who love Susan Wiggs’ work really, really love it.

People who love gently soppy Christmas tales really, really love them.

And while it might be true that sometimes those are the same people, there’s something desperately engaging about Lakeshore Christmas (Mira) Wigg’s crisply engaging fictional celebration of Christmas that invites readers along on another visit -- the sixth -- to the world of Wiggs’ bestselling Lakeshore Chronicles.

There’s nothing earth-shatteringly new going on in Lakeshore Christmas. Rather, Wiggs has opted here to put a contemporary spin on a classic Christmas tale. Small town librarian Maureen wants to put the best ever Christmas pageant that Avalon has ever seen. The only thing stopping her is former child star Eddie Haven, whose misbehavior has landed him into a court ordered recovery that shows every sign ruining Maureen’s seasonal spirit. But it’s Christmas, time of miracles. And it’s no likely no spoiler at all to say that no one puts a title and cover like this together in order to give you a crash landing.

Lakeshore Christmas is not going to be everyone’s cup of nog. But every holiday season seems to bring at least one significant feel-good entry. For holiday 2009, Wiggs’ well written contribution packs all the Christmas cheer you’re going to need. Maybe some besides.

Holiday Gift Guide: Field Guide to Candy by Anita Chu

For some of us, the true meaning of the holidays can’t be found in spiritual lessons. It isn’t in the gifts we give or get or even in the time spent -- or avoided -- with friends and family. Rather -- again, for some -- true holiday meaning can be found in the volume of sweetness we collect, consume and -- if the bounty is sufficient -- share.

Sharing that bounty of sweetness on this holiday might be helped somewhat by Field Guide to Candy (Quirk) an amazing compendium of all that is sweet. In case you’re wondering about that, dig this crazy subtitle: How to Identify and Make Virtually Every Candy Imaginable. Need I say more? Not really. If that was all the information you had, it would be all you need. Except, I guess, that it works. If you’re actually a serious sweet aficionado, this is the sort of book you’ll find yourself referring to again and again. It’s well organized, well and sensibly illustrated and the recipes are boiled right down to basics, with straight-forward instructions and easy to find ingredients.

For gift giving, Field Guide to Candy satisfies almost every requirement. Who doesn’t love candy? And this is a book that includes recipes that even children could make with just a small amount of supervision. A bonus: Field Guide to Candy is small enough to fit into a generous stocking. A sweet gift on several fronts!

Fiction: Generation A by Douglas Coupland

This is one of two important books with international implications and a strong presence of bees written by Canadian authors and published in the second half of 2009. The other is Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood. Interestingly enough, neither book received the attention it deserved at home: something I find inexplicable and, in a way, inexcusable. Both books have a lot to say and their authors manage to say it very, very well.

In a way, Generation A (Scribner/Random House Canada) brings the story Douglas Coupland began in 1991 with Generation X full circle. Where Generation X was completely concerned with a group of self-indulgent slackers, the five young protagonists of Generation A find themselves forced to be not only aware of the world and its problems, they must also be part of the solution. But this is Coupland, so the young people here do not sit smarmily by while hugging and singing “Kumbaya.” They are sharp, acerbic and sometimes slightly homicidal: another group of magnificently drawn Coupland youths.

This particular group have only one thing in common: in the not-so-distant future, in a world that is much less wonderful due to the complete absence of honey bees, each of the young people we meet have been stung by a bee. The stings are cause for consternation and study and the youths are whisked to secret facilities to be tested and evaluated. Then they are released and trouble ensues.

Coupland is, once again, at his very best here. These are big ideas boiled down tightly. He distills each thing to its very essence until we are left with a book that, on the surface of things, seems very simple: it’s easy to read, the language is uncomplicated, the chapters short, the concepts seemingly within our grasp. But Coupland is dealing -- once again and in his own distinctive and inimitable way -- with the important questions of our time. And -- once again -- he does not disappoint.

Children’s Books: The Genius Wars by Catherine Jinks

It began with Evil Genius, in which orphan Cadel Piggott was being raised to become a criminal mastermind. As part of this, he was sent to the sinister Axis Institute in Sydney, where he studied such subjects as Fraud and Disguise and improved his already considerable skills in computer hacking. By the end of the second novel of the series, Genius Squad, he had rebelled against all this and was trying to live a nornal life, though villain Prosper English, who had been responsible for his upbringing, had done everything he could to prevent this.

The Genius Wars (Allen & Unwin) opens nine months later. Cadel, now 15, has settled down with police detective Saul Greeniaus and his wife Fiona, who are hoping to adopt him. Despite his youth, he has begun university and is in contact with some of his friends from the Axis Institute and the Genius Squad, who also want normal lives. Life is pretty good, and he has used his computer hacking skills to make life easier for his best friend, mathematical genius Sonja, who suffers from cerebral palsy. All he wants is to make it possible for her to get around easily in her wheelchair. But old enemies haven’t forgotten him -- and the very things he has done to help his friend may work against him.

This has been a fascinating series. The original premise sounded humorous -- and there are certainly some over-the-top ideas, such as Cadel’s friend Gazo, a human stink-bomb who produces a smell that can literally knock people out when he is stressed. And what about brother-sister computer hackers Dorothy and Compton, mostly known as Dot and Com?

But this is not a comedy. Cadel is angry, frustrated and terrified that even knowing him may kill anyone he cares about. The series has, predictably, been compared to Harry Potter, as anything with a young hero is these days. If anything, it’s reminiscent of Artemis Fowl, if you can imagine that young Irish genius as an orphan, being manipulated by nasty guardians rather than supported and protected by his loyal bodyguard and loving family. Or, for that matter, Mark Walden’s H.I.V.E. novels.

In any case, teens who liked either of those series should enjoy this one. I’d describe it as borderline SF. It never ceases to amaze me how many different genres this writer has clocked up over the years: SF, fantasy, ghost stories, historical fiction, suspense. She is the writer equivalent of the kind of actor who refuses to be typecast.

There’s no point in reading this book if you haven’t read the others, so if you haven’t, go and get them. You won’t be disappointed.

Crime Fiction: The Good Son by Russel D. McLean

In Russell D. McLean’s debut novel, The Good Son (Minotaur), J. McNee is a broken-down ex-cop in Dundee, Scotland, still reeling from the death of his girlfriend Elaine. Into his life walks James Robertson, wanting closure to the recent suicide of his estranged brother, David. McNee takes the case, only to run afoul of London gangster-turned-celebrity Gordon Egg. Egg sends a couple of psychotic hard cases out to clean up the mess left behind by David Robertson. In the process, David’s lover Katrina, aka Mrs. Egg, is murdered. Private eye McNee decides to back off the investigation and focus on insurance work. But the hard cases have other ideas. And McNee, as a result of a beating, learns that his client is not telling the whole truth about the night his brother hanged himself from a tree.

The motif of a traumatized P.I. is a natural one to tell McNee’s story. Becoming a gumshoe in Scotland doesn’t invite the same respect that it might in England or America. In Scotland, especially in smaller cities such as Dundee, an investigator ranks slightly above dope pusher and below repo man. McNee doesn’t care. He spends most of his days working through insurance cases and looking for one more reason not to grieve. For whatever reason, he finds a purpose in learning what led to David Robertson’s death. It nearly kills him and his assistant, Billy.

Not as violent or coarse as fellow authors Ken Bruen and Ray Banks, McLean nonetheless skillfully mines the same ground for a bleak and desperate literary landscape. It’s easier to empathize with McNee, since his wounds are still relatively fresh. Unlike Bruen’s Jack Taylor, who admits he’s insane, or Banks’ Callum Innes, who simply stopped caring about himself a long time ago, McNee is well aware that he’s thrown up walls around himself, but seems utterly helpless in escaping them.

There’s a longer-term story McLean is creating here, and we’ve certainly not seen the last of J. McNee. Whatever comes next promises to be ever bit as hopeless and violent as The Good Son. And that’s a good thing. McLean has scored in his first novel.