For the whole iceberg–the spreadsheet containing every one of the 140 sources compiled into a list with votes for nearly 1700 different best books of 2009–check yesterday’s post. Here’s just the tip of the iceberg, the top of that longer list–an honor roll of the 105 books that received the most votes.
Fiction
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel, 64 votes
A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore, 40 votes
Brooklyn: A Novel, Colm Toibin, 33 votes
Too Much Happiness: Stories, Alice Munro, 32 votes
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood, 32 votes
The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt, 31 votes
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, Wells Tower, 29 votes
The City and the City, China Miéville, 29 votes
Love and Summer, William Trevor, 28 votes
Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann, 26 votes
The Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson, 26 votes
Catching Fire (YA), Suzanne Collins, 25 votes
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker, 23 votes
The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters, 23 votes
Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon, 22 votes
Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon, 21 votes
The Magicians, Lev Grossman, 21 votes
The Help, Kathryn Stockett, 21 votes
Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips, 21 votes
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, Daniel Mueenuddin, 20 votes
Little Bee, Chris Cleave, 19 votes
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, C. Alan Bradley, 18 votes
Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli, 18 votes
Under the Dome, Stephen King, 16 votes
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi, 16 votes
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer, 15 votes
Fire (YA), Kristin Cashore, 15 votes
Beat the Reaper, Josh Bazell, 14 votes
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest, 14 votes
Chronic City, Jonathan Lethem, 14 votes
Every Man Dies Alone, Hans Fallada, 14 votes
This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper, 13 votes
Drood, Dan Simmons, 13 votes
The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly, 13 votes
Homer and Langley, E. L. Doctorow, 13 votes
The Vagrants, Yiyun Li, 13 votes
The Forest of Hands and Teeth (YA), Carrie Ryan, 13 votes
Going Bovine (YA), Libba Bray, 13 votes
Wintergirls (YA), Laurie Halse Anderson, 13 votes
Generosity: An Enhancement, Richard Powers, 12 votes
Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead, 12 votes
Spooner, Pete Dexter, 12 votes
Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese, 12 votes
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver, 12 votes
Leviathan (YA), Scott Westerfeld, 12 votes
Marcelo in the Real World (YA), Francisco X. Stork, 12 votes
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis, 11 votes
Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby, 11 votes
Lowboy, John Wray, 11 votes
My Father’s Tears: And Other Stories, John Updike, 11 votes
Summertime, J. M. Coetzee, 11 votes
Tinkers, Paul Harding, 11 votes
Cyberabad Days, Ian McDonald, 11 votes
The Glass Room, Simon Mawer, 11 votes
The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell, 11 votes
All the Living, C. E. Morgan, 10 votes
The Believers, Zoe Heller, 10 votes
The Financial Lives of the Poets, Jess Walter, 10 votes
American Rust, Philipp Meyer, 10 votes
The Ghosts of Belfast, Stuart Neville, 10 votes
The Devil’s Alphabet, Daryl Gregory, 10 votes
Galileo’s Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson, 10 votes
Nonfiction
Zeitoun, Dave Eggers, 24 votes, 976.355 EGG
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, Richard Holmes, 23 votes, 509.41 HOL
Lit: A Memoir, Mary Karr, 23 votes, B KARR, M.
Strength in What Remains, Tracy Kidder, 23 votes, 305.896 KID
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, David Grann, 21 votes, 918.11 GRA
Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey, 21 votes, B CHEEVER, J.
Columbine, Dave Cullen, 19 votes, 371.782 CUL
The Good Soldiers, David Finkel, 18 votes, 956.7044 FIN
Logicomix: An Epic Search for the Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis et al., 15 votes, G 190 DOX
The Book of Genesis Illustrated, R. Crumb, ill., 13 votes, G 222.11 BOO
Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, Greg Grandin, 13 votes, 307.76 GRA
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, T. J. Stiles, 13 votes, B VANDERBILT, C.
Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, Liaquat Ahamed, 12 votes, 332.1092 AHA
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise during Disaster, Rebecca Solnit, 12 votes, 303.485 SOL
Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch, 11 votes, B OCONNOR, F.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son, Michael Chabon, 11 votes, 913.54 CHA
Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer, 10 votes, 641.3 FOE
Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, Terry Teachout, 9 votes, 791.65 TEA
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, Graham Farmelo, 9 votes
The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders, Emmanuel Guibert, 8 votes
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, Timothy Egan, 8 votes , 973.911 EGA
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall, 8 votes, 796.42 MCD
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith, 8 votes, 824.914 SMI
Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, Morris Dickstein, 8 votes
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, Gordon Wood, 8 votes, 973.4 WOO
A Fiery Peace in a Cold War: Bernard Schriever and the Ultimate Weapon, Neil Sheehan, 8 votes, 355.0092 SHE
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care, T. R. Reid, 8 votes, 362.1 REI
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford, 8 votes, 331 CRA
Ayn Rand and the World She Made, Anne C. Heller, 8 votes, 818.52 RAN
The Music Room: A Memoir, William Fiennes, 8 votes
My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, Harold Evans, 8 votes, 070.4092 EVA
Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir, Diana Athill, 8 votes, 28.914 ATH
A View from the Foothills: The Diaries of Chris Mullin, Chris Mullin, 8 votes
The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Douglas G. Brinkley, 8 votes, B ROOSEVELT, T.
Family Britain, 1951-1957, David Kynaston, 7 votes
The Hindus: An Alternative History, Wendy Doniger, 7 votes
Imperial, William Vollmann, 7 votes
In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, David Wessel, 7 votes, 332.11 WES
Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, Nick Reding, 7 votes, 362.299 RED
The Third Reich at War, Richard J. Evans, 7 votes, 940.5343 EVA
Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, Frank Bruni, 7 votes, 362.196 BRU
Marx’s General: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, Tristram Hunt, 7 votes, 335.4092 HUN
Open: An Autobiography, Andre Agassi, 7 votes, 796.342 AGA
Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, Carol Sklenicka, 7 votes, 813.54 CAR
Each work owned by Williamsburg Regional Library is linked to our catalog so our patrons can put it on reserve today!
Some great books on this list.
[...] list of the best of the year. The megalist consists of all the books (over 1700!) and the “tip of the iceberg” list includes just the best of the [...]