Best books of 2009

2009 was a humdinger of a reading year. Publishers often seem to load up the end of the year with the best stuff, or at least the books that suit my tastes, and this year illustrated that trend strongly. I had to scramble to read enough of those end-of-year books to make sense of the twelve months; even so, there are a few novels unread which might otherwise have figured in this list:

• There aren’t enough superlatives for 2666, the 900-plus-page masterpiece by Roberto Bolano, a dazzling mix of high art, low noir, pungent description, allusion, thematic discourse and insight.
• Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore was his breakout book, in which he took the mystery genre and transformed it into a deep morality play. His latest morality journey, Truth, is as fierce and fast-paced, but if anything, Temple’s style has risen to new lyrical levels
• It takes a brave writer to tackle the Vietnam War and its legacy. Denis Johnson, a renowned, fierce, literary novelist, has done just that, fully head on, with his epic Tree of Smoke. Death, despair and madness expand their grips over the course of the 600-plus pages, yet somehow, as only the best writers can manage, Johnson construes the almighty mess of Vietnam as a triumph, of sorts, of the human spirit. Tree of Smokeis the most exciting, deep novel I have read since Christos Tsiolkas’s  The Slap.
• Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music is a memoir by Stephen Cummings, a sometimes brilliant songwriter and always impressive vocalist who achieved brief, incandescent fame in the early 1970s. A series of very loosely linked riffs (the word is apt) on his chaotic life, this is a unique, revelatory recollection of a highly creative soul.
• Peter Carey is always exhilarating to read; Parrot and Olivier in America sees him at his best, spinning language around a remake of Tocqueville’s journey around America in 1830
• Can you base a novel around an African American who looks like Sidney Poitier and is named Not Sidney Poitier? Madcap satirist Percival Everett has done just that with I Am Not Sidney Poitier, making me laugh but also reflect on the strange world of the United States
• Home is another gem from the pen of Marilynne Robinson, a slow, reflective tale about a prodigal son and the father and sister who grapple with his return, ruminating about human nature and love and forgiveness. I know readers who find Home just too lugubrious but Robinson’s lyrical style more than makes up for it
• T. Jefferson Parker has been one of my favourite thriller/mystery writers for years, and as his competitors seem to have lost their mojos, his The Renegades, a perfectly plotted drugs-and-murder tale told in Parker’s pithy yet eloquent style, has ended up as the only traditional example of that genre on my 2009 list
• Eric Maisel’s The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods is a heartfelt, intelligent, non-gooey take on existential atheism, just the right stuff for these times of increasing fundamentalism
• Part travel memoir, part exploration of psychological ill health, Exposure: A Journey, written by Australian author Joel Magarey, is a superbly written oddity that also set me thinking about the big existential issues