The end of another year (and decade) offers many amusements and diversions, chief among them the inevitable, retrospective lists. We made our own attempt in September, with our Best of the Millennium (So Far) series, which proved to be an instructive and contentious exercise. Among the chief arguments leveled against such “best of” lists is the way they posit an illusory pinnacle of achievement and quality. By means of a grand consensus, the list smooths over natural and exciting variations in individual taste. But true discoveries are often made not by finding out what everybody liked, but by getting from one trusted fellow reader a recommendation that strikes a nerve or piques an interest.
It’s also true that the reader who reflects on a year will find a thread of reading experiences to parallel the real-life ones…and particularly sublime moments alone (even in a crowd, alone) when a book has taken the reader out of her world and into its own. This experience transcends the cold qualitative accounting that names one book better than another.
And so amid all the lists (even our own), to round out the year, we offer a new installment of our annual “Year in Reading” series – an anti-list, as it were. Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we’ve asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these considerations, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era. We hope you find in them seeds that will help your year in reading in 2010 be a fruitful one.
As we have in prior years, the names of our 2009 “Year in Reading” contributors will be unveiled one at a time throughout the month as we post their contributions. You can bookmark this post and follow the series from here, or load up the main page for more new Year in Reading posts appearing at the top every day, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed and follow along in your favorite feed reader.
- Hari Kunzru, author of My Revolutions
- Julie Klam, author of Please Excuse My Daughter
- Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag
- Stephen Dodson, coauthor of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.
- Mark Sarvas, author of Harry, Revised, proprietor of The Elegant Variation.
- Diane Williams, author of It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature, editor of NOON
- Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City
- David Gutowski, proprietor of Largehearted Boy
- Jesse Ball, author of The Way Through Doors
- Deb Olin Unferth, author of Vacation
- Edan Lepucki of The Millions
- Michelle Huneven, author of Blame
- Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End
- William H. Gass, author of The Tunnel
- Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
- Victor LaValle, author of Big Machine
- Dana Goodyear, author of Honey & Junk, New Yorker staff writer
- Rosecrans Baldwin, founding editor of The Morning News and author of You Lost Me There
- Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
- Stephen Elliott, editor of The Rumpus and author of The Adderall Diaries
- Brady Udall, author of The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
- Rick Moody, author of The Black Veil
- Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
- Marco Roth, a founding editor of N+1
- Maud Newton, proprietor of maudnewton.com
- Patrick Brown of The Millions
- Hamilton Leithauser of The Walkmen
- Scott Esposito editor of The Quarterly Conversation and of Conversational Reading
- Ben Fountain, author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara
- Joe Meno, author of The Great Perhaps
- Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian
- Emily St. John Mandel, author of Last Night In Montreal
- Jennifer Egan, author of The Invisible Circus
- Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
- Samantha Peale, author of The American Painter Emma Dial
- Lan Samantha Chang, author of Inheritance
- David L. Ulin, book editor of the Los Angeles Times
- Jerome Charyn, author of The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson
- Jon Raymond, author of The Half-Life
- Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, author of Ms. Hempel Chronicles
- Ken Chen, author of Juvenilia
- Mark Haskell Smith, author of Moist
- Brad Watson, author of Last Days of the Dog-Men
- John Williams, editor of The Second Pass
- Carolyn Kellogg, of Jacket Copy and www.carolynkellogg.com
- Anne K. Yoder, of The Millions
- Tim W. Brown, author of American Renaissance
- Traver Kauffman, of Rake’s Progress
- Jeff Martin, author of My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize
- Ed Park, author of Personal Days
- Cristina Henríquez, author of The World in Half
- Garth Risk Hallberg, author of A Field Guide to the North American Family: An Illustrated Novella, contributor to The Millions
- Motoyuki Shibata, author of American Narcissus
- Robert Lopez, author of Kamby Bolongo Mean River
- Masatsugu Ono, author of Graves Buried in Water
- Roland Kelts, author of Japanamerica
- Dan Kois, author of Facing Future
- Michael Fusco, of Michael Fusco Design
Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 | Support The Millions
