Pop Of King (106) – The Best Books of 2009 – (18 grudnia 2009)

10. ROUGH COUNTRY, by John Sandford
Sandford’s mystery-suspense novels are rich explorations of what it is to be a plain old American guy. This tale is rich, satisfying, and frequently hilarious.

9. RAVENS, by George Dawes Green
Bad boys Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko decide to cut themselves in on a big lottery win by taking the Boatwright family hostage. When Green isn’t making you laugh, he’s making you bite your nails down to the bleeding point.

8. GONE TOMORROW, by Lee Child
If you’re not hip to rambling adventurer Jack Reacher, you’ve missed a mother lode of escapist entertainment. In the wonderfully tense opening, Reacher spots a late-night subway-rider who looks like a suicide bomber. The thrills build from there. Child’s writing is lean and wiry.

7. DROOD, by Dan Simmons
The last years of Charles Dickens, as narrated by his increasingly unstable colleague Wilkie Collins. This is a beautifully realized historical novel, but it’s also a modern tale that chronicles the descent of a great mind into dope-fueled madness.

6. SHATTER, by Michael Robotham
Plenty of people saw the naked woman jump to her death, but professor Joe O’Loughlin discovers the lady was afraid of heights. Someone out there has become an architect of suicide, and soon he’s got his sights set on O’Loughlin1s family. The most suspenseful book I read all year.

5. 2666, by Roberto Bolano
This surreal novel can’t be described; it has to be experienced in all its crazed glory. Suffice it to say it concerns what may be the most horrifying real-life mass-murder spree of all time: as many as 400 women killed in the vicinity of Juarez, Mexico. Given this as a backdrop, the late Bolano paints a mural of a poverty-stricken society that appears to be eating itself alive. And who cares? Nobody, it seems.

4. MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN, by Salman Rushdie
1,001 children are born in India at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947; this epic social comedy follows one of them through a lifetime of adventures worthy of Dickens.

3. HOLLYWOOD MOON, by Joseph Wambaugh
Only Dream City could produce cops as cool as Flotsam and Jetsam (surfer cops), Nate Weiss (the aspiring-actor cop), and Dana Vaughn (the cynical, fortysomething mom-cop). The best of Wambaugh’s Hollywood Station novels.

2. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
Thank God I read the novel before seeing the movie, which is a pale imitation in spite of great acting. Set in 1955, Road focuses on a suburban couple living what looks like the American postwar dream. But Frank Wheeler’s fantasy life as an intellectual rebel is just a hollow pose, and when April makes the mistake of believing he’s serious about busting out of the rut they’ve dug for themselves, tragedy ensues. Skip the DVD; read the book.

1. The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters
This is a terrifying, engrossing ghost story set in the English countryside not long after World War II, but it’s so much more. Although told in straightforward prose, this is a deeply textured and thoughtful piece of work. Several sleepless nights are guaranteed.