Best Books of the Year Countdown: 20 to 11

By Tom

We're slowing things down a little now, with just ten picks today, masterfully building the tension toward our top 10 announcement next week. Among our stops from 40 to 21 yesterday: a wonderful debut in English from one of South America's most exciting young novelists, a delicious novel that Michiko Kakutani mistakenly called "a strangely detached and lackadaisical production," a book so full of hoops lore it can stop a bullet (really), a cookbook loaded with f-bombs and pork, a Swedish novel once described to me as "Logan's Runwithout the lasers," and a brilliant throwback to the great kids' novels of the '70s like From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Mom, the Wolf Man, and Me.

20. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley

19. The Help, Kathryn Stockett

18. Cheever: A Life, Blake Bailey

17. The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America, Timothy Egan

16. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Verghese

15. Sag Harbor, Colson Whitehead

14. This Is Where I Leave You, Jonathan Tropper

13. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Jungle City, Greg Grandin

12. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

11. The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008, Thomas E. Ricks

Sorry, but you'll have to wait the weekend for the top 10 (and the rest of our Best of 2009 extravaganza). See you then. --Tom

More Best Books of 2009:

#100 to #81

#80 to #61

#60 to #41

#40 to #21

Comments

[r4 ds]

I have read Lorrie Moore's birds of america.
I'm pretty surprised by the number of negative reviews Moore's work has received. Many readers have complained that the stories are about tiny people with tiny, unimportant lives. Well, that's the whole point! Moore is without a doubt the best chronicler of tiny people with tiny, unimportant lives. She knows - which many of us do not - that we all have tiny, unimportant lives. But, like her characters, those lives are filled with regret, longing, heartache, joy, laughter, wit and irony. And of course that makes them anything but unimportant.