More Best Books of the Year: Time Magazine's Top 10s

By Tom

Time magazine, as part of its "flood the zone" Top 10 of Everything coverage, has added three books top 10s to the heap of year-end lists (Largehearted Boy's compilation is getting so long it makes me a little nauseous to scroll through it all...). Time's presentation requires a lot of clicks to maneuver through (unless you go to this bare bones summary page), but here are all the links (as usual, props to Time for ranking their lists, which is no less arbitrary than choosing a top 10 in the first place, and all the more fun):

Fiction:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2. The Financial Lives of Poets by Jess Walter
3. Swimming by Nicola Keegan
4. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
5. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
6. Jeff in Venice, Geoff in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
7. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
8. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
9. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
10. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

Nonfiction:

1. The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes
2. D-Day by Antony Beevor
3. Lit by Mary Karr
4. Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith
5. The Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
6. Logicomix by Apostolis Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, and Annie Di Donna
7. Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon
8. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
9. Cooking Dirty by Jason Sheehan
10. Cheever by Blake Bailey

Children's:

1. Duck Rabbit by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld
2. Guess Again by Mac Barnett and Adam Rex
3. Dogs Don't Brush Their Teeth by Diane deGroat and Shelley Rotner
4. Crow Call by Lois Lowry and Bagram Ibatoulline
5. Elephants Cannot Dance! by Mo Willems
6. Creature ABC by Andrew Zuckerman
7. How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You? by Jane Yolem and Mark Teague
8. Pick a Pumpkin, Mrs. Millie! by Judy Cox and Joe Mathieu
9. The Composer Is Dead by Lemony Snicket and Carson Ellis
10. The Snow Day by Komako Sakai

Notable: The Age of Wonder seems to be establishing itself as the nonfiction book of the year, with competition from The Good Soldiers and The Lost City of Z. This is the first time I've seen The Kindly Ones on a US end of the year list (it did make the Globe and Mail's top 100 in Canada). And I must admit I'd never heard of The Windup Girl, but it does sound pretty appealing (the William Gibson comparisons alone...). Worth noting also that the Time critic responsible for most of the adult book writeups, Lev Grossman, has his own novel, The Magicians, on many other people's best of 2009 lists, including ours. --Tom