A Book Shopper’s Top Ten Books of 2009

As a book shopper who always weighs price vs. literary merit, my top ten list usually doesn’t include books published in 2009 as I rarely purchase the latest, fashionable book. I prefer to experience those connections that put me in contact with the right book at the right time. Here are the books that fill up my Christmas Story Book Bag this year:

Famous Long Ago: My Life and Hard Times at Liberation News Service by Ray Mungo (1971). Books Again in Decatur had a hard back copy first edition that I been drooling over not  unlike Ralphie gazing through the storefront window at a Red Ryder BB gun.  Books Again owner Jim Adams made me a good deal on some trade in and I was able to add to my collection of hardbacks from the New Journalists (Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson).

Oedipus Cadet (1990) by Willie Smith, and the Cleveland Indian: The Legend of King Saturday (1992) by Luke Salisbury. My book shopping compatriot Dave in Seattle sent these two books as gifts. Cadet was a bizarre book in the way it mixed baseball with the Civil War and a teenage boy’s sex fantasies.  I’ll probably get to the Cleveland Indian book in the Spring when my fancy turns to baseball.

My Usual Game (1995) by David Owen. I picked this up for a couple bucks on ACappella’s discount shelf outside their store on the same night Owen was speaking at the Carter Center. What a coincidence! I intended to give Owen’s book about golf to my brother as a Christmas gift, but it still sits in my to-be-read queue.

Cultural Amnesia (2007) by Clive James. My book friend Bruce in Wichita highly recommended it and so I used all my store credit at Eagle Eye to order a copy. I’ve been reading it off and on throughout the second half of the year. A fascinating collection of essays about mostly 20^th century artists, writers, thinkers, and film directors who enrich the spirit of humanism, as James says “by increasing the variety of the created world rather than reduce it.”

Absurdistan (2006) by Gary Shteyngart. At the Book Nook in Decatur, I picked up this much-acclaimed novel about a rich, sarcastic overweight young Russian man, who returns to his homeland to see his father only to be swept up into one of those small ugly civil wars that seem to be only too commonplace in Central Asia.  It’s kind of like Dr. Zhivago meets A Confederacy of Dunces. At five dollars, it was a solid read.   

The Man Who Loved Books Too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett (2009). After doing a reading in Knoxville, the book store owner gave me this uncorrected proof of this book as a kind “honorarium.” Her thinking was probably something like this: “He likes books and this book has the word “book” in the title. Why not free up some shelf space?”

A sack full of Books by various authors.  For participating at the Great Lakes Independent Bookseller’s Association  trade show in Cleveland in October. I received a huge sack of books gratis, which I could not bring back with me on the airplane. Nevertheless an autographed copy of Nami Mun’s Miles from Nowhere (we chatted in the hallway briefly; she likes ACappella.) made it into my carryon. The classiest author I met that weekend was Daniel Roth who edited his father’s Depression-era diaries and turned it into The Great Depression: A Diary. I gave the book to my friend Denise’s father who turns 90 next year. Flashing back to the days of his youth, he found the book thoroughly engaging.

And finally, my own book The Book Shopper: A Life in Review (2009). You try for ten years to get a book published and it finally gets published; it deserves to be on somebody’s Top Ten list.

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