2009 books

67) Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008
I'm pleased that the plan to get this translated into four Burmese languages is now up and running – they received the necessary pledges with time to spare. This is Doctorow's "Orwell fan fiction", involving a small group of tech-savvy teenagers who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, fall foul of the Department of Homeland Security in a very bad way. Beyond the pervasive surveillance and counter-hacking it deliberately veers towards a believable extreme – at its most uncomfortable points it involves Americans torturing American children. A country's government using torture on its own youth in the name of state security isn't new, and in the light of the US's recent cultural nadir it's certainly fair play to line it up alongside countries like Burma, Iran and South Africa, at least in fiction. You also don't find many new genre books published these days with an Afterword, let alone the two that Little Brother has, including one from Bruce Schneier. This is pitched very well as counterculture teenage fiction, it feels right from cover to cover even though the protagonist Marcus is often talking with the hindsight of maturity. San Francisco has always been my favourite American city as a visitor but I doubt I'll be able to look at it the same way after reading this – Cory's to be congratulated, and it was a great way to round out a year's reading.

2009 books

68) Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth, 2008
This is a combined edition of two previously released Spanish collections. These insightful stories are all anecdotal and semi-autobiographical but also mostly told in the third person, which inevitably engenders a small aura of mystery about Bolaño himself in the mind of the reader. Bolaño's subject matter is consistently literary: obscure South American poets, Chilean political exiles, Mexican or Spanish settings, reminiscences of lost friends, and left wing writers who like the narrator himself are all living at the far margins of the arts. Bolaño also speaks with consistency: he always writes as if relating the story by voice rather than written words and his story structure is such that you never know quite where he will end up, but wherever it is it's usually on the cusp of what would be another story, and the endings are often abrupt. It's impossible to pin down a favourite; they somehow blur together but are all equally very well told. A completely enchanting collection.

2009 books

69) Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, 1988
After not much internal debate this was easily one of my best books this year, something I read probably back in October. It concerns the life and elusive identity of a dashing Chilean Air Force pilot, skywriter and poet, twisted lothario and secret hitman for the Pinochet regime. The straightforward structure is that of an attempt by a former acquaintance to identify him as the unlikely man responsible for the murders of some opposition sympathisers; the detective work quickly gets bogged down in endless possible leads that go nowhere as the pilot disappears and then very likely reappears in different guises as a guerilla and underground poet, hiding out elsewhere in Latin America as well as France and Spain. This is the literary territory Bolaño has claimed as his own, but he touches on areas I didn't expect: American cult literature, fanzines and Philip K. Dick to name three. In political exile in Spain, this is probably not a book Bolaño could have written while in Chile: he is too specific about certain identifiable people, places and events such that Distant Star would not have received much widespread credibility there, perhaps before being accepted as a legitimate work by people who would be less inclined to discredit Bolaño's believable journalistic style and instead embrace his invention. It's a complex text, often by turns chilling and bizarrely funny, with a translation by Chris Andrews that once again preserves Bolaño's infectious energy. I'll recommend this novel above any other I've read this year.

2009 books

72 books read this year, including three of E.E. 'Doc' Smith's 'Lensman' series which I haven't yet written about – I'll get around to that when I've finished the entire series next year. Only a third of all this year's reads were genre, a lower percentage than last year, and I'm getting very behind on Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds, something I really need to address. Also 13 by, edited by or co-authored by women, a higher percentage than last year although still much lower than I thought.

Favourite book of the year is without a doubt Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star, followed by Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North and Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. As I've said before, I'll probably be reading everything by Bolaño that becomes available, he is that impressive. Best genre novel read this year was China Miéville's The City & The City, a real mind-warper of a book.

All books:
Peter Adolphsen, Machine, 2006 [ review ]
William H. Armstrong, Sounder, 1969 [ review ]
Mike Ashley, ed., The Best of British SF 1, 1977 [ review ]
Mike Ashley, ed., The Best of British SF 2, 1977 [ review ]
J.G. Ballard, The Wind from Nowhere, 1961 [ review ]
J.G. Ballard, The Day of Forever, 1967 [ review ]
J.G. Ballard, The Venus Hunters, 1980 [ review ]
The Bangkok Women's Writers Group, Bangkok Blondes, 2009 [ review ]
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah, 1996 [ review ]
Julian Barnes, The Porcupine, 1992 [ review ]
Elizabeth Bear, The Chains That You Refuse, 2006 [ review ]
Alistair Beaton, A Planet for the President, 2004 [ review ]
Bernard Beckett, Genesis, 2006 [ review ]
Roberto Bolaño, Distant Star, 1988 [ review ]
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, 2000 [ review ]
Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings on Earth, 2008 [ review ]
Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster, 1974 [ review ]
Yuri Buida, The Zero Train, 1993 [ review ]
Terence Bumbly, The Museum of Unnatural History, 2007 [ review ]
Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders' Nests, 1947 [ review ]
Jacques Chessex, The Vampire of Ropraz, 2007 [ review ]
Jim Crace, Continent, 1986 [ review ]
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008 [ review ]
Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile, 1958 [ review ]
Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases, 2007 [ review ]
Jaine Fenn, Principles of Angels, 2008 [ review ]
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, 1892 [ review ]
Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees, 1953 [ review ]
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: Forgiving Apartheid's Chief Killer, 2003 [ review ]
Guy Goffette, Forever Nude: A Fiction, 1998 [ review ]
Haya Hoffman, ed., A Chance Beyond Bombs, 1998 [ review ]
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932 [ review ]
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958 [ review ]
Carsten Jensen, Earth in the Mouth, 1991 [ review ]
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip, 2006 [ review ]
Yasunari Kawabata, Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, 1988 [ review ]
Imré Kertesz, Detective Story, 1977 [ review ]
Imré Kertesz, Liquidation, 2003 [ review ]
Chart Korbjitti, No Way Out, 1980 [ review ]
Khammaan Khonkai, The Teachers of Mad Dog Swamp, 1978 [ review ]
Naguib Mahfouz, Karnak Café, 1974 [ review ]
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981 [ review ]
Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men, 2005 [ review ]
Ian McDonald, Cyberabad Days, 2009 [ review ]
Andrew McGahan, Wonders of a Godless World, 2009 [ review ]
China Miéville, The City & The City, 2009 [ review ]
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea, 1963 [ review ]
James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima, 2009 [ review ]
Sabai Muang, The Call of the Midnight Hour, 1993 [ review ]
Lewis Padgett, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1947 [ review ]
Robert Randall, The Shrouded Planet, 1957 [ review ]
Robert Randall, The Dawning Light, 1959 [ review ]
Adam Roberts, Salt, 2000 [ review ]
Leo Rosten, The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, 1937 [ review ]
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, 1969 [ review ]
Mark Salzman, Lying Awake, 2000 [ review ]
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, 1934 [ review ]
Luis Sepúlveda, The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, 1989 [ review ]
Prabhassorn Sevikul, Letter from a Blind Old Man and Other Stories, 2009 [ review ]
Robert Silverberg & Randall Garrett, A Little Intelligence, 2009 [ review ]
Clifford D. Simak, Spacebred Generations, 1953 [ review ]
George Gaylord Simpson, The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, 1996 [ review ]
Vandana Singh, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories, 2008 [ review ]
E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Triplanetary, 1948
E.E. 'Doc' Smith, First Lensman, 1950
E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Galactic Patrol, 1950
S.P. Somtow, The Pavilion of Frozen Women, 1996 [ review ]
Olaf Stapledon, The Flames, 1947 [ review ]
Garth Stein, The Art of Racing in the Rain, 2008 [ review ]
Kressmann Taylor, Address Unknown, 1938 [ review ]
Jane Vejjajiva, The Happiness of Kati, 2003 [ review ]
Xiaolu Guo, UFO in Her Eyes, 2009 [ review ]
Stefan Zweig, Journey into the Past, date unknown, first English publication 2009 [ review ]