5 Books: The 5 Best Books I’ve Read This Year (So Far)

by Marcelo on July 3, 2009

This week will mark 2009′s halfway point. Already? It seems like only yesterday that 2009 was just beginning, but time flies when you have a lot of books to read. So here are the five books that I’ve read so far this year that have really stuck with me. They weren’t published this year, I just happened to stumble on them in 2009. I’m presenting these in a countdown from 5th best to 1st best.

5. It’s Superman! by Tom De Haven- A rip-roaring Depression-era origin story for the Man of Steel, the book takes the legend of Superman and does something the comics haven’t been able to do in years: make it real. Clark Kent is a dust bowl farm boywho yearns for social justice, Lois Lane is a sexy firecracker of a dame with a penchant for getting into trouble, and Lex Luthorisis a New York City alderman with more nefarious plans and a back story that finally explains what makes him tick.

The result is a supremely well-written book that will have you humming the theme from the Superman movie while you admire the 30′s detail that grounds the story and makes it real and believable. And through it all you never lose sight of the idea that these are real human beings, and that’s a first for the Man of Steel. My only criticism is that De Haven spends too long building the origin story and not enough time with Superman actually being Superman. Indeed, the final chapter has a small summary of all the times Supes and Lois have met since his debut, and I wanted to read about those adventures. But that doesn’t take away much from how great this book is. They should make a period film out of this story.

4. Everything Bad is Good for You by Steven Johnson – Steven Johnson is one of the most fascinating writers working today. Each book he writes tackles some new corner of knowledge, from emergent systems to neuroscience to a mid-19th century cholera outbreak that changed the world, and Johnson always manages to relate the material to your everyday life. Everything Bad is Good For You is a story about the here and now, about how the naysayers who think our pop culture-addicted children are getting dumber and dumber is just plain wrong.

Using an arsenal of statistics, test scores, anecdotal evidence, and reasoned analysis, Johnson argues the exact opposite–that the video games, Internet links, TV shows, and popular music that we are exposing our kids to are making them smarter, more agile, more capable of solving certain types of problems than we have ever been. It’s a story of techno-triumphalism that helps you appreciate this brave new world we’re in right now. It’s one of those books I constantly refer to when talking to people about tech issues.

3. Token by Alisa Kwitney & Joëlle Jones – In a previous 5 Books post I mentioned the DC Minx line of comics aimed at teenage girls. DC has since announced the cancellation of the Minx line, but you can still pick up the books that are out there (and DC has one or two more in the pipeline they intend to publish). One of the best of the Minx books is Token.

Token is a beautiful coming of age story about a girl’s first boyfriend during a too-short summer in Miami Beach. All at once Shira Spektor’s world is thrown upside downby her dad’s impending marriage to her secretary Linda, and it doesn’t help when a young Spanish boy named Rafael wanders into her world. The writing is honest and real withan ending that is completely earned, and the artwork matches the script with subtlety and grace, perfecting quiet beautiful moments like a casual shrug, a shiver, a sideways glance. Many times in comic books art is just cool and stylish, but this book features art that gives ideas about character and mood. This is one of the finer graphic novels I’ve read.

2. Syrup by Maxx Barry – Let me start by pointing out the obvious to anyone who has already read Syrup: it’s got a lot of problems. The final third of the book is completely unrealistic and would never go down the way it does. The writing is hyper-self-aware to the point of parody, and the story is filled with unlikable characters who exist in a sort of quasi wish fulfillment for Barry, himself a survivor of the corporate marketing culture he’s skewering.

But Syrup somehow, against all odds, works. Not only does it work, it works really well. The words fly off the page and hit you in the face with their audacity and electricity. There are so many purely laugh out loud moments, so many wonderful plot twists and punchlines, and despite your better intentions you end up rooting desperately for the main characters to succeed. I had a shit-eating grin on my face the entire time I was reading Syrup, noting passages I wanted to read aloud to my fiancee because they were so funny and so audacious. This may not have been the best book I read this year, but I listed it so high because it was unquestionably one of the best reading experiences I’ve ever had.

1. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland – On a completely different tack, this book is the exact opposite of Syrup–it’s a quietly horrific story of a school shooting and its aftermath in the lives of several key participants. The book is told from four different points of view, each one taking a long single turn to reveal their part of the story. There’s Cheryl, the dead girl everyone turned into a martyr who had a secret marriage to her high school boyfriend, speaking to us from beyond the grave. There’s Jason, her husband, who has tried over the years following the shooting to find some semblance of normalcy in a world where no one could possibly know the truth about what really happened. There’s also a section written by Heather, Jason’s long-suffering girlfriend, about her attempts to live up to Cheryl’s legacy and to heal the wounds Jason suffered so long ago. And finally there’s Reg, Jason’s domineering and psychotic father, who finds himself at the end of his life alone, apologetic, and surprisingly human. Through these four stories we get a portrait of a family lost in a world where God has abandoned them and people are incapable of connecting on a meaningful level.

The result is a story of tremendous humanity and poetry, a story about the difference in perspective between so many disparate people. One image in the book reaches out to me over and over again. In the first few pages Cheryl talks how God doesn’t see night and day because God is the sun and the sun shines indiscriminately on the Earth. It’s our perception of that light that creates night and day. This book is the story of that difference in perception. Every character in the book has a side to them no one else knows or can truly understand. And the ending is a tour de force explosion of meaning and poetry that caps off this beautiful, tragic, sublime book.

Honorable mentions go to Rudy Rucker’s fabulous book of fourth dimensional weirdness Spaceland, Michael Chabon’s nostalgic adventure Summerland, and Judith Guest’s classic Ordinary People, which is one of my all-time favorites but I didn’t want to stack the list with books I frequently re-read because I love them so much.

5 Books: The 5 Best Books I’ve Read This Year (So Far)

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