2009 - reads of the year

Not a vintage year by any means. These are my stand outs - I've had to go right down to my ** rated reads to make up a Top Ten.

1. Red Shift by Alan Garner. Brilliant novel that defies description. Three stories, where love and violence coincide, intermesh and repeat across the centuries, around the same Cheshire locations.
2. Hitler: a Study in Tyranny by Alan Bullock. The first full biography of Hitler largely based on Nuremburg testimony. Extensive, detailed, enthralling, though hardly uplifting.
3. The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy. Sequel to American Tabloid, exploring the decade between the murders of Jack and Bobby kennedy. Contains all Ellroy's good and bad points in abundance.
4. The Wild Palms by William Faulkner. A convict accidentally escapes from the pennitentiary, while two lovers drift aimless to disaster. Two novellas exploring freedom and compulsion. Initially unconvincing, ultimately riveting.
5. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend. Iraq after invasion, told with wit and rage by a blogger who has been silent for almost 2 years. Prescient.
6. Germinal by Emile Zola. French miners strike against their apalling work conditions. Disaster ensues. Over-wrought and bathetic, but still powerful.
7. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad. Off kilter tale of crime and punishment, set in Tsarist Russia and Geneva, as an embittered student is forced to infiltrate a revolutionary group.
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In a reversal of prior experience: first half drags, second soars. But too much of his supposedly luminous tale is just a an endless recitation of odd stuff happening.
9. Big Muddy by B.C. Hall & C.T. Wood. A modern Mississippi journey. Worthy, but lacks the detail to match the scope of the project. The book I'm most interested in re-reading, which is why it makes the list.
10. Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame. Autobiofictography. A childhood that veered between desperate poverty and imaginative nightmare is described brilliantly, but the adult present, played as a comedy of manners, is unsatisfying.

2010 had better be an improvement.