But as of now, these are my favorite books from the year 2009. As always, I’d love to hear your reactions and suggestions for other things I should read.

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Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize this year. It’s a portrait of Thomas Cromwell, who for a time was Henry VIII’s closest advisor. History remembers him as a villain who helped to execute Thomas More, but Mantel treats him as a very modern character — a self-made man, who was an accomplished soldier, merchant, and diplomat, as well as a secret supporter of the Reformation. At its heart, this is a book about politics — both on the personal and the national level — and Mantel turns all of that turmoil into fascinating story.

The Gamble and The Good Soldiers are two different books about the surge in Iraq. The Gamble, written by Thomas Ricks, takes the broad perspective, focusing on the formation of the strategy, the work that Petreaus and his deputies did to advocate and push for the counter insurgency plan. The Good Soldiers, by David Finkle, focuses on one battalion charged with securing part of Baghdad. Both of them are powerful and hard to forget.

A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias is a portrait of a relationship from the beginning through the course of 30 years. It’s full of emotional impact and loss.

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin is a history of the rubber plantation that Henry Ford tried to carve out of the Amazon. His ambition was to create a model of Americana in the middle of the jungle, but it was a project almost doomed from the start.

Columbine by Dave Cullen is a fascinating history of the Columbine school shooting, which offers up new details and perspectives and cuts down many of the myths that took root in the immediate accounts of the tragedy.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is a strong short story collection from Wells Tower, none better than the title piece about a crew of Vikings who set out to raid a frequently-targeted island.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is an incredibly powerful book about Katrina and what it means to be both an immigrant and an American. I started it one Sunday morning and did not put it down until I’d read the last page. This is arguably Eggers’ best piece of writing.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann is a fascinating story about an explorer who set off into Amazon in search of a lost civilization, but disappears completely.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman is a self-reflective novel about the difficulties of growing up, which draws heavily from Rowling, Lewis, and Tolkien.

Born to Run by Christopher McDougall is an account of a tribe of legendary runners in Mexico, a profile of the best ultramarathoners in the world, and an argument for running as an evolutionary imperative. Other books I read this year might be arguably better, but none was more interesting or fun.

The City & The City by China Mieville is a tense story set in a fictional country in Eastern Europe, which is fundamentally detective novel, but draws heavily from science fiction and fantasy.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba is a memoir about a childhood in Africa and the imagination that inspires a boy to teach himself to build a windmill to power his home using castoff parts.

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The Wild Things is easily the best book ever adapted from a movie that was adapted from a picture book, but it also succeeds in its own right. Dave Eggers has created a novel that is deeply imaginative, slightly strange, occasionally dark, and ultimately touching.

On some level, we know the story. (Weren’t we all exposed to Maurice Sendak’s Caldecott winner in childhood?) And the world Sendak evokes is so gripping that it is easy to forget that the original book was built around nine sentences. Eggers, however, has produced a work of 300 pages and many, many sentences, which uses the original for inspiration but leaps off to create a world of its own.

There is still a wild boy named Max, of course, and he still bites his mother. Max still visits an island inhabited by wild Things. But before we meet one of the monsters, we spend time in Max’s home. We learn that Max has a sister who has grown too old for the games they once played, and we are introduced to his mother’s younger boyfriend, whom Max is not prepared to accept. When confronted with changes in his actual life, a place filled with Wild Things seems satisfactory by comparison.

On the island, Max is still a king, and he still leads the Things in a wild rumpus. But where Sendak’s monsters are distinct mostly for the way they are illustrated, each of Eggers’ monsters has a unique voice and personality. And where Sendak’s readers have the perspective to understand that Max is dreaming, in Eggers’ story, everything — no matter how strange — is all too real. When the Things suggest they’re ready to eat Max, it’s a threat we can believe.

With Sendak’s original, part of what works so well is the style in which it’s drawn. Anyone who has seen the trailer for Spike Jonze’s film knows that’s true for the movie as well. So too with Eggers’ adaptation. The writing is crisp and alive, and it works, perhaps better than an adaptation ever should.

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Stone’s Fall: A Novel
by Iain Pears
Published: May 2009
Pages: 608
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

For a novel that seeks to explain the circumstances of John Stone’s death, Stone’s Fall spends a lot of time exploring the details of the man’s life. The story unfolds in three parts, each narrated by a different character, each set in a different city. That set-up seems straightforward enough, but the narrative grows in complexity as it moves from London in 1909, to Paris in 1890, to Venice in 1867. Details that seem innocent upon first introduction become vitally important later. Minor characters in the early sections step into the spotlight later.

John Stone is a Gilded Age industrialist, who first made his fortune selling self-propelled torpedoes and dreadnoughts. When he dies suddenly, his widow — Elizabeth — hires a young journalist named Matthew Braddock to find a child who may or may not exist. Unraveling that mystery requires Braddock to dig deeply into Stone’s business affairs. The more Braddock learns, the less he understands. Was Stone’s corporation in deep fiscal trouble? Why is Elizabeth connected to an assassination-minded band of anarchists? And who is Henry Cort — the man who ordered London’s papers to withhold details of Stone’s death?

Cort, in fact, is the man who picks up the narrative in Paris. As a young spy, he stumbles upon an international conspiracy to sabotage London finance (which eerily reflects our own banking crisis). Cort needs help from Stone and Elizabeth to end the threat, and offers the reader important details about the background of both. The final section is voiced by John Stone himself, dispatching each lingering question with the same efficiency he brings to the arms business. Some answers are easier to predict than others, but the ending is unexpected and well worth the wait.

Stone’s Fall is an intricate, layered puzzle, and from an author like Iain Pears, we expect nothing less. But this is also a novel about ideas, which finds beauty in the rhythms of commerce and politics. At 600 pages, it demands some dedication, but offers plenty of rewards for the effort.

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The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
Published: February 2009
Pages: 352
Publisher: Doubleday

In 1925, Col. Percy Fawcett walked into the jungles of the Amazon in search of a forgotten empire. He had a record of setting off into unmapped places only to emerge months — or even years — later with new discoveries. Fawcett was one of the most famous explorers of his day, so celebrated that he became the model for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s hero in The Lost World.

David Grann — who writes about the explorer in his new book, The Lost City of Z — records that Fawcett was convinced, “that an ancient, highly cultured people still existed in the Brazilian Amazon and that their civilization was so old and sophisticated it would forever alter the Western view of the Americas.”

Fawcett’s mission captured the popular imagination, generating international headlines. For weeks,
the world tracked his journey, certain that a great discovery was about to be made. Then, after a final dispatch from somewhere near the Upper Xingu, Fawcett and his team disappeared — never to be heard from again.

One after another, would-be rescuers tried to find Fawcett or some sign of his fate. None succeeded, but dozens lost their lives in the attempt. Over time, his story became as much a thing of legend as it was fact, then slipped directly into fiction altogether.

Eighty years later, Grann — a writer for the New Yorker — finds himself obsessed with learning the truth. Eventually, he heads to the Amazon, following Fawcett’s trail.

The historians and anthropologists of Fawcett’s day were convinced that his mission was a fool’s errand. They believed that the Amazon was too harsh a place to support anything but the most primitive of peoples.

They were wrong.

As Grann searches for Fawcett’s remains, he meets an archaeologist with evidence that something approaching the Lost City of Z might well have existed (even if its streets were not paved of gold). For the reader, that discovery (along with the thrill of the story itself) will have to suffice, however, as Fawcett’s true fate still remains a mystery.

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Wired for War

When American forces marched into Iraq, they were little different from generations of warriors before them. They may have had global-positioning systems and highly advanced weaponry, but they were still just human beings.

Now, that’s all changed; our troops are no longer alone on the battlefield. Since 2003, the number of American robots in combat has gone from 0 to 12,000, and the unmanned ranks continue to grow.

War in 2009 is a place where science fiction has become military reality.

P.W. Singer’s new book — Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century — explores the both immediate ramifications of this strange fact and the questions it poses for the
future.

The military first deployed robots in missions that were too dull or dangerous for human soldiers to complete. A Predator drone can spend 24 hours in flight without rest, while the PackBot — built by the same people who make the Roomba — can be tossed through the window of a hostile building to transmit live video of insurgents inside.

But even as the scientists and engineers who design these machines dream of a world where their creations eliminate the need for human causalities, they are hard at work devising ways that robots could be used to kill enemy combatants.

If that leaves you thinking about Skynet, you’re not alone.

Writers and thinkers have been haunted by visions of a future with machines in rebellion for nearly 100 years. The experts with whom Singer speaks all understand the potential for apocalypse and many believe that strong artificial intelligence — which exceeds human intelligence — is less than a generation away. Singer takes comfort in the fact that our fears are leading many to begin grappling with the ethical questions long before we’re in danger of being assaulted by our toasters.

In the meantime, the paradigm for the present is clear. In the past six months, American drones have launched nearly 40 strikes against militants on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing hundreds.

That fact alone makes Wired for War essential reading for the immediate future.

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In 2005, Steven Rinella was one of 24 individuals to win one of the rarest lotteries in the world. For his luck, he was awarded a permit by the government of Alaska to hunt and kill a wild American bison in the Wrangell-Saint Elias National Park. For Rinella — a correspondent for Outside Magazine who has been obsessed with buffalo for more than a decade — this hunt becomes an intellectual road trip, which leaves him exploring thousands of years of history, science, and popular culture.

And what a varied trip it is. He takes an old, treasured bison skull he once found on a hike in southern Montana to a laboratory in England to have it carbon dated. He attempts to discover the remains of Black Diamond — the buffalo once housed at the Central Park Zoo in New York and believed to be the model for the engraving on the buffalo nickel coin. He looks for artifacts left behind by the first people to hunt American bison and tells the stories of famous 19th century buffalo hunters who almost exterminated the species.

But at its heart, this is an adventure story which doesn’t disappoint. Even as he tracks his target across the Alaskan wilderness, Rinella is stalked in turn by grizzly bears. He burns dried buffalo chips for fuel; the reader must take on faith that the smoke smells of “cinnamon and cloves, dried straw and pumpkins.” After he makes his kill, he butchers the carcass and carries out a thousand pounds of meat and hide on his back, piece by piece. And, as he returns to civilization, he’s threatened by a freezing river and the onset of hypothermia.

American Buffalo is everything that nature writing should be — Rinella’s prose is muscular, evocative, and utterly dominated by his passion for the subject. This book succeeds where other hunting narratives often fail because Rinella both understands and is willing to explain the inherent contradiction of trying to kill something he holds dear.

But after months of considering the book (and living through a presidential election where voters screamed, “Kill Him!” in reference to my party’s nominee), I’ve decided that the weaknesses are smaller than I originally thought, and they are far outweighed by the book’s strengths.

My review in Boldtype.

Days later, riding down the same road with my dad, we came to the intersection, and he didn’t slow down for a second. The difference between us? I was a new driver, trying to pay attention to everything, and my father, with thirty years of experience on the road, saw nothing that he didn’t expect to see.

Tom Vanderbilt would have told me to expect nothing different.

My review of his new book is available in the current issue of Boldtype.

No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?