There were quite a few books that I liked a lot this year, and I actually still have a stack that I haven’t gotten around to yet, including At Home by Bill Bryson, Salvation City by Sigred Nunez, and Bound by Antonya Nelson, that I suspect would have been nice additions to this list had I read them.
A few notes: This is, as always, not a list of the best books of the year, but of my favorites. Obviously I haven’t read enough of the books published this year for this list to be anything approaching authoritative. Also, the list only includes new books, although I believe two of them were published originally in 2009. But whatever, I didn’t stumble across them until the paperbacks came out this year, and it’s my list. Here we go:
8 ) Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
I swear, when I first heard about the Hunger Games trilogy, all I knew about it was that it was a series of young adult novels aimed primarily at girls, and I thought it had something to do with eating disorders. I’m not even kidding. It turns out I was wrong.
My wife read these all at once when the third volume was released in August and enjoyed them enough to encourage me to give them a chance when I felt like reading something a bit escapist, assuming novels set in a future dystopia can be used as an escape. I really enjoyed the first novel, The Hunger Games, but hesitated about continuing the series; it seemed like the aspects of the first book that made it thrilling and hard to put down would be difficult to replicate. Those of you who have read it will likely know what I mean. The story did lose a bit of momentum in the second book, Catching Fire, but things pick up again nicely in Mockingjay.
The books are of course being adapted into movies, supposedly with a PG-13 rating. If the movies hew closely to the books, that will be a pretty hard PG-13. This story is almost surprisingly violent at times and relatively dark throughout.
Of Modern Proportions 