From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2009

Since shortly after I started this blog about a year ago, I've been periodically looking back on my top 10 favorite books of years past, which were lists I made at the end of each year (since 1999!) and shared with a growing group of friends.  Each list consists of my favorite books I read in a particular year, not necessarily books published that year.  Today, I'll look at my list from 2009.

Here's my list from 2009, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

The Opposite of Love - Julie Buxbaum
Belong to Me - Marisa De Los Santos
Love the One You're With - Emily Giffin
Barefoot - Elin Hildebrand
The House at Riverton - Kate Morton
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox - Maggie O'Farrell
The Year of Fog - Michelle Richmond
Driving Sideways - Jess Riley
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society - Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
The Book Thief - Marcus Zusak

How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?

Wow, this is such a good list!  Very memorable books.  Indeed, I was contemporaneously reviewing books on Goodreads by this time, and I gave 5 out of 10 of these books a full 5 star rating!  ("The Opposite of Love," "Belong to Me," "House at Riverton," "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society," and "The Book Thief").  It's hard to even pick a favorite, I loved those all so much, and the other 5 books on this list are all still pretty memorable as well.  None of these books surprise me, but if I had to pick a few that were slightly less memorable, I'd say "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox" and "The Year of Fog," though they're both still great books.

Genres


Not the most diverse list in terms of genres - 4 historical fiction books ("The House at Riverton," "The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox," "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society," and "The Book Thief"), and the rest pretty much all somewhere on the spectrum of contemporary women's fiction/chick lit.


Popularity

The most read of these books on Goodreads was the very popular "The Book Thief," which has almost 1.5 million reviews.  "Guernsey Literary" comes in a distant second, but with a still pretty large number, almost 500,000 reviews.  The least read was "Driving Sideways," which only has about 1,300 reviews.

Other Random Stuff

"The Book Thief" and "Guernsey Literary" were also the two best reviewed books on Goodreads, with respective average ratings of 4.36 and 4.14.  The lowest rated is "Year of Fog" with an average rating of 3.46

This is the second appearance on my list for Marisa De Los Santos, whose first book, "Love Walked In" (which "Belong to Me" is actually a sequel to), was on my 2007 Ten Favorites list.  (Which reminds me, I really need to read her other books since I loved these two so much!)  It's also the second appearance on my list for Emily Giffin, whose "Something Borrowed" was on my 2005 Ten Favorites list.

This list marks the first appearance of two of my favorite authors - Kate Morton, who is probably the best author writing in the dual time period historical fiction genre, and Julie Buxbaum, who is one of my favorite writers of both contemporary women's fiction and realistic young adult fiction.

I think my sister lent "The Year of Fog" to me, and the rest were all paperbacks I owned and think I still do.  Have definitely lent a lot of them out over the years too.

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Note that I'll give all these posts the tag "Top 10," so you should be able to click on the label  "Top 10" at the bottom of the post and see all my other Top 10 posts.  And if you just want to see all my old Top 10 lists now without waiting, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.