Best Books of 2009--And there were

2009 saw the death of eternally great J.G. Ballard, who left us a one page short story in the New Yorker as his last gift to us. We also lost James Carroll, punk rocker and writer of the Basketball Diaries. The year saw new works by Paul Auster,Iain Banks, James Ellroy, Jonathan Lethem, Thomas Pyncheon and Andrew Vachss.

Here's my first cut for the top of the pops.

Henry Adams, Tom and Jack: the Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. The author of the magisterial work Thomas Eakins Revealed explores the lengthy and overlooked relationship between Benton and Pollock and restores it to its proper importance in art history.

John Ashbery, Planisphere--New Poems. I first saw John Ashbery read at Williams College in 1971 and have bought everything he's written since--one of the few poets whom I've followed throughout his career. His collected poems are now being published by Library of America and are worth having in one volume--soon to be more. But at 82 years old, how can he continue his quality and quantity? Does he even know who good he is? This new volume will not disappoint.

Iain Banks, Transition. When Banks gets his grove on, his style is one of the most innovative around. Transition is about parallel worlds suspended between the fall of the Wall and the collapse of the Twin Towers and the financial collapse of the West.

Max Blumenthal,Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party. Blumenthals documents how the religious right hijacked the once great party with amusing and horrifying tales for all. A great read and an important book.

Taylor Branch, The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President. Former colleague of the Clintons from the McGovern campaign, Branch is persuaded by Bill Clinton to tape and record the President during his Administration. In the hands of an acclaimed historian such as Taylor Branch this works out as a marvelous view of the opinions and attitudes of Bill Clinton and a reminder of why people said he was a 100% political animal. Glimmers of this were seen this year at the Netroots Convention where Clinton gave a bravura performance.

E.L. Doctorow, Homer & Langley. An old favorite, Doctorow tells the story of America through the story and point of view of the Collyer brothers, whom a younger generation would never get the reference. Sometimes works, sometimes not but always worth reading.

James Ellroy, Blood's Rover. The King of modern noir completes his political trilogy in his amped style. He takes us past the 1968 Convention and Watergate with his cast of characters. Ellroy also posits an interesting fate of J.Edgar Hoover's secret files, which were never found on his death.

John Farmer The Ground Truth:the Untold Story of America Under Attack on 9/11. The senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission lets us know all of Washington didn't have a clue about what happened during the whole day. He likens the government's systemic breakdown to the future Hurrican Katrina disaster. For policy wonks.

Elizabeth Hawes, Camus, A Romance. A woman's lifelong intellectual romance with Albert Camus yields a biography that provides more personal details than more authoritative accounts of the author's life. She is particularly good at reconstructing Albert Camus, the Algerian.

Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City. When he's good, he's very good and here he's terrific. A fabulous almost science fiction reconstruction of Manhattan--which works at every level.

David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win:the Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory. The young architect of America's Velvet Revolution provides a glimpse into how the Obama movement was created and ultimately won.

Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice. Pynchon revisits some of his old counter-cultural haunts with private eye Doc Sportello. Set in L.A. during the time of the Manson murders and the FBI's cointelpro program, Pynchon reveals he knows lots about dope, old surf music and the zeitgeist.

Frank Schaeffer, Patience with God: Faith for people who don't like Religion (or Atheism. Known now as a blogger at Huffington Post and a frequent guest on the Rachel Maddow Show, as one of the founders of the religious right he knows where the bodies are buried. This book goes after the New Atheism but also the fundamentalist Christians. For the relevant material read Chapter 8 "Spaceship Jesus Will Come and Whisk Us Away", his analysis of the bloodthirsty apocalyptic visions of today's fundamentalists and why they could care less about the United States, let alone sound policies. A convert to Orthodoxy, Frank Schaeffer reminds us that Christianity has a long and distinguished intellectual tradition that transcends the idolatry of the Bible held by American fundamentalists, who would not be recognized by the early Church fathers.

David Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty. The Cambridge professor writes a new history of America.

Edmind White, City Boy: My Life in New York during the 1960s and 1970s. This is a wonderful book on the New York scene at the time, the travails of being a free-lance writer and a young gay man present at the Stonewall uprising in 1969. It takes place in some of my old haunts in the 1970s.

Andrew Vachss, Haiku. After his acclaimed Burke series, Vachss returns to introduce his new characters.

Leonard Zeskind,Blood and Politics: the History of the White Nationalist Movement from the margins to the Mainstream. An invaluable study for understanding the orgins and gyrations of some of the political rhetroic emerging on the right today. A sobering book.