My Completely Subjective "Best Books" List

The start of a new year means it's time to reflect on last year's reading! I finished a total of 156 books, plus 78 volumes of manga, graphic novels, and comics.

Here are my top five books read in 2009 (with links to my reviews, when I have them):

• Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
• Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta
• Labor Day by Joyce Maynard
• Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
• The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 edited by Philip Gourevitch

Those that were in my top ten were pretty much impossible to narrow down. Here's a list of "honorable mention" contenders that could have been even longer:

• Maus I and II by Art Spiegelman
• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson
• Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson
• The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• The Help by Kathryn Stockett
• Housekeeping vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby
• The Pleasure of Reading edited by Antonia Fraser
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
• A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
• The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

It's fascinating that as I look back on my top reads of the year, the books that stand out aren't always the ones that I rated the highest right after finishing. Instead, they're books that for whatever reason made an impact on me, that I kept thinking about long after I'd finished them and would be reads that I would willingly revisit. I've updated my list in the widget to the right to reflect a "top 20," so there are a few titles there that I didn't include there.

What are some of your favorite books discovered in 2009? What makes them stand out to you?