Great books you read in 2009?
anatoly: I got myself a Sony Reader mid-2009 and started reading about twice more than I had been before. 2009 was also the first year in which I wasn't too lazy to document which books I read (I'm really glad I wasn't). Here're some of the favourites this year:Classics:Kafka's The Process and America - both stunning novels that deserve to be read as much as his most famous, The Castle.Jan Potocki, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa - a trippy collection of tales organised in multiple nested frames.Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina. Still as breathtaking as I'd remembered it from the previous reading five years ago.Science Fiction:Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe, whom I hadn't read before, turns out to be in a class of his own. It's literary SF, overwhelmingly masterful and beautiful in its prose and characters, yet it could give any hardcore SF novel a run in terms of its ideas. It demands and richly rewards a close reading. I'll be reading more Wolfe in 2010.Ted Chiang, collected stories. Chiang writes only stories, and has written just a few of them, but nearly every one is a gem. Read Understand on the web (http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/under.htm) to see if you like his style - I do.Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky, The Peace War, Marooned in Realtime. All great novels, but start from A Fire Upon the Deep (I read that in 2008) if you haven't read Vinge before, it's the best introduction.Greg Egan, Diaspora, Quarantine, Distress. Egan is the best hardcore SF author out there. _Diaspora_ is a fascinating take on shared simulated reality that's very different from the usual fare. Quarantine will appeal to your inner quantum mechanical geek.Contemporary fiction:Pynchon, V. Pynchon is the best novelist we've got. I recommend The Crying of the Lot 49 as the best Pynchon to start from; V is more difficult and much longer, but rewards the patience. I still can't get over the fact that Pynchon wrote and published this novel when he was 26.Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book.Annie Proulx, Fine Just The Way It Is. A new collection of stories from the best writer about rural America out there. Three are extraordinary, two so-so, the rest very good.Non-fiction:W. Sidney Allen, Vox Graeca and Vox Latina. If you want to know how ancient Greek and Latin sounded, these are the books to read.Elizabeth Lloyd. The Case Of The Female Orgasm. An interesting study into how available evolutionary explanations of female orgasm fail in various ways. This is a book about evolutionary biology and its methodological soundness as much as it is about explaining female orgasm.Computer-related:Peter Seibel, Coders at Work. A fantastic collection of interview with great programmers. The one 2009 book no hacker should be without.Squeak by Example. Does a great job of explaining Smalltalk in general and Squeak in particular.