Like the rest of the blogosphere, I like having a few end-of-the-year lists to sum up what actually happened to me in 2009. So here I’m including a short list of the books that really stood out for me in my reading. These are not books published in 2009, but rather any book I discovered in this year. The list is fairly short; while I read a good deal, only a handful of books really moved me or greatly impressed me, and I’m picky! So enjoy my favorite reads of 2009.

Old Path, White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

Thich Nhat Hanh
As a student and admirer of Buddhism, I am always interested in reading about the literary side of the religion. One inspiring figure who continues to write today in Buddhism is the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and this book is his lightly imagined biography of the Buddha. In this deeply moving book, the buddha is not mysterious and inherently holy, but is rather a curious and passionate individual. He is a human being, raised in a life of privilege, but moved to compassion for the lives of the poor and the desperate. The simple, luminous prose outlines some of the main concepts of Buddhism while also celebrating a life legendary for its generosity and wisdom.

Delta Wedding

Eudora Welty
For several years I’ve been a devoted fan of Eudora Welty’s short stories, which capture different inhabitants of the South with startling realism, color, and tenderness. Welty manages to hold both the grotesque and the beautiful, often in the same story. For the first time this year, I picked up her first novel, Delta Wedding. It’s an extraordinarily complex, multi-faceted portrait of the bustle a large family goes through in the days before a wedding. In the space of this brief book, we are given sadness and warmth, joy and humor, playfulness and bitterness. There are so many characters clamoring for their own voice in this novel, and all of them are written tenderly and vividly.

After the jump: more books I loved in 2009.

Wild Nights!

Joyce Carol Oates
When I was just starting to write as a kid, I loved doing style imitations of writers. It became my specialty, to do a good Hemingway impression or a careful mimicry of Ken Kesey. That’s why this novel by Joyce Carol Oates was such a fun exercise for me to read. She imagines the final days of the lives of several famous writers, including Poe, Hemingway, Dickinson, Twain, and Henry James, and each section is in the style of the author in question. They are a creative blending of the concerns and obsessions each writer had with the actual facts of his or her demise. It was fascinating to read, and best yet, it made me want to read more of each great author’s work.

Independence Day

Richard Ford
This is a long novel, but it’s only about a single weekend — one New Jersey weekend leading up to the 4th of July. In that single weekend, author Richard Ford manages to take his character from a previous novel through every extreme of human emotion and questioning. More than anything, this is a character novel, about a man forced to re-evaluate his life in the middle, struggling with the concept of compromise. It is detailed, engrossing, and deeply touching.

None of these books are ranked, except for my number one book of the year. And without further ado:

Runaway

Alice Munro
Alice Munro is indisputably the master of the modern short story. She is cutting but also warm, cool and limpid with her prose. She writes the kind of prose I wish I could have in my own writing, and her story collection Runaway perfectly captures Munro at her best in my opinion. In this collection, Munro often works with the long-form short story, also writing stories that follow the same character a few stories. The stories unfold, unhurried, haunting, beautiful, perfectly structured. They’re great stories to study for craft, but more than that, I find the images they conjured still living vividly in my brain, the emotions of the characters still haunting. It is the only book this year that made it onto my highly exclusive five star list.

Each of the books on this list come highly recommended. I wish you a year of good reading!