Some cool best books of 2009 images:
Best Book I Read in 2009
Image by cogito ergo imago
Never mind that it was published in 2005, I read it in 2009.
So clever and funny, so piercingly insightful, Zadie Smith has a powerful command of the language, and the eery ability to creep up on the reader with an unnoticed plot element. She reminds me of Scott Fitzgerald. (Apparently Zadie is not the writer’s real name, not quite anyway. But I can see why she might have chosen it as a nom de plume – Zadie was Scott Fitzgerald’s wife’s name, and she was thought to have ghosted some of his most acclaimed works.)
I read her brilliant first book, White Teeth, published when she wasn’t much more than an undergraduate (Cambridge) and like everybody else I thought "that’s going to be a tough act to follow".
And sure enough, the reviews of On Beauty when it came out a few years later were almost universally sympathetic – basically "this isn’t a terrible book but … what a pity she’s burdened by having to compete with White Teeth". The message was, this isn’t top shelf, and accordingly, I didn’t bother to read it.
But then I saw On Beauty listed as one of the best works of art of the decade, recently, so I read it. And discovered – it’s superb. It might even be better than White Teeth.
(As an aside – On Beauty is largely set in a fictional Massachusetts town called Wellington. Harking back to my Beef Wellington remarks of a couple of weeks ago – I couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t an English cover for the Massachusetts college town of Wellesley – the 1st Duke of Wellington’s family name was, yes, Wellesley.)
cwp 2009 best book shortlistees
Image by nicholaslaughlin
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009: the six books shortlisted for the Caribbean/Canada regional Best Book prize. From left: Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault; Kenneth J. Harvey’s Blackstrap Hawco; Nino Ricci’s The Origin of Species; Jacob Ross’s Pynter Bender; Jaspreet Singh’s Chef; Fred Stenson’s The Great Karoo.