Salon.com > Best of 2009

The year in ladybusiness

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:31:00 +0000

As the first decade of the new millennium draws to a close, I'm concerned that my lack of participation in the creation of countless year- and decade-end top-10 lists marks me as a failed blogger. Sure, I curated the nominations for female "person of the year" and critiqued the Associated Press's Top 10 Female Athletes list, but I still haven't done the hard work of Googling until I find 10 loosely related people or events I can slap up here with a brief introduction instead of writing a real post. That changes today!

Of course, since everyone's already beaten me to the punch, the only thing left is a list of lists. (Which other people have also beaten me to, but let's not get hung up on details.) Here are my picks for the Top 10 Ladybusiness-Related Top 10 (or thereabouts) Lists of 2009.

Andrew O’Hehir’s best movies of 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

All I have to say about 2009 in film is that I'm sure they'll find movies to give those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations to, but it won't be any of the ones on my list. That's not a shocking development, but in this year of global recession, the distance between the massive pop-Hollywood spectacles and the little-noticed obscurities way out on the cultural margins seems to have widened into a yawning abyss.

Actually, though, this has been a pretty good year for the independent-film sector, at least in economic terms. I know, that goes against both perceptions and the headline news: the implosion of Miramax and the pseudo-indie, mid-budget bombs churned out by mini-major studios like Fox Searchlight (e.g., "Amelia" and "Whip It"). But it's true anyway.

Stephanie Zacharek’s best movies of 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:20:00 +0000

A month or so ago, as critics' top-10 lists started trickling onto various Oscar-related blogs, I noticed that one list or another would be branded "idiosyncratic," and I started to wonder exactly what that meant. Is there a hypothetically perfect list, a list that follows some ideal template? Is the ideal list the one that's most in tune with the Zeitgeist? One that doesn't contain any foreign-language or otherwise "weird" films that the majority of the American populace hasn't seen? Considering that 2009 saw the theatrical release of some 600 movies — not that any critic comes close to seeing them all — isn't any list made by any individual human being going to be idiosyncratic in some way? The notion that there's an acceptable critical view, that certain movies must — or must not — appear on a list in order for any given critic to be taken seriously, flies in the face of what criticism is supposed to be.

The best TV of 2009

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

This was the year TV dared to be odd. Comedies and dramas across the dial flirted with darkness and freaks and bizarre references and tiny subcultures and left the big, obvious, conventional stories and plotlines far behind. Instead of tolerating the same generically likable characters and bland, familiar American lives, we traveled through time and space to meet manic community college professors, polygamists struggling with money troubles, a suicidal retired CEO, a self-deprecating geek with a knack for extreme neurological makeovers and a gay couple bickering over their adopted daughter's bedroom mural.

Yes, this year, bad TV was still bad. But good TV? Good TV was smart and weird and hilarious and fun and provocative -- remarkably so. This year, TV overachieved, and instead of one or two quirky, original, suspenseful, strange shows, we had about 15 of them. If that sounds like an exaggeration, well, maybe you're watching the wrong stuff.

1. "Mad Men"

Female “person of the year”

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:18:00 +0000

In 1999, Time magazine changed its "Man of the Year" title to "Person of the Year," but the linguistic switch had no apparent effect on the magazine's long and rarely interrupted stretch of honoring male persons at year's end. In fact, there hasn't been a stand-alone female honoree since Corazon Aquino was "Man of the Year" in 1986. "The Whistleblowers" of 2002 featured three women; 2003's winner was "The American soldier"; and Melinda Gates was one of 2005's "Good Samaritans," along with her husband and Bono. Oh, and I suppose female persons share in the 2006 "We couldn't really think of anybody this year" award. (They literally covered every woman who saw the cover with that one! What am I complaining about?) But Jeff Bezos, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama and, as of yesterday, Ben Bernanke have all earned solo "Person of the Year" covers since the language was changed -- as have Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton (twice each), George H.W. Bush, Ted Turner, Pope John Paul II, Newt Gingrich, David Ho, Andy Grove and Kenneth freakin' Starr, since Aquino's win. I am detecting a pattern.

What was the best book of the year?

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 03:30:00 +0000

Nick Hornby, the author of "Juliet, Naked"

Jess Walter is one of your country's most interesting younger novelists, and one of my favourite contemporary writers. And his latest book, "The Financial Lives of the Poets," seems to me to contain most things that one can reasonably expect from a good novel: It's wise, moving, very funny and timely, dealing as it does with economic calamity and how that whole mess impacts our lives and relationships and souls. Oh, and it's a joy to read, too — a sine qua non, given the darkness of the times, both within the book's pages and out here in the world.

Judy Blume, children's book author, most recently of "Soupy Saturdays With the Pain and the Great One"

Radio discussion of 2009′s best books

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 23:11:00 +0000

Salon readers who'd like to hear me talking about my favorite books of 2009 should check out this episode of the NPR call-in show, "On Point." Even better, you'll get recommendations from David Ulin, the editor of the Los Angeles Times' books section, and Carol Besse, co-owner of Carmichael's Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as the show's impressively well-read readers. A particularly nice touch was having Carol and I read short excerpts from some of our choices.

The best fiction of 2009

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 01:09:00 +0000

All best-books lists are pretty subjective, none more so than a list of the year's best fiction. For example, I probably experienced the most unadulterated readerly bliss this year while buried in the pages of Lev Grossman's "The Magicians," but then the quirky theme of Grossman's novel -- how a child steeped in literary fantasy like the Chronicles of Narnia comes to terms with the ambiguous nature of adulthood -- is virtually the same as that of my own nonfiction book. They even have almost the same title! And the author is a good friend. If that's not too many caveats for you, dear reader, then you can consider this a strong recommendation.

The truth is, there's enough great fiction out there that it makes sense to reach for a certain breadth, balance and variety. This year's Booker Prize short list was so good, it's tempting to simply reproduce it, but an all-Brit list would be as cockeyed as, say, an all-male one. In the end, we've kept the Booker crowd down to just two. Hillary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" was neck and neck with A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book," but a shade more celebrated, which tipped the balance in favor of Dame Antonia.

The best nonfiction books of 2009

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 01:05:00 +0000

It's been a rocky year for the book business, what with price wars among the major discount retailers, the byzantine provisions of the Google Books settlement and an unceasing drumbeat of proclamations that the publishing industry is rendering itself obsolete. At the same time, new reading apps introduced for the iPhone outnumbered games for the first time this fall, and the manufacturers of e-readers all report that the devices are selling like hotcakes.

Amid all this speculation about the future of publishing, one thing has remained constant: Authors are still writing great books. Today, Salon presents our list of the five best works of nonfiction published in 2009. Tune in tomorrow to learn our choices for best fiction, and on Thursday, we'll publish our list of the 10 best books of the decade.