The Daily Caller does have one intriguing bit of regular content its competitors don’t, though: A diary by S.E. Cupp, one of the latest young, white conservative women to make a career of saying inflammatory things while looking really pretty. Cupp’s own Web site boasts a blurb from Carlson: “If anyone can make conservatism cool again, it’s S.E. Cupp, one of the smartest, most energetic and interesting people I know under 30.” And while I’m not one to take Tucker Carlson’s word on pretty much anything, my own investigation into his protégé – i.e., a good half-hour of checking out what Google turns up on her (Salon pays other people to do unimpeachable reporting, thanks) — suggests she is indeed smarter and more interesting than your average conservative pundit. 

For one thing, she can write, and she’s genuinely funny. In today’s diary, she hopes for a Rick Warren/Pat Robertson Twitter war, decides that the “idea of President Beck balancing the budget on a blackboard, in a Thomas Paine costume, crying, is kind of awesome,” engages in “about four minutes of relatively shallow introspection, questions about technology-dependence and a little womb-nostalgia” after being separated from her BlackBerry, and spends “three minutes thinking of a way to meet Judge Judy and convince her to become my second mother.” She seems to be a fan of my favorite novelist, Nick Hornby, and he’s publicly called her “charming.” In an interview with a besotted blogger, she said, “I like to write about politics as it appeals to a certain American value — whether it’s self-sustainability, independence, common sense, fiscal responsibility, community, decency — but not in a saccharine or pollyanna way, but in a way that gets to the root of what makes us all human.” Out of context, all that makes S.E. Cupp sound like the kind of woman I’d love to hang out with. In context — the one where, say, the serious thought of a President Beck doesn’t necessarily make her blood run cold, or where her political writing explores the relationship between our common humanity and “the reasons we should want a Sarah Palin in a position of power” — I think we’re probably both OK with living 800 miles apart.

It’s the contradictions that make Cupp an equally interesting and irritating personality. Her forthcoming book has the Coulteresque title “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity,” but Cupp says she’s an atheist. She’s just an atheist who feels comfortable barely tweaking standard Christian talking points about the religious foundation of the human conscience. (“It’s an understanding of and a respect for [Judeo-Christian] values that keeps me moral … even if we agree that nonbelievers can be moral people, how would you know?”) Despite those religious-but-not values, in her first Daily Caller diary, she introduces herself as “a terrible person” and “a misanthrope.” OK, I have to admit you don’t often hear that from a conservative pundit — tell me more! “That’s because most of the people I meet fall far short of the examples my mother and father set decades ago. Whereas they are compassionate, hard-working, down-to-earth, unpretentious, God-fearing common folk, you are an entitled, self-important, elitist and condescending snot weasel who wears his empty moral relativism and cheap ‘Daily Show’ pieties like they are Olympic medals.”

The “you” in question here is a pretend first date she’s concocted, which might prompt the thoughtful reader to wonder, “Why did you accept a pretend date with me when you already know you hate everything I stand for? Is it that difficult to be a single woman in New York?” (Oh yes, she lives in New York — and is an Ivy League graduate and former professional dancer currently working on a master’s at NYU — but she is totally not an artsy East Coast intellectual elitist, on account of how her god-fearing, common parents raised her to be a god-fearing, common atheist ballerina turned author and pundit.) But to dwell on such questions would be to miss the beauty of what Cupp has accomplished here: Instead of inventing a friend or blogger or liberal media whose imaginary views she loathes, like a lesser conservative personality might, she’s invented a reader! You are the straw man! Now, how are you going to argue that such a person doesn’t really exist, when you’re sitting right there? Well played, S.E. Cupp. Well played.

She’s smart. She’s funny. She’s charming. She’s honest enough at least to admit she doesn’t believe in a god and (in the second video below) to give George Bush, of whom she’s “a fan,” only a C grade on fiscal responsibility and cutting taxes. But then she gives him a B+ on limited government, which … what? What? And then you remember, this is a woman who says that in liberal New York, walking into the Fox News building “is like slipping into a warm bath.” A woman who wrote on that august organization’s Web site about an imaginary “slew of gay parties and inaugural balls” planned to welcome President Obama. Whose future column ideas include: “Shouldn’t it be the conservative creationists who want to save the polar bears and all of god’s creatures, and the liberal Darwinists who say ‘Screw ‘em — survival of the fittest, bitches’? Can’t we just drop a bomb on Yemeni al-Qaida camps? Is Avatar un-American and anti-military?” And who has said with a straight face to Sean Hannity (first video below), “Frankly, the rhetoric on the left has gotten so ugly.” So yeah, she’s basically just another Ann Coulter in someone sort of interesting’s clothing. But for better or worse, it looks like she’s here to stay.

Judy Blume, children’s book author, most recently of “Soupy Saturdays With the Pain and the Great One”

What I look for, what I always hope for, especially when I pick up a first novel, is an original voice. In Nicola Keegan’s “Swimming” I found not only the most original voice I’ve read in a long time, but a fantastic story of one girl’s journey from splashing infant to Olympic champion. But it’s not really about those gold medals. It’s about a life, it’s about a family — and what a family! Not that any of it is what you expect. That’s the thing about this book. It’s never what you expect. You know how the best fiction plunges you deep into another world? I would happily have stayed in Pip’s world.

Come to think of it, it’s time for me to read “Swimming” again. And no, Nicola Keegan was never an Olympic swimmer. But she sure fooled me. Kind of the way Wally Lamb fooled me in his first book, “She’s Come Undone.” I was convinced when I finished it that Wally was a woman. Had to be a woman. If you enjoy books and movies that make you work, you won’t be disappointed. And you’ll come away wanting to know everything you can about Nicola Keegan, especially when we can read her next book.

Anne Lamott, author of “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith”

One book I loved this year was “What I Thought I Knew” by Alice Eve Cohen, a memoir of an impossible and misdiagnosed pregnancy by a mother (already in her 40s) with a much younger man, and the ultimate knowledge that the fetus had Major Issues. It is just lovely, everything we love in a book — profound, honest, hilarious, humane, surprising. It’s the book I foisted on everyone.

Matthew Klam, author of “Sam the Cat: And Other Stories”

“Lowboy,” by John Wray, is a really tight thriller and love story told in short scenes about a young man who believes that in 10 hours global warming will destroy the world unless he (and only he) does what he believes he must do to stop it. It’s an amazing view of city life as seen through the eyes and the wanderings of a schizophrenic young man with a history of violence, off his medications and hiding out in the sewers and subway tunnels of New York. In “Lowboy,” Wray is so deeply living inside his work that it hums and shivers, echoes and drips with authentic believable and gorgeously wrought dialogue and scenes. Wray etches his details and inhabits all nature of humanity with ghostly power and can surely see up his characters’ noses, can see the geography of their tongues. This is a sometimes light, sometimes horrifying, pitch-perfect and lovingly rendered thing.

Junot Diaz, author of “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

Here’s a I book I fought hard for during the National Book Award judging, but to no avail: Chloe Aridjis’ “Book of Clouds.” A hypnotic first novel about a young Mexican gal in Berlin who stumbles into friendship with an eccentric historian and the madness that ensues. This book has the power of dreams and still hasn’t left me.

Lydia Millet, author of “Love in Infant Monkeys”

Robert Olmstead is one of the most sublime novelists we have. His work is under-recognized, I suspect, because his subject matter — Western and violent and horsey and manly — shares some ground with the better-known and highly talented Cormac McCarthy, and possibly there isn’t enough room in the culture for both of them to be famous at the same time. But to my mind Olmstead is the even greater artist and the more compassionate of the two writers; his style is more restrained, his language more perfect.

“Far Bright Star” tells the story of some brothers on horseback and some people who die — its set in 1916 during the search for Pancho Villa, and the plot has to do with revenge and is full of death and solitude. I’m purposefully vague here because in the end I didn’t much care about the details of the story, though in fact the narrative was well-crafted in its rhythms and suspenses. Rather I was repeatedly startled and taken in by the raptures and ecstasy of the prose, its philosophical qualities, its space and imagination and sculptural beauty and terrible sadness.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of “The Thing Around Your Neck”

I deeply admired the talent, ambition and courage it must have taken to write “Zeitoun.” Dave Eggers has appropriated — in the best possible sense — the story a Syrian-American family’s experience of Hurricane Katrina. His writing is spare and precise, with respect for both the reader and the story, and underlying the narrative is a wonderful sense of outrage made all the more powerful because of how light his touch is.

Juan Cole, author of “Engaging the Muslim World”

My pick for 2009 is Barry Eisler’s “Fault Line.” Eisler has reinvented the spy thriller for the 21st century. His fast-paced plots and action sequences are not slowed down by his careful exploration of moral ambiguity and the space he gives his characters to develop. His Iranian female lead is smart, frighteningly competent and creamily gorgeous. His tough-guy protagonist, Ben Treven, can take down Russian mafiosi in a nanosecond but can’t escape the legacy of family tragedy. Treven lives the contradictions of our time — the fight against terrorism and the outrage against torture, the need for ruthlessness and the perdurance of American values, the patriotic commitment and disillusionment at the betrayals of our leaders. Eisler’s ability to write both as an intelligence insider and a perceptive social critic allows him to create a gripping and believable universe in which you would just remain if only the book wouldn’t end.

Colum McCann, author of “Let the Great World Spin” and winner of this year’s National Book Award for fiction

It’s impossible to pick an absolute favorite — there are so many — but one book that I think deserves a very loud shout-out is “The Book of Night Women” by the young Jamaican novelist Marlon James. It’s a slave narrative, a story of rebellion, beautifully written, brave, smart, incisive and, yes, even funny. James has been called “a Jamaican Diaz” — it’s a nice phrase, and it also happens to be true.

Laura Lippman, author of “Hardly Knew Her”

By this point in my reading life, I have two mantras: “Surprise me” and “Have a take and don’t suck.” Jim Rome coined the latter, but the former is the result of more than a decade as a crime novelist. I’m a hard reader to surprise. I’m not talking about traditional plot twists, but something almost indefinable, a resolution at once true and earned, yet not entirely expected. In Jess Walter’s fifth novel, “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” he sets up a hilarious situation — former reporter/would-be Internet entrepreneur decides to become a pot dealer to forestall his family’s financial crisis — and brings it to a ruefully understated ending. Bonus: A succinct and, yes, poetic description of what’s happened to newsrooms over the past few years. It actually reminded me why I loved being a newspaper reporter, once upon a time.

Amy Sohn, author of “Prospect Park West”

Sparer than some of his other books, fast-paced and full of heart, Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked” centers on the relationship between Annie, an emotionally adrift English woman of 39 — and the reclusive Bob Dylanesque musician Tucker Crowe, who her boyfriend has idolized for years. The proscriptive fan boy is a Hornby archetype (“High Fidelity”), but here he shows the darker side of this personality: zealous narrow-mindedness and a total lack of generosity.

The real triumph, though, is the protagonist, Annie. Hornby has always been good at writing women, but Annie is his richest female character to date — a woman of childbearing age (just) who wakes up one day and realizes that 15 years have passed without her getting anything she wants. There’s also a hilariously inept shrink and a perfectly pitched 6-year-old boy. This book, combined with Hornby’s screenplay for “An Education,” which focuses on a 16-year-old schoolgirl in early-’60s London, work well together as a dual portrait of lost women at different stages of life.

Sean Wilsey, co-editor of “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America” and author of “Oh the Glory of It All”

I’m not always a fan of the memoir. But “The Kids Are All Right” reinvents the genre. It’s a choral book, with the point of view shifting between four siblings — Amanda, Liz, Dan and Diana Welch — who recount, and disagree about, the disintegration of their family. After their father’s sudden death in a car crash comes their mother’s slow death from cancer, and then the narrative explodes into pure bedlam: children on their own! The setting is suburban New York and Manhattan, and the time is the ’80s, in all their forgotten glory — no clichés, just detail after detail that eerily reconjured my own childhood in cars, TV, music, products, as I’d long since forgotten it. This is a memoir that always feels alive and true, and one that exists for no other reason than that the story needed to be told.

Maud Newton , books blogger

My favorite book published this year was also one of the most disillusioning. R. Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” combines the fire-and-brimstone flavor of Jack Chick’s fundamentalist tracts with peerless artistry and painstaking attention to historical detail and produces a straightforward but incredibly immersive retelling of the first book of the Old Testament. “The Bible doesn’t need to be satirised,” Crumb has said. “It’s already so crazy.” In relying on Robert Alter’s (very thoughtful) translation, though, Crumb casts doubt on my longtime admiration for Eve, who in some renderings chose to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree because the serpent convinced her that it was “desired to make one wise.”

Contemplating this rationale for a Bible as Literature class years ago, I concluded that God excoriated Eve more roundly and punished her more severely than he did Adam not because she was more wicked, but because she represented an actual threat. Seeking knowledge, she chose to eat the fruit, whereas Adam ate passively and only because she handed the fruit to him and had tried it first. Adam would never of his own accord betray or compete with God the way Satan had. Eve, on the other hand, aspired to be godlike. Crumb’s rendering of my hero doesn’t support this reading, however; he ascribes her actions to the temptations of the serpent and emphasizes only that the fruit was pleasing to the eye.

Tracy Kidder, author of “Strength in What Remains”

I think my favorite book of 2009 is Alice Munro’s new collection of stories, “Too Much Happiness: Stories.” I’ve long admired her writing. I think she’s one of the best writers alive. I’m not sure there’s much more to say.

Dave Cullen, author of “Columbine”

I loved the idea of “Sum: 40 Tales From the Afterlives,” but did I actually want to slog through 40 of them? How many novel conceptions of the afterlife are there — wouldn’t this be about 35 too many? No, actually. David Eagleman has got a million of them.

Eagleman did his undergrad in literature and his Ph.D. in neuroscience. He runs a brain lab by day and writes fiction at night. It shows. His provocative little vignettes play like brainstorms between alien hemispheres: playful, intriguing and full of emotional surprises as well as ideas. When his over-specific gods in charge of spoons, bacteria and chewing gum look down at our traffic jams and find comfort in our disarray but also our desire to reach out to find comfort through a cellphone … there is tenderness here, and perception, too.

The conceit is different, but the effect kept summoning up the delightful “Wearing Dad’s Head.” No one has ever reminded me of Barry Yourgrau before. I never thought they would.

I’m still making my way through Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses,” loving every sentence of it. I felt Texas from page one, and Texans, who I couldn’t wait to know better. Her style recalls, lovingly, the late great working-class short-story teller Lucia Berlin. I’m taken, particularly, by Walls’ ability to write children: not book children, or film kids — actual mini humans with the complexities of their parents, and even less predictable.

Geoff Dyer, author of “Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi”

It’s been a great year for fiction and nonfiction alike, but for sheer page-turning excitement, knowledge-gained per page turned, and sustained admiration for what the writer was doing, I will go for Richard Holmes’ magnificent “Age of Wonder.” I should have added, as well, that it’s an incredibly original idea: a biographical relay in which the baton of scientific exploration is passed from Joseph Banks in Tahiti in 1769, to William Herschel and his sister at their telescopes, to Humphry Davy in his lab (yeah, I know, I didn’t have any particular interest in this stuff either) and beyond. Set against a blazing firmament in which the great stars of the Romantic movement are plainly visible, it’s a flat-out masterpiece of historical and biographical narrative.

Curtis Sittenfeld, author of “American Wife”

The book I’m obsessed with right now is “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present” by Hank Stuever. Stuever is a Washington Post reporter who spent the 2006 Christmas season following three people in Frisco, Texas, a wealthy suburb of Dallas: One is a single mom who’s very involved in her megachurch, one is the guy who lives in a house that’s decked out with a billion Christmas lights (and it turns out he’s more tech geek than Christmas diehard), and one is a simultaneously savvy and un-self-aware woman who decorates other people’s McMansions for the holidays.

Stuever, who is something of a Christmas cynic, spent months with these people, and he shows them in all their glorious, complicated humanity. I love this book so much that I’ve literally bought seven copies (so far) to give as gifts, which is to say I’ve broken the personal record I set in the mid-’80s for giving the same present to the maximum number of people — back then, all the members of my family were recipients of identical reindeer ornaments made out of clothespins. I like to think my taste has improved in the last 25 years.

Mulligan plays 16-year-old Jenny, a bright student who lives with her mother and father (played by Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina) in the suburbs of London. Her parents, as well as one of her teachers, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams, of “Dollhouse”), have high hopes for her: The plan is that she’ll go to Oxford, and her father, in particular, orchestrates her life with that goal in mind. He doesn’t even want her to practice the cello too much, seeing it as a diversion that isn’t wholly necessary for academic success. Jenny finds solace lounging alone in her room, listening to French pop music — the enormous, romantically sooty eyes of Juliette Greco stare out from one of the album covers scattered about her room — and dreaming of a sophisticated, cultured life that’s far beyond her reach.

And then she meets David (Sarsgaard), a fellow music lover who takes what is at first a rather harmless interest in her, even though it’s clear he’s approximately twice her age. He charms her parents into letting him take her to a concert. Before long, he’s also taking her out to nightclubs with his upscale friends, Helen and Danny (Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper). David has money (although, it turns out, his line of work isn’t particularly savory), and he knows how to enjoy it. Jenny thrives under his tutelage and in the glow of his attention. And to Jenny’s delight, Helen, a cool blonde with a taste for fitted brocade and snowy furs, remakes her into a sophisticated gamine: Jenny loves flitting about London — and, at one point, Paris — in trim sheath dresses and Audrey Hepburn updos, a far cry from her usual schoolgirl gear.

Eventually, of course, there will be a crisis, and we’ll learn that David isn’t exactly what he seems — or maybe the point is that he is exactly what he seems, and Jenny just can’t see it. Either way, Scherfig treats the affair as a real relationship, not as a schoolgirl fantasy; she doesn’t patronize her lead character by making her seem foolish or flighty. The point is that Jenny’s desires are real — they may be shallow or misguided, but that doesn’t diminish their hold on her, and she’s the one who has to work them out of her system.

Scherfig and Hornby understand that, which also frees the actors. Sarsgaard, in particular, has a challenging role. He’s a handsome question mark; we know he’s too good to be true, and deep down, Jenny probably does, too. The movie doesn’t quite know what to do with him, and in the end, it makes him into the worst kind of coward — when, really, he needs to be only a minor coward to make the story believable. Even so, he isn’t an easy figure to pin down. David is Jewish, and he knows how to make money: The movie is clear about that fact. But that may not be so much a mark of anti-Semitism as it is of plainspoken emotional logic. The idea, I think, is that being Jewish in 1961 Britain is enough to put a chip on your shoulder. No wonder David is a social climber, aspiring to prove himself worthy of a certain class of people, or of a certain kind of girl who has more innate class than he does.

The love scenes between David and Jenny are sweet: David doesn’t seem predatory so much as perpetually confused, and Jenny, despite her romantic expectations, is in many ways more realistically grounded than he is. The two do sleep together, and the sequence is handled delicately and intelligently — Jenny may be inexperienced, but she’s not a pushover. Scherfig takes care to make it clear that Jenny’s choices are risky for the time in which she’s living — she doesn’t frame Jenny as an anachronistic, pre-sexual-revolution heroine. At the same time, she doesn’t pretend shock and dismay that young people actually had sex in the days before sexual liberation. Her approach doesn’t treat sex as a novelty, but as a fact of life. And the movie is compassionate toward nearly all its characters: Helen, as the crisp and wonderful Pike plays her, looks like a class act, but she’s dismayed by Jenny’s attempts, awkward as they are, to speak French — it’s clear she doesn’t have anything close to Jenny’s smarts, and she hides her insecurity with a veneer of coolness.

Scherfig makes it easy to see why Jenny would be seduced by the life of culture and glamor that David offers. The movie, shot by John de Borman, shows London and Paris as beautiful, lavish playlands. It’s pleasurable to watch Jenny enjoy herself in this newfound paradise: Mulligan has just the right blend of coltish awkwardness and ageless common sense. And although Jenny is clearly enjoying David’s attentions, Mulligan makes us see that the character is always working hard to read the people around her. She wants to be in love, and she wants it to be easy; but there’s always a shadow of uncertainty in Mulligan’s eyes — as inexperienced as Jenny is, she knows deep down that love can never be easy. And while the movie’s conclusion may be a little too facile, it doesn’t hold even a whiff of “I told you so” lecturing. Scherfig allows Jenny both her youthful joy and her dignity. And it allows that one of the bittersweet gifts of sexual adulthood is the freedom to make your own mistakes.