As it’s the end of the year it seems customary to makes lists of our favourite things of the previous 12 months. Well, here’s my list of the best books that I read in 2009.

These are not books that were necessarily published this year (I don’t think a single one of them was), just books that I read this year.

2009 wasn’t my most prolific year for book reading, but there were plenty of magnificent books that I enjoyed. And in no particular order, these are my favourites:

Early in the year I read Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’, a simply stunning story of a man and young boy’s journey through a post-apocalyptic America.  A perfectly formed jewel of a novel, it more than deserves the title ‘masterpiece’.  Sparse, harrowing, moving, and masterfully written: a perfect novel. In a similar vein and from another literary master came Jose Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, literary science-fiction of the highest order, depicting the sudden onset of a blindness epidemic and the subsequent breakdown in society. It’s brutal and challenging, but an eminently readable novel.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of my absolute favourite authors, and I enjoyed four books by her this year. For the purpose of this list the one I am going to pick out is her short story collection ‘The Museum of Dr. Moses’. A collection of tales of mystery and suspense, it’s macabre and tight and perfectly formed, and further demonstrates Oates’s amazing versatility as a writer.

‘American Gods’ by Neil Gaiman provoked an unexpected emotion in me: embarrassment. Embarrassment that it had taken me so long to get around to reading anything by this remarkable author. Fantastical and playful, bursting with in imaginative flair, yet grounded in the real world, this book blew me away. An absolute delight.

A couple of non fiction books: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan’, about the impact of highly improbable events, genuinely made me look at the world in a different way, and Ben Goldacre’s ‘Bad Science’, about how the media reports, or mis-reports, science stories, was in equal parts both humourous and terrifying.

The posthumously published ’2666′ by Roberto Bolano was a huge literary feast that left me feeling sated like few books manage to do – dazzling  and provocative, brutal and fiercely intelligent. A herculean behemoth of a novel.

Victoria Coren’s ‘For Richer, For Poorer’, was a beautifully written and engaging memoir of her twenty years playing poker – a book I did not want to end, and I missed it when it did!

The were a couple of ‘classic’ authors whom I discovered this year. The first was H. Rider Haggard, whose book ‘She’ utterly enraptured me . Years ago I read an essay by Henry Miller in which he wrote about his obsession with this book, something I can now understand – lucidly written and brilliantly structured, it’s a captivating read. The second ‘classic’ author is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I might be cheating by including ‘The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes’ in this list as it is actually all of the Holmes books presented in a single volume, but it truly is an absolute delight to me – ingeniously plotted, brilliantly written and quite, quite addictive!

David Peace’s ‘Red Riding‘ quartet of novels were a captivating read. Irredeemably bleak, but brilliantly written; angry howls of pain. The series actually gets better as it goes on, and even though I found it bloody difficult to follow – Peace doesn’t make life easy for his readers – these are compelling, angry books full of bile and vitriol and nihilistic despair. I doubt I will ever read a bleaker book in my life than the second volume of the series ’1977′, and the series as a whole was the equivalent of a literary grenade of despair being tossed into my life.  Overall, a brilliant and unique experience.

Finally, two truly extraordinary books from the creator of ‘The Wire’, David Simon. The first, ‘Homicide’ is an account of his year as a newspaper reporter working with the Baltimore Police  Homicide department.  Fans of The Wire will spot many incidents and dialogue which later made it into the TV series, plus the original inspirations for many of the characters that feature in the TV show.  Simon succeeds in structuring a mass of material, with literally dozens of characters, into an accessible and readable book – the pacing is spot on, so that the reader doesn’t feel overwhelmed or bogged down in detail. It is at times a harrowing book – the ‘spine’ of the story revolves around the rape and murder of an eleven year old girl, Latoya Wallace, and the subsequent hunt for her killer.  It’s a crime that sent shockwaves through the entire police department, and it’s a crime that will send shockwaves through you too, dear reader. The second book was written by both David Simon and Ed Burns, ‘The Corner’. This is an account of a year in the life of a Baltimore inner-city neighbourhood that’s been devastated by the drug trade. The story is told primarily through the characters of addicts Fran and Gary McCullough, and their fifteen year old son DeAndre, although there is a cast of dozens of supporting characters, most of whom have had their lives destroyed by drug addiction.  This is a deeply humane book that gives a voice to those members of society about whom the mainstream media would choose to forget. These are real lives, real people, and the book is such an intimate portrayal of their inner lives that by the end of it you feel as if you really know them.  A masterpiece.

Not making it to my final list of absolute favourites of the year, I still want to give an honourable mention to Scarlett Thomas’s ‘The End of Mr. Y’ and ‘PopCo’, both of which were very entertaining and clever novels, Robert Crais’s ‘LA Requiem’, a literary crime thriller that really hit the spot for me, and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s ‘Let The Right One In’, an ingenious twist on the vampire horror novel.

So those, my dear friends, were my favourite books of 2009 – humdingers, the lot of them!