Gift Guide: Best Books of 2009

Don’t know what to buy the voracious reader on your list? Yes, you could default to a bookstore gift card—again. But wouldn’t you prefer to give something a little more personal? Something that could actually be wrapped with care and placed beneath the tree? Perhaps something that was recommended by the bookish experts at the New York Times? Yeah, that’s what we thought.

When it comes to book buying for friends, we’ve long deferred to reviewers at the New York Times Book Review. While we don’t always base our personal book choices on expert opinions—after all, we’ve been known to stock up on equal parts nostalgic classics and guilty pleasure escapism reads from time to time—when it comes to books as holiday gifts, it’s best to listen to those in the know.

That’s why we’re going to use the New York Times Book Review list of “The 10 Best Books of 2009” as a shopping list for all of the bookworms we hold dear. Don’t you just love it when shopping is this easy? Here are the New York Times top 10 book picks, in no particular order:

1. Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy, Riverhead Books.

2. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, Doubleday.

3. A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore, Alfred A. Knopf.

4. Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls, Scribner.

5. A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, Scribner.

6. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, Pantheon Books.

7. The Good Soldiers by David Finkel, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

8. Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr, Harper/HarperCollins Publishers.

9. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed, The Penguin Press.

10. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life by Carol Sklenicka, Scribner.