1. A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
2. Ahab's Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund
3. An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke (excellent book, you should read it.)
4. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (Anything by her is good.)
5. Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
6. The Cleft by Doris Lessing
7. Indian Killer by Sherman Alexie
8. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (One of my favs from 2008 -- one of the few book-to-movie translations that didn't blow.)
9. Naked by David Sedaris (Meh.)
10. The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes
11. The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch
12. Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra (Again, one of my favorites.)
13. Indira Gandhi: A Personal and Political Biography by Inder Malhotra
14. Snow by Orhan Pamuk
15. Walt Whitman's America by David S. Reynolds
16. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano (Surprisingly awesome. I look forward to reading more by him.)
17. India by Stanley Wolpert
18. Lilith's Brood by Octavia Butler (I devoured this three-book omnibus like a starving snow leopard eats a dying mountain goat.)
19. The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
20. White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Ever since I read this book [which totally lives up to the hype] I've seen her EVERYWHERE in magazines.)
21. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation by Jeffrey Chang
22. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
23. The House of the Spirits by Isabell Allende
24. A Mercy by Toni Morrison (Cue choir of angels singing.)
25. The Collected Essays of E.B. White
26. Wicked by Gregory McGuire
27. Son of a Witch by Gregory McGuire
28. Fury by Salman Rushdie (#1 choice for the year, it's awesome)
29. Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
30. The Know it All by A.J. Jacobs
Along with various works in literature anthologies, and entries from literature dictionaries and critical works in the course of studying for my GRE, which earned me the awesome score of ... look! A chicken!
