Omnivoracious: More Best Books: The Atlantic's History-Heavy Top 25

I haven't been doing as good a job as Largehearted Boy in tracking all the Best Books of 2009 lists that are coming out (although it's true that about half of his links at this early stage are to our own voluminous offerings), but I wanted to note one more list I ran across: The Atlantic's top 25 books of the year, which is, really, literary editor Benjamin Schwarz's top 25. Schwarz runs a pretty idiosyncratic books section, with an emphasis on strong voices like Caitlin Flanagan, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Christopher Hitchens, and with little obligation to talk about the same books everybody else is talking about. They don't cover much fiction, and you can tell from Schwarz's own reviews that he is a heavy history reader, which his list of favorites reflects. Compared to our own top 100, which is even more weighted toward fiction than in other years, his 25 includes just three novels and three story collections, and in his top five are both a 2,000-page biography of Lincoln (take that, Vollmann!) and a nearly 3,000-page trilogy on the Third Reich (and his second twenty manages to embrace both the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War!). The full list, which is dominated by histories and biographies and has a healthy representation of university presses, isn't much like any other you'll find from a major media outlet, and so worth checking out:

Top Five:

Abraham Lincoln: A Life by Michael Burlingame
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
The Third Reich trilogy (The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War) by Richard J. Evans
It's Beginning to Hurt: Stories by James Lasdun
Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light

The rest:

Too Much Happiness: Stories by Alice Munro
Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power by Bruce Cumings
The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution by Denis Dutton
The Hundred Years War, Vol. 3 by Jonathan Sumption
The Hindus: An Alternative History by Wendy Doniger
Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic by Gordon S. Wood
The New Old World by Perry Anderson
The Thirty Years War by Peter H. Wilson
This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Carmen M. Reinhart and Keneth Rogoff
Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon by Mark Bostridge
Flannery: A Life by Brad Gooch
Samuel Johnson: A Biography by Peter Martin
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
Reading Dance, edited by Robert Gottlieb
Words in the Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell
Charles Dickens by Michael Slater
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Arabs by Eugene Rogen
Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman by Arnold Weinstein
The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth: A Life by Frances Wilson
Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire by Brendan Simms
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Which ones did we share with him? Just fiction: Byatt, Munro, Hall, and Davis were all in our top 100 too. And a side note, if you're making further comparisons: a number of his choices (Bostridge, Martin, Gottlieb, Bishop/Lowell, Weinstein, Simms) came out last fall, so by our definition were 2008 books. --Tom