Ask HN: Great books you read in 2009?

I read a lot of Nabokov beginning in high school and continuing into my university studies (when I was initially a Russian language major). Nabokov is very interesting to read. I like Speak, Memory

http://www.amazon.com/Speak-Memory-Everymans-Library-Cloth/d...

and his essays on literary criticism (which I'm not turning up just now as I do an Amazon search, but which you should be able to find in a library). I'm not such a big fan of his most famous novel, Lolita. I read it once and have never reread it.

http://community.electricsheep.org/

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Problem Of Pain by C S Lewis

Disgrace by J M Coetzee

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

On Writing by Stephen King

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Candide by Voltaire

The Labyrinth Of Solitude | Life And Thought In Mexico by Ocavio Paz

I finished that last one today. Read this:

All men, at some moment in their lives, feel themselves to be alone. And they are. To live is to be separated from what we were in order to approach what we are going to be in the mysterious future. Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature -- if that word can be used in reference to man, who has "invented" himself by saying "No" to nature -- consists in his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.

I recommend this old book.