I’ve been working this week on editing the page proofs of my boss’s book for my Harvard Business School job. (Hence the lack of long, navel-gazing, rambling posts.) Whew! It’s a lot longer than my book was, I’ll tell you that. It’s a good one, though — and already up on Amazon. Check it out. Fundamentally, it is about what happens when people change jobs: Do they continue to succeed? How can you know if a job change is a good idea or not? If you are a manager, is it better to hire outside talent or invest the time and money to develop your own workers into superstars?

… and my further top five from 2009 (I’m enjoying your recommendations too, folks!)

6. The American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld. I reviewed this here.

7. Rebuilt by Michael Chorost. See, here we go with that description problem again … this is a memoir by a man who got a cochlear implant at age 30. Yaaaaaawn. But it is, in fact, a brilliant, funny, honest and compassionate look at what it means to be a social being, the difference between hearing and listening, and the nature of relationships.

8. Still Woman Enough by Loretta Lynn with Patsi Bale Cox. I’d planned to write about Loretta Lynn’s second autobiography — the one she wrote after her husband died, when she could really tell the truth — when I first read it, but shortly after that, the Roman Polanski scandal broke and I couldn’t, because I couldn’t wrap my head around Ms. Lynn’s marriage at age 13. Months after I’ve read the book, I still don’t know what to make of it. Ms. Lynn’s intelligence and ignorance are both on astonishing display as she recounts her improbable life.

9. Guns, Germs, & Steel by Jared Diamond. Yes, finally, like the rest of the world, I read this classic of “Why Everything Is the Way It Is and Not Some Other Way Entirely, and by the Way It Has Nothing to Do with Race.” Good book, although a number of folks in one of my chats mentioned that it’s fairly repetitious, which indeed it was.

10. Under the Dome by Stephen King. I said I liked King on a wide canvas? Here, he gives himself an entire Maine town to characterize — and kill. It’s no spoiler to say that 300 pages in, I was already beginning to wonder if enough people would survive to finish the 1,000+-page novel. Whatever your politics, the first 400 pages or so after “the dome” of the title descends will make you angry — either by reminding you of the Bush administration, or by painting an unfair picture of it. Then the action kicks in. Don’t make any social plans after you hit page 600 or so.

…. and what were some of the best books you read in 2009 — fiction or non-?

Every year, I keep a running list of the books I’ve read, with an asterisk beside the ones I particularly like. In 2009, I had a pleasingly rounded list of 10 asterisked books, with an even more pleasing symmetry: both the first and the last books I read in 2009 were starred, and both were by Stephen King.

Here are my first five top books from 2009. I’ll post the second five later today or tomorrow.

Please only comment if you’ve read these and want to discuss them — I’ll put up a post where you can leave your own recommendations shortly, just to keep things convenient.

1. The Stand by Stephen King. I like Stephen King on a wide canvas, and he gave himself one here. Not everything rang true to me psychologically, but the story is riveting and mythic in its power to stick in memory.

2. Intuition by Allegra Goodman. Ms. Goodman got her start writing about the arcane and claustrophobic world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, and she’s even better here, limning the intellectually spacious, yet physically and emotionally cramped, world of elite academic science. (My friend Amazing Genius Science Girl thought Goodman got it right, who am I to argue?)

3. The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver. Unfortunately, there is no way to write about this without making it sound like a horrible gimmicky rom-com: alternating chapters of two different futures for the heroine, in one of which she stays faithful to her husband and one in which she begins an affair with a friend, a raffish but loving snooker star. Somehow, the book is far more compelling than any description of mine, thank heavens.

4. The Ten-Year Nap by Meg Wolitzer. This is significantly weaker than her earlier novels The Position or The Wife, but Ms. Wolitzer’s eye for detail is spot on. There’s a lot to object to — I’ll leave “mommy war” critiques out of it, but I was taken aback by the notably short shrift given the book’s Asian couple, and their stereotypical upbringings. Still, mediocre Wolitzer is better than good nearly anyone else.

5. The Calligrapher’s Daughter by Eugenia Kim. No, I did not star this out of atonement for the casual racism of Ten-Year Nap, it just worked out that way. Calligrapher’s Daughter, the story of a Korean family at the turn of the last century, was published by my own publisher a few months before MCMoM, and the publicist gave me a copy. The author was inspired by the life of her mother, but decided to write a novel rather than an historical book or biography. Her research shows, though; I learned a lot. This is a contemplative book — you can read a chapter or two a night before going to bed and not stay up all night finding out what’s going to happen next. But its images and conflicts hang on.

So, last week I gave a brief review of American Wife and The Likeness and asked what good novels you’ve been reading. I think I’ve got enough on my list to get me through the end of the year! Thanks for the great suggestions. Now, let’s turn to nonfiction.

I must say, the finest nonfiction book I’ve read this year is Miss Conduct’s Mind over Manners. It’s a quick read, but thought-provoking, empowering, and hilariously funny. Plus, the recipes in the appendix are delicious! It’s a delightful confection: imagine a cross between Malcolm Gladwell and Miss Manners, channeled through Tina Fey.

But there’s a chance–just a slight, off chance–that I might be biased about this.

Fact is, I haven’t read all that much non-fiction this year. I tend to go through phases with that. And I read so much nonfiction to when I was writing MCMoM that I’ve kind of burned out on it for a while. Also, certain kinds of nonfiction can be hard for me to read. Or–that’s not really the best way of putting it–it’s more that I tend to want a particular experience when I read. I want to get swept away into a narrative world. I want to escape. I want, usually, to power down and let go of my self-ness for a while.

Fiction does that for me. Some kinds of nonfiction–narrative nonfiction, like history (The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes) or true crime (Always in Our Hearts by Globe features editor Doug Most)–can do that as well. But nonfiction that is about ideas rather than stories is incredibly stimulating to me. It’s like having a conversation with someone who is finally putting together all those odd thoughts that have been floating around in your brain and you never knew how to connect before, or else like listening to someone who’s flat-out wrong and you are compelled to correct them, or in most cases, a combination of both. Which, for a big ol’ INTJ like me, beats snorting wasabi on a roller coaster next to Robert Downey Jr. for sheer excitement value.

So it can be hard for me to read good philosophy or religious studies or sociology or psychology or any other -ology for more than a couple pages at a time. Then I get so excited I need to go e-mail my friends about the incredibly insightful or incredibly stupid thing the author wrote, or take a walk with Milo and contemplate, or write a blog entry, or clean the kitchen and fume, or pour myself a glass of wine and yell at Mr. Improbable. (He doesn’t mind. He’s a writer, too, and needs to work out his ideas. We both sometimes talk to each other and sometimes talk at each other, and we’ve gotten fairly good at knowing which is which.)

I do have recommendations, though. I pulled together a short bibliography for MCMoM. It’s not everything I read for the book, but it’s everything that I thought someone who liked the book might also like. If you’ve got MCMoM, you’ve got the list–but my 1-2 sentence reviews didn’t make it in to the final version for page-count reasons. (Or, now that I am rereading what I wrote, perhaps because I grotesquely overused the term “classic.”) So, below the jump, are some of the best nonfiction books I’ve read since starting my own book–and why I liked them.

Leave your own fave reads in comments!