I have news.

In a bizarre combination of two factors (reading the New York Times Top Ten Best Books of 2009 list and watching Julie and Julia during the same weekend), I got an idea.

I learned in a Bookworm post I wrote that my readers seem to be… well, readers. My two favorite activities are reading and writing, so my New Year’s Resolution this year is to bring a book club in some way to Pajamas and Coffee.

If you guys like the idea, I can add a community page where we discuss books (for now we’ll just do it in the comments section – I also have the Virtual Bookshelf on my Facebook page and you can follow along there).

The deal: In the first ten weeks of 2010, I am going to read the Top Ten Books of 2009 chosen by the New York Times . 5 are fiction and 5 are non-fiction- I will be alternating during the weeks, starting with nonfiction. After I finish a book each week, I’m going to tell you what I think of them (in Sunday posts, because Sundays are for reading!), in my vulgar trashy unique style.

So it’s 10 in 10 in ’10. Cool? (And yeah, I know. I’m nuts.)

A shout-out of thanks to my 15 year old daughter Sarah, who works at our local library- for putting holds on these books for me! God knows I am too cheap to buy them.

As a reader, you have three choices. You can:

• Read along with me and comment each week. All ten books, just the two you’ve been wanting to read, whatever.
• Ignore the whole thing completely. I’ll be doing one book post a week (sort of a review) on Sundays. Don’t care? Don’t read. It’s all good.
• Wait until I’ve read all ten books *, ranked them according to which ones I like best, and then maybe look for a few at yard sales or download them on your Kindle.*

So here’s the list:

Week 1: Jan 3, with review post on January 10. The Book:

Week 2: Jan 11, with review post on January 17. The Book:

By Maile Meloy

Meloy’s concise yet fine-grained narratives, whether set in Montana, an East Coast boarding school or a 1970s nuclear power plant, shout out with quiet restraint and calm precision. Her flawed characters — ranch hands in love, fathers and daughters — rarely act in their own best interests and often betray those closest to them.

Week 3: Jan 18, with review post on January 24. The book:

By David Finkel

Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize-­winning writer and editor at The Washington Post, gives full voice to his subjects, infantry soldiers from Fort Riley, Kan. (average age 19), posted in the lethal reaches of Baghdad at the height of the “surge.” Finkel’s own perspective emerges through spare descriptions — of a roadside bombing or the tortured memories of a single soldier — that capture the harrowing realities of war.

Week 4: Jan 25, with review post on January 31. The book:

By Jonathan Lethem

Lethem’s eighth novel unfolds in an alternative-reality Manhattan. The crowded canvas includes a wantonly destructive escaped tiger (or is it a subway excavator?) prowling the streets, a cruel gray fog engulfing Wall Street, a “war free” edition of The New York Times, a character stranded on the dying International Space Station, strange and valuable vaselike objects called chaldrons, colossal cheeseburgers and some extremely potent marijuana.

Week 5: Feb 1, with review post on February 7. The book:

By Mary Karr

This sequel to “The Liars’ Club” and “Cherry” is also a master class on the art of the memoir. Mordantly funny, free of both self-pity and sentimentality, Karr describes her attempts to untether herself from her troubled family in rural Texas, her development as a poet and writer, and her struggles to navigate marriage and young motherhood even as she descends into alcoholism.

Week 6: Feb 8, with review post on February 14. The book:

By Lorrie Moore

Moore’s captivating novel, her first in more than a decade, is set in 2001 and narrated by a Wisconsin college student who hungers for worldly experience and finds it when she takes a job baby-sitting for a bohemian couple who are trying to adopt a mixed-race child. Meanwhile, she drifts into a love affair with an enigmatic classmate and feels the pressing claims of her own family, above all her affectless younger brother, who enlists in the military after 9/11.

Week 7: Feb 15, with review post on February 21. The book:

By Liaquat Ahamed

The parallels with our own moment are impossible to miss in Ahamed’s narrative about four members of “the most exclusive club in the world,” central bankers who dominated global finance in the post-World War I era. Ahamed, a longtime investment manager, evokes in glittering detail a volatile time of financial bubbles followed by busts, all of it guided by players wedded to economic orthodoxy.

Week 8: Feb 22, with review post on February 28. The book:

By Jeannette Walls

In her luminous memoir, “The Glass Castle,” Walls told of being raised by eccentric and unfit parents. Now, in a novel based on family lore, she has adopted the voice of her maternal grandmother, Lily Casey Smith — mustang breaker, schoolteacher, ranch wife, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider and bush pilot. The result ­re­animates a chapter of America’s frontier past.

Week 9: Mar 1, with review post on March 7. The book:

By Carol Sklenicka

Ten years in the making, this prodigiously researched and meticulous biography sympathetically and adroitly integrates its subject’s work with the turbulent life ­— marred by alcoholism, financial turmoil and family discord — that brought it into ­being. ­Sklenicka shrewdly deconstructs Carver’s fraught relationship with Gordon Lish, the editor who played an outsize role in the creation of Carver’s stories, the most influential of a generation.

Week 10: Mar 8, with review post on March 14. The book:

By Kate Walbert

The 15 lean, concentrated chapters in this exquisitely written novel alternate among the lives of a British suffragist and a handful of her Anglo-American descendants. The theme is feminism, but Walbert is keenly alert to male preoccupations and the impressions they leave on the lives of her female cast. Walbert’s prose, cool and intelligent, captures the many ways we silence and are silenced, the ways we see and hear as we struggle to grasp hold of meaning.

_________________

Cool that 6 of the 10 were written by women. Go girls!

The whole thing seems like a cool challenge to me. 2010. 10 books. 10 weeks. Can I do it? What clean laundry will my family have if I am reading all the time? Will some of the books suck, even though the fancy schmancy New York Times said they’re the best?

These questions and more will be answered as we dive into the pages of the Pajamas and Coffee Book Club. After I finish in March, I’d like to do a book a month so it’s easier for readers to read along if they’d like. By then I’ll know if you guys are into the idea or not. I hope you are!

A tiny favor? If you’re buying books to read along (or anything else from Amazon!), use one of the links on this page. I get a small percentage of your sale and it will help me buy books and pay the web guy to keep this shop open.

Word!

*This is totally what I would do if I was a reader of my blog. Lazy all the way, yo!

** I totally don’t have a Kindle. Too much money to spend on myself when I have 4 kids who constantly need new sneakers. My goal in life is to have one, though!

*** Small prediction? A banking book is going to fucking kill me.