Top book picks for 2010

Jess Walter, author of 2009 novel “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” says he’s planning to read “Point Omega” by Don DeLillo (February, Scribner), “because it’s Don DeLillo and the title sounds like a 1970s thriller about Nazi hunters.” (The protagonist is actually an American war strategist.)

Walter’s also marked the historical fiction “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” by David Mitchell (Random House, June), fiction novel “The Ask” by Sam Lypsite (March, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and 2009 essay collection “Changing My Mind” edited by Zadie Smith, “because her brilliant essay in The Guardian about David Shields’s upcoming manifesto, ‘Reality Hunger,’ made me want to read both books.”

The book buyers at Powell’s Books of Portland, Ore., report 2010 reading lists a mile long. Billie Bloebaum, new book coordinator, plans to delve into a host of genres during the first few months of the year.

“There are a couple of debut thrillers coming that I am really, really thrilled about,” Bloebaum says. “Keith Thomson’s ‘Once a Spy’ (March, Doubleday), which is about a former spy with Alzheimer’s and the scrapes and adventures he and his son face as they try to outrun and outsmart the guys trying to kill them; and ‘Still Missing’ by Chevy Stevens (St. Martin’s, July).... I want to start spreading the word on this one early. [It’s] about a woman who’s abducted from a real estate open house and held in isolation for a year. It is told in the first person as sessions with her psychiatrist.”

For readers of romance, Bloebaum recommends Meredith Duran’s “Wicked Becomes You” (April, Pocket), saying that Duran, “while still very early in her career, has become an author I know I can depend on for quality writing and emotionally complex love stories.”

Powell’s new-book purchasing supervisor, Gerry Donaghy, wants to check out “Matterhorn,” a 2009 Vietnam War novel by decorated Vietnam veteran Karl Marlantes. “The jacket copy [notes] that this is on the level of ‘The Thin Red Line’ [a 1962 thriller by James Jones] and ‘The Naked and the Dead’ [Norman Mailer, 1948], which is a bold statement,” says Donaghy, “but readers I trust who have read this say the description isn’t far off.”

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