By JIM HIGGINS

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Here is a selection of 2009 books I personally recommend. It's not a top 10 list. It's simply a selection of books that I read this year and happily endorse.

"Bright Wings" (Columbia University Press, $22.95): Poet Bill Collins and artist David Allen Sibley have compiled a beautiful anthology that matches poems about birds with striking color paintings. Both the illustrations and the poems suggest that even common birds we think we know -- robins, starlings, swallows, crows -- are more complex and mysterious than we realize.

"Something's Missing" (Broadway Books paperback, $14): In Matthew Dicks' entertaining debut novel, an obsessive-compulsive thief commits an act of anonymous kindness that begins to transform him into a light-fingered guardian angel and leads him into mayhem, personal growth and the prospect of love.

"Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone" (Nation Books, $26.95): Uruguayan writer and historian Eduardo Galeano's anthology of lyrically written vignettes runs from prehistoric origin tales through the present, with a focus on the dreams, accomplishments and suffering of the forgotten, the underdogs, the downtrodden and the persecuted of history.

"Steal Across the Sky" (Tor, $25.95): In sci-fi master Nancy Kress' novel, Earthlings were unsuspecting lab rats for a species now calling themselves the Atoners, who have returned 10,000 years later to make amends for their sins.

"Mary Nohl: Inside & Outside" (University of Wisconsin Press paperback, $29.95): Without disrespecting Barbara Manger's biographical text, the chief thrill of this book is the chance to gaze at more than 300 photos of the late artist Mary Nohl's life and work without having to check the rear-view mirror.

"Lucky Girl" (Algonquin Books, $23.95): Journalist Mei-Ling Hopgood, adopted at 7 months by a pair of suburban Detroit teachers, unexpectedly connects as an adult with her boisterous Chinese birth family and also learns some painful secrets in this fair-minded memoir.

"The Housekeeper and the Professor" (Picador paperback, $14): Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa blends baseball and math gracefully in this deft, slender novel about the friendship between a brain-injured math scholar and the son of his housekeeper.

"Poe: A Life Cut Short" (Nan A. Talese Books, $21.95): The masterful English biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd strives to make sense of both Edgar Allan Poe's great work and sad existence in this succinct addition to his "Brief Lives" series.

"The Ultimate Super Bowl Book" (MVP Books paperback, $20): Through extensive interviewing of players, football personnel guys and coaches (including such luminaries as Bill Belichick), Bob McGinn, who covers the Green Bay Packers for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, describes and analyzes why each of the 43 Super Bowl winners won the game.

"That First Season: How Vince Lombardi Took the Worst Team in the NFL and Set It on the Path to Glory" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25): John Eisenberg chronicles the legendary Vince Lombardi's first year as Green Bay Packers head coach, when he transformed a stumblebum unit into a fierce football machine.
https://www.thehour.com/entertainment/article/Ten-books-you-will-just-simply-enjoy-8247459.php
www.thehour.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
89398
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:GGMOKD4KNFU4C3Q7XE2O5TLMJOM5SRZJ
<urn:uuid:2b999060-b705-4eaa-9d03-b9e1152794a6>
2018-02-17T21:52:52Z
151.101.200.200
text/html
sha1:H3TN5VA4BTEASBXPKC6RIGH2HWKOL2CS
<urn:uuid:69200132-a853-4276-9053-ad2d3ee36e62>
https://www.thehour.com/entertainment/article/Ten-books-you-will-just-simply-enjoy-8247459.php
response
<urn:uuid:8e603a3f-d4d1-4fd5-adb2-9716d214b602>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-30-36-74.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf