Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Backdated, for my reference:
1/11/09: Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, The Woman That Never Evolved.

More January:

Havana Nocturne, by T. J. English.
White Sands, Red Menace, by Ellen Klages
Murder Packs a Suitcase, by Cynthia Baxter
The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, by Margery Allingham

February:

Sarah Caudwell, The Siren Sang of Murder.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Laughing Policeman.
Lloyd Alexander, Westmark.
Marjorie Allingham, Traitor's Purse.
Ken Dryden, The Game.
Hazel Holt, Mrs. Mallory: Detective in Residence.

[note, 2/28/09: I started this entry thinking I wasn't going to do actual review posts this year, since I didn't last. The "more January" and "February" lists are transcribed from longer entries; the February one not yet posted]

2/28/09 James White, Code Blue: Emergency.
George R. Stewart, Names on the Land

March:

3/1: Lloyd Alexander, The Kestrel
3/6: Lifelode
3/8: Allingham, More Work for the Undertaker [15]
3/9: Caudwell, The Shortest Way to Hades
3/10: Caudwell, Thus Was Adonis Murdered
3/20: Edward Dolnick, The Forger's Spell
3/21: Caudwell, The Sybil in Her Grave
3/27: James White, The Genocidal Healer [20]

April:

4/1: Neil Gaiman, The Dangerous Alphabet (yes, a picture book with very little text, but I'm counting it).
4/4: Lloyd Alexander, The Beggar Queen
4/7: Jean Merrill, The Toothpaste Millionaire
4/8: Elise Broach, When Everything Came with Dinosaurs (ill. David Small)

May:

[5/3 Sayers, Gaudy Night]
5/8: Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer [25]
5/10: Daniel Pinkwater, The Neddiad
[5/10: Busman's Honeymoon & Lord Peter Views the Body; short stories are good for sitting on the couch icing assorted joints.]
5/17: Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia
5/27: Rosemary Harris, Pushing Up Daisies
5/30: Pat Murphy, Wild Girls

5/30: Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light [30]
6/7: Abraham, A Betrayal in Winter
6/9: MCA Hogarth, Flight of the Godkin Griffin (serialized at godkin)
6/21: Sarah Monette, Corambis
6/25: Rebecca Ore, Centuries Ago and Very Fast
6/26: P. C. Hodgell, God Stalk [35]
6/27: Hodgell, Dark of the Moon

July:

7/5: Rex Stout, Please Pass the Guilt
Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many
Catherine Valente, Palimpsest
7/12: Daniel Keys Moran, The Long Run [40]
7/22: Abraham, An Autumn War
7/25: Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven. The dragons are at least 10% pure handwavium, and it's definitely an alternate/fantasy universe. Fun.

8/13: Abraham, The Price of Spring
8/22: Sydney Taylor, All-of-a-Kind Family
8/23: Maureen McHugh, Mothers and Other Monsters (short story collection) [45]

9/4: Peter Beagle, We Never Talk about My Brother, short story collection
9/6: Henry Petroski, To Engineer is Human, read in bits over several months
9/7: Taylor, More All-of-a-Kind Family (exactly what the label says)
9/12: Uma Krishnaswami, The Happiest Tree (picture book, recommended by I don't remember who,

[it seems unlikely I finished nothing else in September, but there seems to have been a cut-and-paste error, and memory is not being helpful.]

[10/2: Terry Pratchett, The Night Watch, reread. Lots of Vimes, history monks, young Vetinari, mixes the humor and the more serious stuff better than he sometimes manages.]
10/14: Mary Gentle, Ilario: The Lion's Eye. Not a complete story; not clear how many parts it's published in, but the US edition of Ash was four books, and this is set in what seems like the same world, to the extent that that's even a meaningful concept here. [50]

[do not count: abandoned Fortey, Earth: An Intimate History after four chapters or so, for being insufficiently engaging--it's not easy being John McPhee--and careless, specifically that, _after_ an entire chapter on Hawaii, he describes Iceland by saying, in part, "If Hawaii were in the northern hemisphere". ]

10/29: James Thurber, The Years with Ross

11/7: Steve Brust, Brokedown Palace (fun, but feels like cotton candy)
11/9: Mary Gentle, Ilario: The Stone Golem. Second of two, weird broken and stitched-together family dynamics, mixed with politics at scales from within a single court to across the Mediterranean. Loosely alternate history, with some touchpoints of our own world, more or less mutated (Zheng He in Carthage; the Pharaoh-Queen of Constantinople, devoted above all to the books in the Library of Alexandria-in-Exile; Crusades fought entirely in northern Europe) and supernatural (or otherwise unexplained) situations, especially the darkness hanging over North Africa.
11/12: Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals: football, a self-made orc, and the regrettable absence of pies, or any other cooking, from formula romance novels. With Rincewind and the Librarian. In which it transpires, in passing, that there are Jews in Ankh-Morpork. [and then I went over to Tor.com and left this comment about the book, in response to Arache Jericho's review: I didn't read Glenda as ultra-smart, so much as reasonably smart, and very hard-working. She's spent most of her life living within invisible walls (not nearly as bad as Nutt's whips in the head, but the same sort of "it isn't done" and "be realistic" and putting in 18 hours a day to make sure people are taken care of.

She and Trevor Likely both have serious "I don't have to stay in that pattern" realizations during the book, maybe both prompted by Nutt (I haven't had much time to think about this, I finished the book about 20 minutes ago).

Again, Juliet isn't an intellectual, but that doesn't mean she's stupid: we're told in so many words that if she's incompetent, it's because every time she tries to learn or stretch herself, Glenda gets in the way and says "let me do that for you." It's not stupid to prefer getting good money to model clothes over a much lower pay rate to be assistant to the night cook. She reads celebrity magazines; Glenda reads formulaic romance novels. Equally cliched, but so are just above everything the male characters read, from the sports magazines to the stereotypically German psychology texts.]

11/20: Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking. Quick, often funny, memoir of a celebrity upbringing with an absent father and of mental illness, addiction, and treatment. And some good serious lines as well as the funny: for example, that the difference between a problem and an inconvenience is that a problem derails your life, and an inconvenience is not getting a good seat on the derailed train. Fisher also notes that being awake for several days (in her case because the doctors decided to take her off her meds) can lead to paranoia, and if you must watch television in that state, avoid CNN. We also get the idea of people being "related by scandal." [55]
11/20: Mike Carey, The Devil You Know. Noir detective fiction, in which the viewpoint detective is an exorcist. Recommended by rysmiel.

11/27: Aaron Elkins, Uneasy Relations
11/28: Patricia Wrede, Dealing with Dragons (read aloud to me, a chapter or two a visit, by Adrian)
11/29: Emma Lathen, Sweet and Low, another banker-as-detective/viewpoint mystery, this one from 1974, and a first-paragraph remark comparing the associations of the World Trade Center with those of actual mountains that threw me out of the story for a minute.

December:

12/3: Laurie King, A Grave Talent, good but dark mystery/detective novel, of the sort that includes quite a bit of "okay, we know they did it, how can we prove it? How can we find them again?" after the viewpoint character and her colleagues identify the killer. [60]
12/16: Patrick O'Brian, Post Captain
[Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters, reread]
12/24: Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man (bio of Paul Dirac)
[12/25: Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed, reread after several years. first contact/exploration, good world-building, ambiguity makes sense because it's what the viewpoint character sees, too damned many apostrophes and italics]
12/30: Stross, Singularity Sky [63 not counting rereads]