You may be wondering why someone would write a top ten of 2009 list three months into 2010. Well I have two excuses. One: I didn't want to write a list until I was absolutely certain I had read every book that had a chance of making it on the list. All that reading takes a lot of time. Now, with my eyes blurry and my dreams dark, I can honestly say that I've read every book worth considering (with one exception, which I will admit to later) for the top ten.

Reason two is a tad more subjective: I've noticed with horror that nearly every Top 10 of 2009 list on the internet picks Michael Connelly's mediocre thriller The Scarecrow as one of the best of the year. Come on, folks! We can do better than that! I trust that anyone who included that one (not to mention some of the other stinkers I saw) on their list didn't have a chance to read the following titles. So, I finally decided to break my silence. 2009 was a banner year for crime fiction, and the following books deserve to be talked about. Enjoy.

(Once again, a word from our crime/noir genre specialist Garrett Kenyon. -- Levi)

(Please welcome a new contributor to LitKicks, Garrett Kenyon, a writer from Kansas City who can be reached at garrettkenyon@yahoo.com. The illustration is by Clayton Douglas. -- Levi)

My great-grandfather Elias Trichter was a Mason, a member of the Cambridge Lodge 622 of the Free and Accepted Masonic Guild of Brooklyn, New York. He died before I was born, but I inherited an elaborate plaque, titled MASONIC HISTORY and signed and stamped to commemorate his initiation as a Master Mason on February 21, 1910, witnessed by brothers Mortimer Carman, Howard J. Fitzpatrick and James A. Nixon.

Here are three works offering creative interpretations of noted authors and their works.

Love As Always, Kurt Vonnegut As I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw

When I told Levi I was going to write about some memorable characters from literature, I thought I had several of them in mind. Because I've read a lot of books, and I mainly won't read a book if I don't enjoy at least one of the characters in some way, even if it is to appreciate how completely awful the character is.

Out of the stack of review copies I have (that still aren't reviewing themselves, by the way) I chose Patrick Glendon McCullough's debut novel, Son of the Ripper! to write about this week. The book clocks in at 308 pages, which can either seem insufferably long (I told you I had a short attention span) or just right, depending. Fortunately, McCullough's prose keeps things clipping along at a merry pace, and kept me reading, and moreover, enjoying what I read.

Note: For the first time in the entire two-something-year history of Jamelah Reads the Classics, I am reading books out of order. According to my list, I should've kicked things off with To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, but I'm not because I recently finished this one and I want to write about it right now. So I have to save Virginia Woolf for next time. If any are necessary, you have my apologies.

I discovered novelist Matthew Pearl two years ago, when I was browsing a slim bus-station gift shop bookshelf for anything I could bear to read and found a curiously intellectual paperback titled The Dante Club.