My Top 10 list of 2009

I spent a lot of yesterday poring over the Top 10 Everything of 2009 lists on Time.com. This is entirely Jan Edmiston's fault over at A Church for Starving Artists who lured me in with the Top 10 political cartoons, and then suddenly Sunday was gone. And still no persimmon bread.

The thing that's weird for me is I really can't remember what things were notable in 2009 and not other years. That makes my top 10 list very limited, but here it is:

Laura's Top 10 list of favorite things that I can remember doing/reading/hearing/seeing/occurring during 2009

1) Best restaurant I ate at: Eggheads in Fort Bragg, where I had lunch after church at St. Michael's each Sunday

2) Best non-fiction book I read: The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose about his year posing as an Evangelical Christian at Liberty University.

3) Best fiction I read: I read a lot of Emma Lathen mysteries and just loved them. None of that fancy-schmancy prize winning contemporary fiction for me. So what if they weren't published in 2009. Or in this millennium even. They are still pertinent today. And well-written always.

4) Best movie I saw: Herb & Dorothy, a documentary about unexpected NYC art collectors. It was such a treat.

5) Favorite blogger I followed: Ta-Nehisi Coates, as you might have guessed. He makes me think, and I do like that. Here's a post that I particularly liked from earlier this year.

6) Best audio I heard: This American Life had hands down the best, clearest reporting on the recession and health insurance among other lighter fare, such as this episode on 24 hours at a rest area in New York State. Which is three things, but they're all friggin' awesome.

7) Best TV show I saw: continues to be The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

8) Coolest place I visited: Forest Lawn Memorial Park in L.A.

9) Biggest new time-waster: Twitter. 'nuff said. Though learning how to set up an RSS feed didn't help any.

10) And finally: Biggest personal accomplishment, 2009: Growing hollyhocks from seed. Seriously, I'm very pleased about that. It's going to be hard to beat that in 2010.

And now on to the persimmon bread.