hello John,
this is pretty long (way too long, i deleted some comments) , but its the staff picks for good 2008 books from publishers weekly:

Looking Back at 2008: PW Staff Picks
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/5/2009
In all likelihood, posterity will view 2008 as an iconic American year—not unlike, say, 1929 or 1968, for which the numbers themselves convey a deeply complex national experience. At year’s end, we asked PW staffers to choose one book they read during this tumultuous, historic year that they would care to recommend or simply praise. At Publishers Weekly we reviewed more than 6,000 titles last year; here are 27 that we thought worth another mention.

Joker

Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo (DC Comics)

Although created before the release of the hit film The Dark Knight, this graphic novel is both eerily reminiscent of Heath Ledger’s performance and utterly impressive in its own right. Relentlessly malevolent and morbidly funny, the Azzarello/Bermejo Joker is a brilliantly creepy evocation of Batman’s worst enemy. Not for the kiddies.

—Calvin Reid

Watching the Spring Festival

Frank Bidart (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Bidart’s poems are intense to the point of nearly setting the paper they’re printed on aflame. Nothing short of paying superhuman, all-consuming attention to one’s own thoughts tells as much about what it’s like to live inside a contemporary mind.

—Craig Morgan Teicher

In the Land of No Right Angles

Daphne Beal (Anchor)

A naïve young American photographer who spent a year traveling through Nepal returns several years later to find that the country and the people she loved have changed, and so has she. Debut author Beal’s lush descriptions and haunting tale capture the beauty and ambiguity of a very foreign land. —Robin Lenz

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins (Scholastic)

Imagine Survivor, with kids, televised in real time with the entire country watching. And instead of being voted off the island, you’re locked in a death match till the last kid is left standing. For a sheer thrill ride that’s bound to hook teens and adults, and for its mordant social commentary, this novel gets my vote. —Diane Roback

Masterpiece

Elise Broach, illus. by Kelly Murphy (Holt/Ottaviano)

Everything I like best in a middle-grade novel is here, in just about perfect balance: secret friendships, miniature worlds awaiting discovery, mysteries wrapped around real-life art and artists, and a main character unusually deserving of the adventure he finds. —Elizabeth Devereaux

The 19th Wife

David Ebershoff (Random)

As the great-grandson of a polygamous Mormon, I relished this dual saga, which alternates between the present-day story of a son’s efforts to prove his mother innocent of his polygamous father’s murder and the historical tale of Eliza Young, one of Brigham Young’s real-life wives, the only one to divorce him. While the author takes almost as much care as Wallace Stegner in Mormon Country to present the Latter-Day Saints fairly, he makes clear the church’s antigay bias. —Peter Cannon

Atmospheric Disturbances

Rivka Galchen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Waking one day to find that his young Argentinean wife, Rena, has been replaced by an exact duplicate, an introspective New York psychiatrist sets out on a quixotic quest to find the original. Joined by a patient who believes he can control the weather, our middle-aged narrator travels to Buenos Aires, gleaning strange clues from dubious characters and complicated meteorological research. Galchen’s remarkably assured debut is not just funny, passionate, idiosyncratic and original, but her observations on love and memory prove wise beyond her years.—Marc Schultz

Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

Mark Harris (Penguin Press)

A sensationally entertaining film history that is compulsively readable and filled with juicy, revelatory anecdotes from brand-new interviews with the participants. Attention, thrifty film buffs: this irresistible, beautifully researched gem comes out in paperback on January 27.

—Kevin Howell

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency

Robert Kuttner (Chelsea Green)

In readable, persuasive prose, Kuttner explains how transformative presidents—Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ—lead. Then he offers the many teachable moments President Obama can use to transform the U.S. into a country with health care for all, good jobs with good wages, secure financial markets and an understanding that good tax policy supports government that works for everyone, not just the rich. —Sonia Jaffe Robbins

The Private Patient: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery

P.D. James (Knopf)

At 88, Dame James suggests that The Private Patient —Wendy Werris

Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen (Modern Library)

Matthiessen’s reworking of three previous novels into one magisterial epic, ostensibly about the . —Michael Coffey

Redeemed: A Spiritual Misfit Stumbles Toward God, Marginal Sanity, and the Peace That Passes All Understanding

Heather King (Viking)

King, who told of her battles with booze in Parched, Dermot McEvoy

To Siberia

Per Petterson, trans. by Anne Born (Graywolf Press)

The author of Out Stealing Horses explores the lost . —Judith Rosen

Day

A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)

The book—about former RAF tail-gunner Alfred Day, .—Jonathan Segura

Occupational Hazards

Jonathan Segura (Simon & Schuster)

The audacious debut novel by PW’s deputy reviews editor follows beat reporter Bernard Cockburn . —Juan Martinez

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination: A Memoir

Elizabeth McCracken (Little, Brown)

Could the story of the death of a child only days —Louisa Ermelino

Outliers: The Story of Success

Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown)

So unlike me to pick a nonfiction favorite, but this discussion of success—why some have it and some . —Sara Nelson

Eat Me: The Food and Philosophy of Kenny Shopsin

Kenny Shopsin and Carolynn Carreno (Knopf)

Four words (actually three and a half): mac ’n ch. —Lynn Andriani

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Alice Schroeder (Bantam)

Not a step-by-step business book, but a refreshing do —Ted Olczak

The Gargoyle

Andrew Davidson (Doubleday)

True love transcends the boundaries of time and existence, as Davidson weaves together stories w. —Claire Kirch

Half a Crown

Jo Walton (Tor)

I rarely cry over books, but I was sobbing by the time I reached the end of this powerful, heart-wrenchg. —Rose Fox

Cat Eyed Boy

Kazuo Umezu (Viz)

The mysterious Cat Eyed Boy narrates disturbing tales of unrepentant monsters, aliens and eerie .—Heidi MacDonald

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963

Susan Sontag (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Enigmatic, epigrammatic and astounding in its candor, the first volume of Sontag’s private . —Parul Sehgal

Breath

Tim Winton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

For a surfer, the average ride on a wave—the high—lasts mere seconds. And for two loner A —Mark Rotella

Sarah’s Key

Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s Griffin)
—Daisy Maryles

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

David Wroblewski (Ecco)

In a PW interview, debut author Wroblewski said he wrote this stunning work “to learn how to write a novel.” Go to the head of the class, sir. Reviews have calledSawtelle an elaborate boy-and-his-dodoesn’t relax its grip until the final emotion-packed pages. —Dick Donahue

Thanks, Tuck. I know a few of these books, none of them duds. John