It's time for that annual removal.

To make room for 2011 in the sidebar:

Books I Read: 2009 Edition

• Amos Oz - A Tale of Love and Darkness
• Colin Shindler - A History of Modern Israel
• Gershon Shaked (ed.) - Six Israeli Novellas
• Nick Hornby - High Fidelity
• Raymond Chandler - Blue Dahlia (Screenplay)
• Raymond Chandler - English Summer: A Gothic Romance
• Raymond Chandler - Killer in the Rain
• Raymond Chandler - The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler
• Robert Alter (ed.) - Modern Hebrew Literature

I'm starting 2011 off with Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, finished it on Thursday. Unfortunately, and bizarrely, Amazon doesn't have the book. Weird, right? I linked, though, a super surprisingly awesome good deal. You can get The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Dial M for Murder, and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) movies for only $11.99! All really solid movies: a movie based on the Hammett novel, a movie based on a Chandler novel, a Hitchcock movie, and a movie that's pretty good. I was planning on reading every Hammett novel like I did with Chandler, but the Chandler oeuvre was such an undertaking that I don't think I can do that again just yet.

I watched 149 movies in 2009.

What follows is a list of my top films from each month. This took me several hours to make. Complete waste of time, but I didn't realize it was going to take so long until about an hour into it and then it was too late. I had already started! Apparently, I don't like current movies. Only ten of these did I see in theaters or, in the case of PBS documentaries, when they debuted on PBS.

January:


February: I only watched one movie in February and it wasn't amazing.

March:


April:


May:


June:


July (this may have been the best month of my movie-viewing. so many to list!):


August:


September:


October:


November:


December: