Jennifer's three-year-old Boston terrier’s name is Percy–that's what clinched the job for her. She'd been reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Maple Street Book Shop's patron saint, around the time that puppy Percy was born. Somehow, the name seemed incredibly relevant. Every afternoon, she'd walk Percy up and down Maple Street. He always forged ahead, dragging her behind him. And he always turned into the opening of the fence at Maple Street Book Shop.

   One day, Rhoda, the owner of the shop, heard Jennifer urging Percy to leave the yard of the shop. "Come on! Percy, now!" Jennifer cried. Rhoda thought that an eccentric (and somewhat poorly mannered) customer was calling for curbside assistance and came running out with a bag full of Walker Percy's books. They quickly cleared up the confusion, but Rhoda saw it as a sign and offered Jennifer a job on the spot. After a little haggling over visitation rights for Percy, Jennifer accepted.

How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel by Alain de Botton (humor? essay? fiction? self-help?)
Alain de Botton is one of my all-time favorite writers. I love everything he’s written, particularly this one. All of his books could take on the subtitle "not a novel." They all are of a different sort of book. They incorporate elements of the personal essay, and they use wit, drawings, graphs and illustrations. The chapter titles of this book include, "How to Suffer Successfully" and "How to Put Books Down." Smooth prose, great insights. He never disappoints. You don’t have to know or like Proust to love this book.

True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (fiction)
Carey won his second Booker Prize for this exciting and emotional fictionalization of the life and death of Ned Kelly, Australia's most famous and revered outlaw. Told as a series of memories to his unborn daughter, this novel is touching, hilarious, and as good as Carey's best, which is saying quite a lot.

Audubon's Watch by John Gregory Brown (fiction)
It's difficult to pin down in a few words why this book is fantastic and why you should read it. Though hardly more than two hundred pages, it is dense with the parallel stories of John James Audubon, the famous artist and ornithologist, and New Orleans physician and anatomist Emile Gautreaux. The two men are forever linked and haunted by the death of the physician's young, beautiful wife in 1821. I've loved and admired Brown's previous two novels, but this one may be even more spectacular. It's worth the read if only for his descriptions of hapless slaves forced to chop sugar cane during a devastating storm. An amazing book that demands to be read again.

History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes (fiction)
In these loosely connected ten (yes, and a half) chapters, Barnes takes the reader from Noah’s Ark to international terrorism. Don’t be alarmed of you’re not a history buff–no history scholar would put this novel on his essential reading list (well, maybe just for fun). Barnes, as (almost) always, is terribly funny and delightful to spend time with.

Headlong by Michael Frayn (fiction)
This is one of my favorite books of the year. I'd follow this narrator anywhere. He's an uptight, pretentious academic who has gone to the country for a few months with his wife and baby to complete his book. But on the farm, he gets distracted from his task by his mysterious but dim-witted neighbors. He's led on an all-emcompassing quest by something he thinks he might have seen in the neighbors' house, forcing him to risk his marriage, his livelihood, his entire bank account, his sanity, everything, for what he might have glimpsed.