We were thrilled that long-time friend of the store, Bob Birkby’s latest book Mountain Madness made the list. Bob’s book is a biography of his friend, mountaineer Scott Fischer, one of the guides whose deaths on Mt. Everest were recounted in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. A personal book that presents his own memories of Fisher as well as those of family and other friends, Mountain Madness tells the story of an adventurous kid from New Jersey who was driven to ever higher goals in his mountaineering career. A quick aside – Bob will be here on Feb. 17th celebrating the paperback release of Mountain Madness and taking us, via visuals, to Siberia.

China was your favorite country this year-maybe it was the effect of this summer’s Olympics. Simon Winchester’s book The Man Who Loved China about eccentric scientist and author Joseph Needham’s obsession with the Middle Kingdom appeared in this column in June and Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem, a cautionary tale of man’s destructive potential set in Mongolia made the May edition. You all found Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop without any help from me. This memoir by the British food writer of her adventures learning to eat and cook in China is a serious foodie book but also excels at expressing some of the ideas that draw us to travel. Dunlop writes that being so far away from home, studying at Sichuan’s premier cooking school, she was able to break away from the expectations of friends and family and find her true self. Her fluent Chinese enables her to delve much deeper into Chinese culture than most travel writers and her understanding of the connections between food and cultural identity adds new dimensions to the usual stories of the curious things Chinese people eat. And there are recipes.

You also favored books about really long journeys. It was no surprise to find Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star on the list. This account of his journey by train through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, India and China travels through time as well as place, comparing scenes from his 1973 classic, The Great Railway Bazaar to today’s landscape. A September arrival on the Front Table, The Marco Polo Odyssey by Harry Rutstein, has already racked up enough sales to achieve bestseller status helped by an in store appearance by the author, a Seattle resident. The book tells the story of his ten year effort through three expeditions to retrace the steps of the famous traveler. His ten meter sailboat nearly foundered off the coast of Turkey, he trekked through the high mountain regions of Pakistan, and he finally succeeded after years of struggle with Chinese bureaucracy in becoming the first foreigner to enter China through the closed Western border. It’s a truly epic journey that Rutstein documents in words, pictures and even film on the DVD included with the book.

We had a couple of around-the-world titles on the list with Eric Weiner’s study of happiness in many lands, The Geography of Bliss (now arriving in paperback) and Around the World in 80 Dinners, Cheryl and Bill Jamison’s attempt to eat their way through ten countries in three months. You also decided to read up on cities. Richard Florida’s Who’s Your City is a serious but accessible study about the importance of where we chose to live. With charts, graphs and statistics, Florida analyses the effect of place on careers and lifestyles. He looks into the reasons people say influence their decisions to move from place to place and then tells us the truth about why we really do what we do. In the final chapter he offers a ten-step decision making manual to help us make informed decisions about where to live in order to achieve our life goals. And the appendices offer pages of rankings of cities and regions in various categories to assist in that decision making.

You showed England some love, making a novel and an affectionate look at British foibles bestsellers in 2008. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Fiery Barrows and Mary Ann Fiery Shaffer has been on fiction bestseller lists around the country and was featured in September’s Front Table column. Sarah Lyall’s essays about her new life in London after moving there from New York in the ’90s, The Anglo Files, seems to have hit your collective funny bones. A worthy entry in a long line of books about the eccentricities of the U.K. that includes such classics as Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island, Lyall regales us with hilarious stories of British dentistry, the anachronistic oddities of the House of Lords and much more.

We’ll round out the list with a couple of bestselling staff picks. Timm has been handselling his favorite novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone by Bosnian-born author Sasa Stanisic since its June debut on the Table. My personal favorite on the bestseller list isn’t written at all. The Arrival is a wordless graphic novel, brilliantly plotted and illustrated by Shaun Tan. In sepia-toned drawings slightly reminiscent of Chris Van Allsburg’s classic children’s books, Tan shows a man forced to leave his family to travel to a new and very strange land to try and build a new life. His struggles to adapt to this darkly whimsical world are moving and uplifting especially for anyone who has ever stood in a new place and wondered if you’ll ever manage to make it home.

Happy New Year! We look forward to seeing what you’ll be reading in 2009.