All in all, I had a pretty good year this year — but I also had plenty of stuff I wanted to escape from. There was the swine flu epidemic, the ongoing recession and my own broken leg.  That seems to be how it’s gone for a lot of us, so I took a cue from Stuff You Missed in History Class’ Katie Lambert, who compiled a list of history reading recommendations from the HowStuffWorks.com staff this fall. But I was more interested in fiction: the books and films we turned to so we could go someplace imaginary.

For my part, I became so engrossed in Cherie Priest’s Seattle steampunk zombie novel “Boneshaker” that I very nearly missed my stop during my morning commute. There was also Neil Gaiman’s “The Graveyard Book,” which really came out in the fall of ’08 but became a book of ’09 after winning the John Newbery Medal in January and spawning a series of Halloween parties by independent booksellers. Gaiman’s “Blueberry Girl” — a book that made me want to have a daughter so I could read it to her– came out in ’09 . That was one of the two volumes I took to his Dec. 14 reading in Decatur, Ga.

I didn’t read many other new releases because of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos series — those 2,300+ pages dominated a big chunk of my summer reading. I did read Wil Wheaton’s “Memories of the Future: Vol. 1,” which is sort of a memoir-meta-TV hybrid, and which led me to explore the previously unknown origins of Wesley Crusher.  And I saw plenty of movies — the one that utterly transported me this year was “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which was everything I had hoped “Where the Wild Things Are” would be.

Here’s what some of our writers and editors named when I asked them what they watched and read this year — and a lot of their pics I loved, too.

Movies

• Jonathan Strickland:  ”Coraline,” “Watchmen,” “Star Trek” and “Up” (“proving Pixar can make a grown man burst out into tears within 10 minutes of a movie starting”)
• Josh Clark: “The Men Who Stare at Goats”
• Robert Lamb: “Mary & Max,” “Moon,” “Stingray Sam” and the German/American sci-fi horror film “Pandorum”
• Katie Lambert: “An Education,” “Bright Star” and “Zombieland.” And she adds, “I wouldn’t say ‘Inglourious Basterds’ was a favorite, I will say that I can’t forget it.”
• Chuck Bryant: “Sunshine Cleaning”

Books

• Katie: “The Lost City of Z” by David Grann
• Robert: “The Judging Eye” by R. Scott Bakker. “Waiting for the Barbarians” by J.M. Coetzee, “Black Robe” by Brain Moore,  “Outer Dark” by Cormac McCarthy and “The Worthing Saga” by Orson Scott Card
• Candace Keener: “Return to the Hundred Acre Wood” by David Benedictus

What did 2009 bring to your imagination?