2010 Books
I just posted my last capsule reviews for 2010, and looked back at the list of books I read this year. I read 44 books this year, less than one a week, but still a fairly healthy number. And it doesn’t count comics.
I wanted to pick a few that were particularly good and say a few words about them, but that’s proving to be hard. I read a lot of really great books this year. I’m going to throw out a few links to some of the stuff I enjoyed the most.
In non fiction, this was the year I was blown away by Kevin Roose’s incredible The Unlikely Disciple, found out a ton about the recent Wall Street shenanigans in Michael Lewis’s excellent The Big Short, saw how a serial killer and the World’s Fair danced an abstract tango in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, heard a rational plea for coming to terms with our finite planet from Jared Diamond in Collapse, and became a Chuck Klosterman fan by Eating the Dinosaur.
I read more fiction than usual this year. Partially this was because I discovered Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and Farewell, My Lovely) and renewed my interest in Dick (The Man in the High Castle and A Scanner Darkly) and Atwood (The Year of the Flood, Oryx and Crake, and The Handmaid’s Tale). I also got sucked into the Twilight thing, knocking off all four constituent books in pretty short order. I also finally read The Grapes of Wrath, which is a towering work of literature, and found Lionel Shriver’s spectacular We Need to Talk About Kevin, a harrowing mirror held up to both the reader and the world.
That’s a pretty good year by my standards, and there are other fun things that didn’t quite make a mention here.