the 10 best books of 2010 - nytimes

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HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE

The 10 Best Books of 2010

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Published: December 1, 2010

Fiction

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The 10 Best Books of 2010 - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/10-best-books-of-2010.html?ex=1308632400&en...

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Paper Cuts Blog: Choosing the 10

Best Books of 2010 (December 1,2010)

100 Notable Books of 2010

(December 5, 2010)

Best Illustrated Childrens Books of

2010 (November 7, 2010)

Previous Years Lists

2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005

From The Timess Critics

Michiko Kakutanis Top 10 Books

of 2010 (November 26, 2010)

Janet Maslins Top 10 Books of

2010 (November 26, 2010)

Dwight Garners Top 10 Books of

2010 (November 26, 2010)

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FREEDOM

By Jonathan Franzen.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.

The author of The Corrections is back, not quite adecade later, with an even richer and deeper work a

vividly realized narrative set during the Bush years, when

the creedal legacy of personal liberties assumed new

and sometimes ominous proportions. Franzen captures

this through the tribulations of a Midwestern family, the

Berglunds, whose successes, failures and appetite forself-invention reflect the larger story of millennial

America.

THE NEW YORKER STORIES

By Ann Beattie.

Scribner, $30.

As these 48 stories published in The New Yorker from

1974 through 2006 demonstrate, Beattie, even as she

chronicled and satirized her post-1960s generation, also

became its defining voice. She punctures her characters

pretensions and jadedness with an economy and

effortless dialogue that writers have been trying to

emulate for three decades, though few, if any, have

matched her seamless combination of biting wit and

mordant humor, precise irony and consummate cool.

ROOM

By Emma Donoghue.

Little, Brown & Company, $24.99.

Donoghue has created one of the pure triumphs of recent fiction: an ebullient child

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narrator, held captive with his mother in an 11-by-11-foot room, through whom we

encounter the blurry, often complicated space between closeness and autonomy. In a

narrative at once delicate and vigorous rich in psychological, sociological and political

meaning Donoghue reveals how joy and terror often dwell side by side.

SELECTED STORIES

By William Trevor.

Viking, $35.

Gathering work from Trevors previous four collections, this volume shows why his

deceptively spare fiction has haunted and moved readers for generations. Set mainly in

Ireland and England, Trevors tales are eloquent even in their silences, documenting the

way the present is consumed by the past, the way ancient patterns shape the future.

Neither modernist nor antique, his stories are timeless.

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD

By Jennifer Egan.

Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95.

Time is the goon squad in this virtuosic rock n roll novel about a cynical record

producer and the people who intersect his world. Ranging across some 40 years and

inhabiting 13 different characters, each with his own story and perspective, Egan makes

these disparate parts cohere into an artful whole, irradiated by a Proustian feel for loss,

regret and the ravages of love.

Nonfiction

APOLLOS ANGELS: A History of Ballet

By Jennifer Homans.

Random House, $35.

Here is the only truly definitive history of classical ballet. Spanning more than fourcenturies, from the French Renaissance to American and Soviet stages during the cold

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war, Homans shows how the art has been central to the social and cultural identity of

nations. She meticulously reconstructs entire eras, describing the evolution of ballet

technique while coaxing long-lost dances back to life. And she raises a crucial question:

In the 21st century, can ballet survive?

CLEOPATRA: A Life

By Stacy Schiff.

Little, Brown & Company, $29.99.

With her signature blend of wit, intelligence and superb prose, Schiff strips away 2,000

years of prejudices and propaganda in her elegant reimagining of the Egyptian queen

who, even in her own day, was mythologized and misrepresented.

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer

By Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Scribner, $30.

Mukherjees magisterial biography of the most dreaded of modern afflictions. He

excavates the deep history of the war on cancer, weaving haunting tales of his own

clinical experience with sharp sketches of the sometimes heroic, sometimes misguided

scientists who have preceded him in the fight.

FINISHING THE HAT: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) With Attendant

Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes

By Stephen Sondheim.Alfred A. Knopf, $39.95.

The theaters pre-eminent living songwriter offers a master class in how to write a

musical, covering some of the greatest shows, from West Side Story to Sweeney

Todd. Sondheims analysis of his and others lyrics is insightful and candid, and his

anecdotes are telling and often very funny.

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: The Epic Story of Americas Great


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A version of this article appeared in print on December 12, 2010, on

page BK10 of the New York edition.

Migration

By Isabel Wilkerson.

Random House, $30.

Wilkerson, a former national correspondent for The Times, has written a masterly andengrossing account of the Great Migration, in which six million African-Americans

abandoned the South between 1915 and 1970. The book centers on the journeys of three

black migrants, each representing a different decade and a different destination.

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