Updated Best Books 2010: 15 'Best Of' Lists (PHOTOS)

The lists are up, the decisions are out: publications across the globe have selected their favorite books of 2010. From Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" to Patti Smith's "Just Kids," there were many predictable picks across the board and some surprises, too.

Click through the slide show to see lists from 13 publications. Let us know which of your favorite books from the year made none of the lists in the comments section below.

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The New York Times

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The 10 Best Books of 2010

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The 10 Best Books of 2010

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Comments

[Sheryl Brower]

04:27 PM on 12/21/2010

The Room??? Seriously??? Gawd, what a horrible book.

[Miss Trust]

11:06 AM on 12/22/2010

I read it within two days and thought it was great.

[TammyCamp]

03:26 AM on 12/21/2010

Out of the 10, what is your favorite?

[want2run527]

07:45 PM on 12/20/2010

The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter

Synopsis

A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race—not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively
The New York Times - Linda Gordon

…an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial…I cannot fault Nell Painter's choices—omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.

[want2run527]

07:47 PM on 12/20/2010

Apologies for the reviews. Not much of a synopsis there so I added them.

[want2run527]

07:41 PM on 12/20/2010

The Lonely Polygamist by: Brady Udall

Synopsis

From a luminous storyteller, a highly anticipated new novel about the American family writ large.
The Barnes & Noble Review

The size of the cast means that Udall, like his protagonist, must make some tough choices. The smartest one he makes is to ignore the children as individuals (there are plenty of funny descriptions of them as a faceless hive), except for one, Rusty. Going on 12 years old, boyishly spazzy and misunderstood, prone to conspicuous behavior like trying on his sisters' underwear or blowing up a cherry bomb in the dryer, Rusty has been separated from his nervous mother, wife #3, to live in another house under the sterner guidance of wife #1, Beverly. Rusty's plight is to be a kid looking for attention when there isn't nearly enough to go around. "If there's anything you learned as a plyg kid," he thinks, using the shorthand for a child of polygamy, "it was that you were not the center of the universe." The one family member who offers him substantial sympathy is Trish, wife #4, who lives with her daughter from a previous marriage in a duplex on the other side of town from the rest of the clan, "like some exiled daughter of a Prussian czar." Though Golden gives the novel its title, he, Rusty, and Trish all form its yearning heart.

[naschkatze]

04:51 PM on 12/20/2010

A new Karin Fossum--I have to have that one.

[Andrew FingerlickingGree]

02:54 PM on 12/20/2010

The History of White People.....what's that about? LOL

[Jonathan Robert]

01:29 PM on 12/14/2010

It is good that books like Percy's are getting attention.

[want2run527]

11:16 AM on 12/14/2010

The Wave : In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by: Susan Casey.

For centuries, mariners have spun tales of gargantuan waves, 100-feet high or taller. Until recently scientists dis­missed these stories—waves that high would seem to violate the laws of physics. But in the past few decades, as a startling number of ships vanished and new evidence has emerged, oceanographers realized something scary was brewing in the planet’s waters. They found their proof in February 2000, when a British research vessel was trapped in a vortex of impossibly mammoth waves in the North Sea—including several that approached 100 feet.

As scientists scramble to understand this phenomenon, others view the giant waves as the ultimate challenge. These are extreme surfers who fly around the world trying to ride the ocean’s most destructive monsters. The pioneer of extreme surfing is the legendary Laird Hamilton, who, with a group of friends in Hawaii, figured out how to board suicidally large waves of 70 and 80 feet. Casey follows this unique tribe of peo­ple as they seek to conquer the holy grail of their sport, a 100­-foot wave.

In this mesmerizing account, the exploits of Hamilton and his fellow surfers are juxtaposed against scientists’ urgent efforts to understand the destructive powers of waves—from the tsunami that wiped out 250,000 people in the Pacific in 2004 to the 1,740-foot-wave that recently leveled part of the Alaskan coast.

[SiouxieQ]

01:32 PM on 12/14/2010

Thanks for these synopses, Want2Run. I was disappointed that HuffPo didn't include them.

[want2run527]

04:08 PM on 12/14/2010

YW. Seems to be the way for HP on book slides. I was just a lil bothered by it myself. Obviously.

[ESerafina42]

06:44 PM on 12/20/2010

I'm not disappointed anymore. I just don't expect them. Evidently they figure that everyone has read every book they mention.

[bluegardenia]

11:02 PM on 12/20/2010

A whole book about giant waves?

[want2run527]

11:12 AM on 12/14/2010

Alice Neel: The Art of Not Sitting Pretty by Phoebe Hoban.

In this first full-length biography of Neel, best-selling author Phoebe Hoban recounts the remarkable story of Neel’s life and career, as full of Sturm and Drang as the century she powerfully captured in paint. Neel managed to transcend her often tragic circumstances, surviving the death from diphtheria of her infant daughter Santillana, her first child by the renowned Cuban painter Carlos Enriquez, with whom she lived in Havana for a year before returning to America; the break-up of her marriage; a nervous breakdown at thirty resulting in several suicide attempts for which she was institutionalized; and the terrible separation from her second child, Isabetta, whom Carlos took back to Havana.

[want2run527]

11:08 AM on 12/14/2010

Exley by: Brock Clarke

For nine-year-old Miller, who lives with his mother in Watertown, New York, life has become a struggle to make sense of his father’s disappearance, for which he blames himself. Then, when he becomes convinced that he has found his father lying comatose in the local VA hospital, a victim of the war in Iraq, Miller begins a search for the one person he believes can save him, the famously reclusive — and, unfortunately, dead — Frederick Exley, a Watertown native and the author of his father’s favorite book, the “fictional memoir” A Fan’s Notes. The story of Miller’s search, told by both Miller himself and his somewhat flaky therapist, ultimately becomes an exploration of the difference between what we believe to be real and what is in fact real, and how challenging it can be to reconcile the two.

[want2run527]

11:03 AM on 12/14/2010

Broken by: Karin Fossum, Charlotte Barslund (Translator)

A woman wakes up in the middle of the night. A strange man is in her bedroom. She lies there in silence, paralyzed with fear. The woman is an author and the man one of her characters, one in a long line that waits in her driveway for the time when she’ll tell their stories. He is so desperate that he has resorted to breaking into her house and demanding that she begin. He, the author decides, is named Alvar Eide, forty-two years old, single, works in a gallery. He lives a quiet, orderly life and likes it that way—no demands, no unpleasantness. Until the icy winter morning when a young drug addict, skinny and fragile, walks into the gallery. Alvar gives her a cup of coffee to warm her up. And then one day she appears on his doorstep. Broken is an unconventional, subtle, and disturbing mystery from a master of the form.

[want2run527]

11:01 AM on 12/14/2010

The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee.

June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.

[want2run527]

10:58 AM on 12/14/2010

The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg by: Deborah Eisenberg.

Since 1986 with the publication of her first story collection, Deborah Eisenberg has devoted herself to writing “exquisitely distilled stories” which “present an unusually distinctive portrait of contemporary American life” to quote the MacArthur Foundation. This one volume brings together Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and her most recent collection-Twilight of the Superheroes (2006).

[want2run527]

10:55 AM on 12/14/2010

C by: Tom McCarthy

Opening in England at the turn of the twentieth century, C is the story of a boy named Serge Carrefax, whose father spends his time experimenting with wireless communication while running a school for deaf children. Serge grows up amid the noise and silence with his brilliant but troubled older sister, Sophie: an intense sibling relationship that stays with him as he heads off into an equally troubled larger world.

After a fling with a nurse at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator for reconnaissance planes. When his plane is shot down, Serge is taken to a German prison camp, from which he escapes. Back in London, he’s recruited for a mission to Cairo on behalf of the shadowy Empire Wireless Chain. All of which eventually carries Serge to a fitful—and perhaps fateful—climax at the bottom of an Egyptian tomb . . .

[want2run527]

10:53 AM on 12/14/2010

Room - Emma Donoghue

To five-year-old Jack, Room is the entire world. It is where he was born and grew up; it's where he lives with his Ma as they learn and read and eat and sleep and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.

Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it is the prison where Old Nick has held her captive for seven years. Through determination, ingenuity, and fierce motherly love, Ma has created a life for Jack. But she knows it's not enough…not for her or for him. She devises a bold escape plan, one that relies on her young son's bravery and a lot of luck. What she does not realize is just how unprepared she is for the plan to actually work.

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, ROOM is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

[superjules]

12:38 PM on 12/14/2010

Bought this one too, haven't read it either. How about you?

[want2run527]

04:10 PM on 12/14/2010

No I haven't gotten around to reading this one or any of them really. I do have this one and Freedom. I have to make time to put the laptop down to read. LOL

[Miss Trust]

06:18 PM on 12/14/2010

I read it last week. It was so great that I read it within two days. Highly recommended.