The best of the fiction year – review Justine Jordan rounds up our critics' recommendations - from The Guardian

Of course, Freedom is on this list. But here are a few other interesting tidbits, from this "best of" list. For example:

Surely the year's most pleasurable read and now a Costa contender, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, charted teenage highs and lows at an Irish boarding school: Patrick Ness called it " a rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comedic".

Jeffrey Burke from Bloomberg, had this to say about the book, last month:

For his second novel, Murray has gone from impressive to world-class. “Skippy Dies” concerns a few months in the life of a Catholic boys high school in Dublin called Seabrook College. There’s sex and drugs and high jinks, wimps, bullies, queen bees and brains, jaded teachers, a questionable coach and an administrator so perfectly full of himself that I was reminded of Stephen Dedalus’s bloviating Mr. Deasy in “Ulysses.” This is far from the musical TV series “Glee,” though. Characters that verge on cliche prove unpredictable. A teacher ripe for burnout finds inspiration in a World War I uniform. A femme fatale reveals the stony investment adviser within. The punk selling diet pills isn’t the worst pusher in school.

See that Bloomberg piece, here.

Christopher Tayler applauded Ian McEwan's "elegant and surprising" response to global warming in Solar (Jonathan Cape, £13.99): "instead of applying doom and gloom, he reaches for a lighter, more comic mode than usual".

In March, The New York Times reviewed the book:

Ian McEwan has long had a penchant for creating unsavory, disreputable characters: children who bury their mother in the basement (“The Cement Garden”), a Machiavellian sadist who preys on a pair of middle-class tourists (“The Comfort of Strangers”), a dead woman’s conniving former lovers (“Amsterdam”), an adolescent girl who makes false accusations against a man that will alter his life and the life of her entire family (“Atonement”). In his latest novel, “Solar,” Mr. McEwan’s protagonist — a fat, middle-aged Nobel Prize-winning physicist named Michael Beard — joins this gallery of distasteful antiheroes. In the course of the book he will not only cheat on five wives and innumerable girlfriends and send an innocent man to jail, but he will also steal another scientist’s plans for stopping global warming and try to turn them into a big, moneymaking machine. This self-deluding scientist will come to embody just about everything that has brought about the climate-change crisis in the first place: greed, heedlessness and a willful refusal to think about consequences or the future.

See the complete Guardian list here. Jordan breezes right by the titles, so it's a quick run-down.

Us And Them: The Year's Best Outsider Fiction from NPR by Danielle Evans, Reginald Dwayne Betts

When I sat down to write this list, I realized that I would need to define what "outsider fiction" was in the first place, a daunting prospect. I came up with (and then discarded) several definitions that seemed to me problematic because they posited the "inside" as fixed and unchanging, or insider status as only an accident of birth or demographics. Much of the fiction on this list recognizes that boundaries between inside and outside are fluid and always shifting, and that people can shift with them. Still, the books retain a certain sensibility of outsider status, an identity forged by characters well aware that they must define themselves in light of or in opposition to external forces that might seek to impose definitions or limit possibilities. Beyond that, these books are all great, provocative reads that I'm excited to have encountered in 2010.

This is a really good, well put together "best of" list. Check it out, here. See also: Death Is Not an Option: Stories

"Best of 2010 -- A look back at the year in books" from Washington Post by Stephen Lowman

Jan. 12 - Peter Biskind's biography of Warren Beatty arrives in stores with the extraordinary claim that the actor has slept with 12,775 women. Oh, and Biskind says that figure doesn't include "daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on."

Jan. 17 - Erich Segal, who broke the hearts of millions of readers with his novel "Love Story," dies at the age of 72. Published in 1970, the tale about the doomed romance between Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri became one of the bestselling books of the decade.

Hold on a minute here, the first two books, off the bat, are about these hot and steamy, sort of cheap lusty gossip stories? Ugh, check out the rest of the list yourself, here. It's in chronological order.

The top 10 business reads of 2010 from Globe and Mail by Globe and Mail Blog

When I read Daniel Pink’s Drive last January I admired it and wondered whether any book this year would be better – it was so stimulating, and well written, on the essential topic of motivation. A few weeks later, I delved into Switch, the latest offering from brothers Chip Heath and Dan Heath, whose 1997 book Made To Stick was my choice of best book that year, and I wondered if they would repeat in 2010. When The Management Mythbuster by David Axson came along a few months later, I was positive I had now read the best book of the year. It told us that a lot of the conventional wisdom on management is wrong, and was fascinating reading. However, Hundred Percenters by Mark Murphy, two months later, gave me pause to reconsider; and then when I feasted in the summer on The Executive and the Elephant, a terrific book by Vanderbilt University Professor Richard Daft, I realized it was also contender for best book of the year.

A very good list, and worth checking out. See, read it here. Other titles on the list: The Management Mythbuster, Hundred Percenters: Challenge Your Employees to Give It Their All, and They'll Give You Even More

The best books of 2010 from the Sydney Morning Herald by Christos Tsiolkas

CHRISTOS TSIOLKAS: I discovered Margaret Yourcenar. Her Memoirs of Hadrian, written across decades, made me truly see the ancient world for the first time. A stunning book. I rediscovered John Updike's Couples, one of the great novels of the suburbs. It makes me want to be so much better at my craft. Fiona McGregor's Indelible Ink and Brendan Cowell's How it Feels both showed me a Sydney I have never known. Max Schaeffer's debut novel Children of the Sun bravely examined the fraught contradictions of masculinity and homosexuality, how desire complicates our political correctness. Colm Toibin's The Empty Family is a wonderful collection, unflinching about the pettiness of our cruelty to one another and, in the final story, unapologetic about the transcendence possible through something called love. Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven is masterful, breathtaking.

Check the full list out, here.

Second on the webpage, is:

COLM TOIBIN: The two novels I liked best were David Grossman's To the End of the Land and David Malouf's Ransom. Both books deal with fear and bravery, violence and forgiveness, parents and children. But more than anything, both understand that rhythm and texture in language and the space around words have an almost tactile quality and must be handled as a painter handles paint. In poetry, Seamus Heaney's The Human Chain has a hushed, elegiac tone and is his most beautiful book in many years. I have been getting nothing but pleasure and amusement from Philip Larkin's Letters to Monica. He was a big, sad old softie.

See also: The Yellow Wind: With a New Afterword by the Author, See Under: LOVE: A Novel

Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Book's of 2010 and Guilty Reads from NPR: Books Podcast

Stories in this episode: 1) Howard Jacobson: Finding Humor In Jewish Nerves 2) On Banks of Seine, Niche Booksellers Fight to Survive 3) Fresh Delivery: Indie Booksellers Pick 2010 Favorites 4) Maureen Corrigan's Favorite Books of 2010 5) Sex, Drugs, and 'Life' - The Year's Best Guilty Reads

Download the podcast here.








Chelsea Handler tops the Guilty Reads list. [gag] If you don't want to sit through the podcast, read the full Guilty Reads list here.

NYT: Book Review for 12/10/2010 from NYT Book Review

This week, conversation with two writers who made the Book Review's Top Ten Best Books of 2010: Jennifer Homans, author of "Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet", and Siddhartha Mukherjee, who wrote "Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer"; Julie Bosman has notes from the field; and Jennifer Schuessler has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Download the podcast here. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is also on the list.

The Best Books We Read in 2010 from Lopate - Underreported by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Most "best of" lists look at the books that were published in the last 12 months, but many of the memorable books that you read aren't necessarily new. Here's a list of the best books that the staff of the Leonard Lopate Show read in 2010 that were published earlier. And other folks at WNYC were kind enough to share their picks as well.

Check the full list out here.

Julia Corcoran, Assistant Producer: Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr “I’d never heard of the author before I read this book of short stories, and the writing and the stories were incredible and inventive, written from many different points of view, covering the present, history, even the future.”

Melissa Eagan, Executive Producer: A Chance Acquaintance by William Dean Howells “It’s slender book about two very different people who meet, and are forced to spend time together. The sort of novel that stays with you, long after you’ve finished it.”

Better Than Freedom from The Slate.com by staff writers and editors

Editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg's pick:

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. Weisberg's Law states that any Jew more religious than you are is mentally insane, while any Jew less religious is a self-hater. The Finkler Question demonstrates this rule's applicability in Britain, where the striations of Semitism have their own complications and subtleties. It centers on three old friends, one a goy who thinks he might be Jewish, one a Jew ashamed of Israel, and a third who thinks the other two must be nuts. Like Phillip Roth, to whom he is fairly compared, Howard Jacobson is a magnificent prose stylist who is often at his most serious when he is being uproariously funny. This novel, which won the Man Booker Prize this year, is both a send-up of some very silly people, and an examination of Jewish identity in relation to rising tides of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I don't think you have to be Jewish to find it funny, touching, and troubling.

The book was also listed on one of The Guardian's "best of 2010" lists, in which it was said:

It was a great 12 months for the comic novel, with Howard Jacobson's uproarious investigation of grief, friendship and British Jewishness, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury, £18.99), a Man Booker winner that surprised and pleased in equal measure. Reviewer Alex Clark found it "a terrifying and ambitious novel, full of dangerous shallows and dark, deep water", bringing knockabout humour to bear on the most serious themes.

Read our post about that Guardian list for 2010 here.

Slate Contributor, Sara Dickerman's pick:

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. I read The Imperfectionists: A Novel in one sleepless gulp. It is a novel, as the subtitle informs you, but a multifaceted one: Each chapter stands as its own finely wrought short story about one of the various employees (and in one case a consumer) of a once-revered international newspaper based in Rome. For a group of professional observers, the journalists have whopping blind spots—the fossilizing stringer has never gotten around to purchasing a computer; the lonely business writer decides to date the very thief who robbed her. Rachman's prose is wildly witty but never arch, and even as his characters tangle themselves into absurd predicaments, you can't help but sympathize with them.

Read The Slate's full best-of list here.

The best books of 2010 from The Economist: Books and arts

It wasn't a good year for big analytical books, but 2010 yielded some very fine books on Russia and China.

Download the podcast of that Economist discussion here. First that list:

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime. By John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Sleazy, personal, intrusive, shocking and horribly compulsive, particularly about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. By two American journalists, one of whom, John Heilemann, worked for The Economist until 1995. The 2008 presidential race as high-quality political porn.

If you don't care for podcasts, and/or you need that information, right this minute, check this printed/published page out. Second on that list:

The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. By David Remnick. Beautifully written, artfully constructed and full of new detail about the president—from his Hawaiian childhood to the Indonesian interlude and his years in Chicago, by the editor of the New Yorker.

2010's Best Books from On Point with Tom Ashbrook Podcast

We search for the best books of 2010. Maggie Galehouse, book editor for the Houston Chronicle; Laura Miller, senior writer at Salon.com; Paul Yamazaki, head buyer at San Francisco's City Lights Books.

Of course, Franzen is on there. Check this list out, though. Download the podcast here (nothing revolutionary here; all very expected and unsurprising). See also: The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Emerald City

Anthologizing Rap from WNYC's Soundcheck by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Rap music has given to pop culture some of its most compelling modern lyricists, yet for years the main resource for lyrics has been online. Now a major publisher has anthologized a book of lyrics. Today: rapping about this new textbook. Also: our Smackdown series taps into the competitive nature of hip-hop and pits the rhymes of two MCs -- Kanye West and Pusha T -- against each other. Later: Composer and pianist Anton Batagov finds connections between Eastern and Western cultures. He performs in the studio.

Download the podcast here. Check the full feature story out here. See also: Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop, Decoded, One of the Last Great Poets Standing: Could Rap Be Poetry?

Best of Think from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-09-29 13:00:00] On a special Best-of-Think program this hour, we'll revisit conversations from earlier this year with Julie Hersch, who tells the story of her struggle with depression and suicide in her book "Struck by Living" (Brown Books, 2010) and Jerre Tracy, who works to preserve endangered local historic places as Executive Director of Historic Fort Worth.

Download the podcast here. Other titles often seen on "Best of" lists: Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, Simple Wisdom for the Not So Simple Business World-International book Award-Best Business/Motivational book of 2010, The Best American Mystery Stories 2010 (The Best American Series (R)), Steadfast Christian: A higher call to faith, family, and hope (National Award Winner, "Best Books 2010" Awards)