Best Books from 2010

I’m not very apt at making best of lists. I’m especially crap at trying to keep it as a top 10, or anything neat and orderly. So I decided to split it into sub-sections, and even then I found it difficult. I realised, though, that this is a great thing. It means I read lots of wonderful things, which I did. It’s been a great reading year, and I want to thank you all for keeping me company. Out of the 118 books I read, these are my favourites, in no order:

[Oh! Important note: I didn’t include more than one book per author, even when I’d read several that deserved to be on here.]

Essays

• On Solitude (And Other Essays) by Michel de Montaigne
• The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• Books v. Cigarettes by George Orwell
• Days of Reading by Marcel Proust

Non-fiction

• Half a Life by Darin Strauss
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
• The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks
• The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby

Classics

• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse 
• Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint by Shakespeare

Contemporary

• The Easter Parade by Richard Yates 
• Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
• Cathedral by Raymond Carver
• Music for Chameleons by Truman Capote
• South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
• Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson 
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro 
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
• So Many Ways to Begin by Jon McGregor
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy 
• One Day by David Nicholls
• Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls
• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen 
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham