What were the most notable books of 2010? Here are some chosen by the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and Amazon.com:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN, Vol. I, by Mark Twain. The great American humorist is his own best character in this first volume of his unexpurgated autobiography that doubles as a razor-sharp portrait of the human comedy.
THE BIG SHORT, by Michael Lewis. Lewis has written the briskest and brightest analysis of the crash of 2008. Other books might provide a more exhaustive account of what went wrong, but Lewis's character-driven narrative reveals the how and why with peerless clarity and panache. When will they ever learn?
THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Mukherjee’s powerful and ambitious history of cancer and its treatment is an epic story he seems compelled to tell, like a young priest writing a biography of Satan.
FREEDOM, by Jonathan Franzen. Like Franzen’s previous novel, “The Corrections,” this is a masterly portrait of a nuclear family in turmoil, with an intricately ordered narrative and a majestic sweep that seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life.
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, by Stieg Larsson. In the third installment of the pulse-racing trilogy featuring Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the pair are threatened by an adversary from deep within the very government that should be protecting them.
THE HELP, by Kathryn Stockett. An uplifting debut novel set during the cascent civil rights movement in Jackson, Mississippi, where black women were trusted to raise white children but not to polish the household silver.
THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS, by Rebecca Skloot. Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge - became one of the most important tools in medicine: vital for developing the polio vaccine, uncovering secrets of cancer and viruses, and leading to in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping.
THE IMPERFECTIONISTS, by Tom Rachman. This intricate novel is built around the personal stories of staff members at an improbable English-language newspaper in Rome, and of the family who founded it in the 1950s.
MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War, by Karl Marlantes. In this tale, 30 years in the creation, bloody folly envelops a Marine company’s construction, abandonment and retaking of a remote hilltop outpost.
MR. PEANUT, by Adam Ross. In this daring first novel, a computer game designer suspected of murdering his obese wife is investigated by two marriage-savvy detectives, one of whom is Dr. Sam Sheppard.
A RELIABLE WIFE, by Robert Goolrick. Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, a successful businessman stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife."
ROOM, by Emma Donoghue. Donoghue’s remarkable novel is narrated by a 5-year-old boy, whose entire world is the 11-by-11-foot room in which his mother is being held against her will.
SHADOW TAG, by Louise Erdrich. Erdrich’s portrait of a marriage on its way to dissolution appears to be seeded with deliberate allusions to her own relationship with the writer Michael Dorris.
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