The 2010s: My favorite books

Over the coming weeks, I will list and briefly discuss my favorite films, albums, and books of the 2010s. These are not meant to be an exhaustive review of the Best artworks, simply a catalog of what I loved, what meant a lot to me, and what I could remember while I was compiling this list.

Books listed alphabetically with author names secondary.

Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer (2014)

The first in The Southern Reach Trilogy may not actually be as good as its finale, Acceptance, but the extremely alien nature of this first foray into Area X will always hold a special spot in my heart. Vandermeer created a mirror world out of our own (based largely on the wildlife surrounding his home in Tallahassee, Florida) where the plants, the animals, and the very air seem to be constantly conspiring against the humans among them. Told from the point of view of a biologist investigating the strange and expanding region, Annihilation marvelously reveals its horrors and grotesque beauties slowly as the backdrop for an all-too-human tale of paranoia, betrayal, and sacrifice. The team of female explorers realize that they have been tricked by their handlers and their environment only when it is too late to do anything about it. That is, upon entering Area X, one of fiction’s most fully brought to life and terrifying regions. Vandermeer’s mesmerizing prose hypnotized me into finishing the book, and the rest of the trilogy, as quickly as possible, shirking professional and personal obligations as I tried to decipher the writing on the wall and the journals in the lighthouse. I recommend this book to anyone even remotely interested in science or horror fiction or stories of the strange.

A Dance with Dragons — George R. R. Martin (2011)

In a decade dominated by its television adaptation, we received only one novel in A Song of Ice and Fire, the long-running and often vexing fantasy series Martin began writing in 1991. This fifth volume showed that though time has passed his skill and sense of this world have not diminished. Focusing largely on Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, and Tyrion Lannister after their absence from A Feast for Crows, Dance leans into the development of these characters as they try to wield power or drift away from the only power they’ve ever known. The icy chill of winter begins to settle in across Westeros, bringing dangers human and supernatural to the lingering War of the Five Kings. Martin’s sense of worldbuilding is sharp as ever here, with new histories relevant as ever to the present characters. The realm’s unraveling makes for captivating reading as the price of power raises again and again, causing some to abandon the pursuit or die seeking to remake the world after their ideals. Oft-criticized for bloat and pace, I consider Dance either atop or tied with A Storm of Swords as the best in Matrin’s cycle for its sense of character and thematic resonance across continents, plots, and action. I hope The Winds of Winter sweep us away soon.

The Fifth Season — N.K. Jemisin (2015)

Like Annihilation, I am uncertain this is the best book in The Broken Earth Trilogy but it is the one which wrapped me up in Jemisin’s world first. Orogenes, feared for their ability to manipulate the earth’s heat and minerals, are either held in lifelong servitude by The Citadel or treated as outcasts by society, often facing violence from their families and strangers alike. The Fifth Season tracks the journey of three orogenes (routinely slurred as “roggas” in one of Jemisin’s masterstrokes), two of them trying to navigate the trials of life under the Citadel’s thumb and the other attempting to find her daughter following a cataclysmic event in The Stillness. Their interwoven narratives are expertly written as Jemisin carefully doles out information about the world to us and her protagonists, coming to reveal the horrific injustice in layers. The orogeny scenes surpass standard fantasy fare in both emotional valence and brutality. The Stillness is a brutal world, and the fleeting moments of happiness its inhabitants experience offer brief reprieve’s for the reader. Upon realizing this book’s clever twist my appreciation for it expanded tenfold, and the rest of the trilogy (each book won fantasy’s highest prize, the Hugo) continued to impress upon me that Jemisin is a writer at the height of her powers. May she stay there for years to come.

The Friend — Sigrid Nunez (2018)

The only book to make me want a dog, to make me ok with reading book reviews and quotes in the midst of a novel, and to make me love a philandering professor. The novel centers on a woman’s recollections of her complex relationship with a longtime friend who has recently died by suicide and left her with his Great Dane to look after. She alters her entire life around this sudden pet (at one point a colleague tells her she needs to do something about her apartment’s dog smell. She resolves to do something: never speak to him again). This meditation on grief and the solipsism of bereavement is a stunning work of emotional processing. The Friend is something I will come back to in the years to come, as much as Nunez’ narrator warns us against pathologizing our memories.

I’ll Be Gone In The Dark — Michelle McNamara (2018)

Published posthumously after McNamara’s tragic death, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is one of the most haunting pieces of true crime I’ve ever encountered. An extensive recapping and investigation into the rapes and murders committed by the so-called Golden State Killer in the 60s and 70s, the book combines contemporaneous sources with the author’s own newfound evidence and theories. She is sympathetic to his victims, shares her information with several of the detectives who worked the case as it was ongoing, and describes how this hunt engulfed her professional and personal lives. Her prose is sharp and engrossing, describing the crimes in enough detail to horrify without embarrassing the people — mostly women — violated by the spree assaulter. Following McNamara’s death (this book features the single most affecting editor’s note of my reading life), those who assisted in her research continued to track down her theories before writing the final chapters, and just a few months after the book’s publication police caught the Golden State Killer, a former police officer. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark ends with a letter McNamara wrote before she died, demanding him to step into the light and be revealed. That day finally came too late for her to see it, but it never would have without her work.

The Idiot — Elif Batuman (2017)

Batuman’s debut novel is a gorgeous character study of a young woman who does not know herself. Selin enters her freshman year of Harvard with a full set of her parents’ expectations and little of her own. She allows herself to be swept up in a sea of other people’s desires for her, be they her roomates or her professors or, most significantly, an older student named Ivan who emails her his philosophical ramblings and observations on film. Their messy friendship which constantly verges on both romance and dissipation drives much of the book, as Selin attempts to bring observations from her courses and discussions to bear on his strange behavior without success. Batuman’s prose captures the swirling confusion of college and intimacy at a young age with a deft hand. Having the novel narrated by Selin’s older self allows for recursive introspection the titular Idiot did not have at the time. As she finds herself attempting to tutor in the Turkish hinterlands on Ivan’s advice Selin begins to realize something may be wrong with the lessons she has taken from those around her. The somber breakthroughs she experience have been familiar to many of my peers in our burgeoning adult lives. The Idiot is a fitting book for our age of mass confusion and trick mirrors.

Milkman — Anna Burns (2018)

From the opening sentences, Milkman is a stunning work of experimental prose. The contradictions, entanglements, and covered thoughts of 18 year old “middle sister” are enormously engaging, despite being purposefully vague. Almost no characters or locations have proper names and the unfolding public stalking our protagonist endures plays out behind a vicious normality of The Troubles, the religious and political conflict which engulfed Northern Ireland for decades. The constancy of “political problems” subtly overwhelms the psyche of every character, all of whom Burns portrays with an incredibly deft touch. The narrator’s struggles to maintain the doublethink necessary to survive the conflict and its acute pressure upon her as a young woman seeking a future make up the bulk of the novel, in stunning lengthy passages of free thought. This book is a masterpiece of language, memory, and generational trauma told through the strange perils of one summer. An absolute must read. (Honorable mention Say Nothing, a history of The Troubles, makes for an excellent companion text).

Pachinko — Min Jin Lee (2017)

A multi-generational story of pain, loss, and injustice, Pachinko follows a Korean family attempting to rise in the face of systemic oppression doled out by the Japanese. Lee writes with an eye towards emotional detail while staying far from purple prose. She crafts sentences impactful in their understated nature and plainly states the daunting nature of her characters’ predicaments. Taken advantage of by an older Japanese businessman, a young woman and her child leave occupied Korea for the homeland of her occupiers and struggles in the face of rampant anti-Korean discrimination. As her children and other relatives face enormities across the country, their lives bounce around with the seeming randomness of the Pachinko machines from which the book takes its title (it’s said in the novel that the machines are mainly operated by Koreans living in Japan as it is considered dirty work fit for them). Told through the eyes of a large cast of unique characters this story winds across decades of hardship and ends not with resolution but a strain of resilience in the face of oppression which is all too familiar throughout the globe.

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl — Andrea Lawlor (2017)

Sex-crazed shapeshifting gender-bending Paul Polydoris is my new favorite anti-hero. The roguish protagonist of this spectacular novel uses his ability to mold his body at will to slip between spaces and groups with extreme fluidity, engaging in varieties of debauchery from the tame to the obscene. Lawlor writes their smut with as much care as their introspection, which often occur for Paul simultaneously. Whether running from demons of the past or trying to elude those barreling towards him, Paul remains a charming, frustrating character seeking absolution or oblivion. His adventures through 90s queer scenes such as the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, New York Pride marches, and The Mission cause chaos and confusion throughout this highly unique bildungsroman which taught me loads about life, love, and the pursuit of self-acceptance.

Saga — Brian K. Vaughn & Fiona Staples (2012–2018)

When I started reading Saga, it was the day after the Pulse massacre in Orlando. I desperately needed a distraction, and Saga wound up the perfect antidote to my paralyzing sorrow. A story of love and death narrated by the child of an interspecies marriage, the series follows a band of misfits and freaks attempting to eek out peaceful lives against the backdrop of intergalactic warfare. Fiona Staples’ art routinely dropped my jaw over the 54 issues released thus far (the series has been on hiatus since June 2018) while Brian K. Vaughn’s character work has made Alanna, Marko, Prince Robot IV and many others some of my favorites in all of genre fiction. The first half of this story, now available as Compendium One, entered my life exactly when I needed it, and following its twists, heartbreaks, and moments of joy has been a wonderful part of my decade.

The Sellout — Paul Beatty (2015)

I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn just a few months before being assigned The Sellout in college. The former’s rampant, unapologetic use of “nigger” left me wearied and ready to jump off the raft. The latter uses it with such virtuosity that the fact we couldn’t use it during class discussions rattled my teeth. The Sellout may be the funniest book I’ve ever read, a dark satire about one black man’s attempt to re-segregate his South Los Angeles community with the help of an elderly man who wishes to be his slave. Written with deep knowledge of and contempt for America’s sins, the novel features a host of ridiculous characters and events alongside cameos from notable black figures. Beatty’s writing manages to be hilarious, morose, and poignant simultaneously time and again, such as the chapter featuring a segregated bus ride along the Pacific Coast Highway or the meeting of the Dum Dum Donuts Intellectuals as they attempt to transform Huck Finn into “The Pejorative-Free Adventures and Intellectual and Spiritual Journeys of African-American Jim and His Young Protoge, White Brother Huckleberry Finn, as They Go in Search of the Lost Black Family Unit.” As painful as it is hilarious, Beatty’s novel is a tour-de-force of creativity.

Honorable Mentions

Confessions of the Fox — Jordy Rosenberg (2018)

Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest — Hanif Abdurraqib (2019)

Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn (2012)

Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado (2017)

Lincoln in the Bardo — George Saunders (2017)

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory — Patrick Radden Keefe (2019)

Sing, Unburied, Sing — Jesmyn Ward (2017)

A note on recency bias: Between 2010 and 2017 the vast majority of books I read were assigned to me by high school teachers and college professors. Most of those were written well before this decade began, though The Sellout was an assigned read. After graduating college, I got to pick my own contemporary books, many of which populate this list.