Best of 2010

It's that time of year again...time to make plans and resolutions for a bright, shiny new year. Time to gleefully anticipate a fresh batch of promising books, movies, CDs and video games. But before you charge full steam ahead into 2011, take a moment to reflect on some of the highlights of the retreating year. Many a book, DVD, CD and video game brought joy and insight to the PCL community this year.

Peruse the Adult Services Department's picks for the best fiction of 2010, included below. The list is a combination of some of the best reviewed and most popular items at PCL.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson - "As the finale to Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is not content to merely match the adrenaline-charged pace that made international bestsellers out of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. Instead, it roars with an explosive storyline that blows the doors off the series and announces that the very best has been saved for last." - Amazon.com Review (Amazon Best Books of the Month, May 2010)

Room by Emma Donoghue - "Emma Donoghue's Room is rife with moments of hope and beauty, and the dogged determination to live, even in the most desolate circumstances. A stunning and original novel of survival in captivity, readers who enter Room will leave staggered, as though, like Jack, they are seeing the world for the very first time." - Amazon.com Review (Amazon Best of the Month, September 2010)

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey - "Richly atmospheric, this wonderful novel is picaresque and Dickensian, with humor and insight injected into an accurately rendered period of French and American history." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Faithful Place by Tana French - "Faithful Place is Tana French's best book yet (readers familiar with In the Woods and The Likeness will recognize this as an incredible feat), a compelling and cutting mystery with the hardscrabble, savage Mackey clan at its heart." - Amazon.com Review (Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010)

A Visit from the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan - "Readers will be pleased to discover that the star-crossed marriage of lucid prose and expertly deployed postmodern switcheroos that helped shoot Egan to the top of the genre-bending new school is alive and well in this graceful yet wild novel." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee - "Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, the novel does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking - and not to be missed." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Great House by Nicole Krauss - "This stunning work showcases Krauss's consistent talent...Much like in Krauss's The History of Love, the sharply etched characters seem at first arbitrarily linked across time and space, but Krauss pulls together the disparate elements, settings, characters, and fragile connective tissue to form a formidable and haunting mosaic of loss and profound sorrow." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman - "In his zinger of a debut, Rachman deftly applies his experience as foreign correspondent and editor to chart the goings-on at a scrappy English-language newspaper in Rome...As the ragtag staff faces down the implications of the paper's tilt into oblivion, there are more than enough sublime moments, unexpected turns and sheer inky wretchedness to warrant putting this on the shelf next to other great newspaper novels." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell - "Every page is overfull with language, events, and characters, exuberantly saturated in the details of the time and the place but told from a knowing and undeniably modern perspective. It's a story that seems to contain a thousand worlds in one." - Amazon.com Review (Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2010)

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What were your favorite books of 2010? Stay tuned for upcoming posts on the best CDs, DVDs and video games of 2010!

Also, don't forget to check out the Youth Services blog for lists of the best Picture, Juvenile and YA books of the year and the Reference Services blog for the best Non-Fiction titles of the year.