From the Top 10 Archives - Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2008

I've been slowly working my way through re-visiting all my past annual top 10 book lists, so today we'll take a look back at my 10 favorite books of 2008.  As a reminder, that means books I read in 2008, not necessarily books published that year.

2008 was a momentous year for me personally because my second child, my son Jonah, was born in 2008!  Nonetheless I managed to hold steady by reading the exact same amount of books I had read the previous year.  (68 books, if you are curious!)

Here's my list from 2008, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

Away - Amy Bloom
March - Geraldine Brooks
London Is the Best City in America - Laura Dave
I Love You, Beth Cooper - Larry Doyle
The Monsters of Templeton - Lauren Groff
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
Finishing Touches - Deanna Kizis
My Best Friend's Girl - Dorothy Koomson
The Department of Lost and Found - Allison Winn Scotch
How to Talk to a Widower - Jonathan Tropper




How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?
This is another pretty good list.  I pretty much remember all of these books, and definitely remember liking them all - and I remember crying reading a bunch of these, which is always a mark of a good book for me.  Three of these books remain among my favorite contemporary fiction novels to this day - "London Is the Best City in America," "The Department of Lost and Found," and "How to Talk to a Widower."  On the flip side, there are only two that I was somewhat surprised to see on a top 10 list, even though I do remember enjoying them - "I Love You, Beth Cooper," and "My Best Friend's Girl." 

Genres

This list has two historical fiction novels, "Away" and "March."  "Finishing Touches" is a chick lit novel, and ""London Is the Best City in America," "The Department of Lost and Found,"and "My Best Friend's Girl" are all contemporary women's fiction.  "I Love You, Beth Cooper" and "How to Talk to a Widower are contemporary male fiction.  The remaining two books, "The Monsters of Templeton" and "A Thousand Splendid Suns," I would probably characterize as literary fiction, though an argument could also be made that "A Thousand Splendid Suns" was historical fiction.


Popularity
The most read of these books on Goodreads, by far (way more than all the rest combined), was "A Thousand Splendid Suns," with 960,945 ratings.  The least read was "Finishing Touches," with only 301 ratings on Goodreads.

Other Random Stuff

In addition to being the most read, "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is also the highest rated of these books on Goodreads, with an average rating of 4.35 stars out of 5.  The lowest rated is "I Love You, Beth Cooper" with an average rating of 3.29.

There are two repeat authors on this list - Amy Bloom, whose short story collection "A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You" was on my 2001 list, and Khaled Hosseini, whose first novel "The Kite Runner" was on my 2005 list.  (Note that you'll see Allison Winn Scotch appear again in the future.)

"March" won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006. 

As I mentioned in my recent post on contemporary women's fiction, Allison Winn Scotch and Laura Dave are two of my favorite authors in that genre - 2008 was the year I discovered them both, as their novels on this list are each their debut novels. 

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Note that I'll give all these posts the tag "Top 10," so you should be able to click on the label  "Top 10" at the bottom of the post and see all my other Top 10 posts.  And if you just want to see all my old Top 10 lists now without waiting, you can also click through to my Goodreads profile - I have a separate shelf for each of my old lists.