From the Top 10 Archives: Jen's 10 Favorite Books of 2010

Since I started this blog, I've been periodically looking back at my top 10 favorites lists of years past.  Each list consists of my favorite books I read in a particular year, not necessarily books published that year.  Today, I'll look at my list from 2010.  Full disclosure, I actually cheated in 2010 and put 11 books on the list!  😉 It's often a challenge to narrow my lists down to 10, but this is the only year I did it - made an exception because I read two books by the same author that I loved so much I just decided to list them as one entry!

Here's my list from 2010, in alphabetical order by author's last name:

When Will There Be Good News? - Kate Atkinson
After You - Julie Buxbaum
Little Bee - Chris Cleave
The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
In the Woods - Tana French AND The Likeness - Tana French
The Host - Stephenie Meyer
The Forgotten Garden - Kate Morton
One Day - David Nicholls
The Thirteenth Tale - Diane Setterfield
Lottery - Patricia Wood

For more about these books, read on!

How Does This List Hold Up Over Time?

I guess it makes sense that as I get closer to the present in looking back at these lists, the books become more and more memorable!  But this is a really good list.  I actually truly remember every single one of these books.  It would be hard to even pick a favorite ( I contemporaneously gave 6 of these books a 5 star rating on Goodreads at the time).  I definitely can't pick just one favorite, but would put The Forgotten Garden, The Likeness, and The Hunger Games at the top if I had to narrow it down.  And this list contains so many of my favorite authors - Kate Morton, Tana French, Julie Buxbaum, Kate Atkinson!  None of these books are books that I look back and shake my head as to their inclusion, but if pressed I'd say One Day and Little Bee are perhaps less favorite than the others.

Genres

This list has 3 mysteries (the two Tana French books and the Kate Atkinson), two sci fi/dystopian books (The Hunger Games and The Host), and two books which are not just historical fiction books (The Forgotten Garden and The Thirteenth Tale) but specifically dual time period gothic fiction set in crumbling manor houses with secret gardens - random!  The other four books are all contemporary fiction.

Popularity

A lot of these books were pretty popular, but the most read on Goodreads is The Hunger Games with more than 5.6 million reviews which I think puts it up there with Harry Potter as one of the most read books on Goodreads, period.  6 of the other books actually have Goodreads ratings in the hundreds of thousands which is quite a bit.  The least read on Goodreads is After You with only 3,710 ratings.

Other Random Stuff

The Hunger Games is also the highest rated on Goodreads, with an average rating of 4.33 out of 5.  The lowest rated is Little Bee with an average rating of 3.71, which is still pretty high.

None of these books won any major awards, but In the Woods won some awards for best debut mystery novel, and The Hunger Games won a bunch of random young adult awards.

As I mentioned above, a lot of my favorite authors on the list.  This is Kate Atkinson's second appearance on the list after 2006.  Julie Buxbaum and Kate Morton both went back to back on this list with their first two books after both first appearing in 2009.  And while this is the first year I discovered Tana French, I loved her so much I put both books on the list, and you'll see her again in the future!

I'm pretty sure all these books are still on my bookshelf, except for The Forgotten Garden which I lent to someone who never gave it back.  (Grrr!)

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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.