Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By DWIGHT GARNER

November 23, 2010
Dwight Garner’s Top 10 Books of 2010 By DWIGHT GARNER


THE BEST OF IT: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Kay Ryan. Kay Ryan’s poems are as slim as runway models, so tiny you could almost make them Twitter messages. They are also, as it happens, riddled with heartbreak and loss, and possess an essential gawkiness that, despite their wit, draws you close. Ms. Ryan’s poems are, in 2010, about as good as American poetry gets. (Grove, $24)

HITCH-22: A MEMOIR by Christopher Hitchens. Mr. Hitchens’s memoir traces his coming of age as a public intellectual and as a man, and it’s both electric and electrifying. Mr. Hitchens embraces the serious things, the things that matter: social justice, learning, direct language, the free play of the mind, loyalty, holding public figures to high standards. His book is also a lovely paean to the dearness of one’s friends. (Twelve, $26.99)

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS by Rebecca Skloot. This thorny and provocative first book — it’s about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty — floods over you like a narrative dam break. It’s one of the most graceful and moving nonfiction books I’ve read in a very long time. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like a book Rebecca Skloot was born to write. (Crown, $26)

SIMON WIESENTHAL: THE LIFE AND LEGENDS by Tom Segev. A meticulous and forceful biography of the legendary Nazi hunter, a man who led one of the 20th century’s most interesting lives. Tom Segev’s book begins in medias res — with the hunt for Adolf Eichmann — and rarely slows to catch its breath. This biography captures a character, and is cleareyed about its subject’s many character flaws. (Doubleday, $35)

MOURNING DIARY by Roland Barthes. On Oct. 26, 1977, the day after his mother’s death, the French theorist and literary critic Roland Barthes began keeping a diary of his suffering. Now, 30 years after his own death, it has been published. This book’s unvarnished quality is the source of its wrecking cumulative power. Barthes’s ironic intellect is here wrapped around his nakedly beating heart. (Hill and Wang, $25)

THE LAST HERO: A LIFE OF HENRY AARON by Howard Bryant. This confident and brawny book is, incredibly, the first full-dress biography of the man who, in 1974, broke Babe Ruth’s home run record and did so as a black man playing for Major League Baseball’s first franchise in the Deep South. It’s also a striking and elegiac assessment of race relations in America in the mid-20th century, and a rich portrait of a complex, introverted man. (Pantheon, $29.95)

I.O.U.: WHY EVERYONE OWES EVERYONE AND NO ONE CAN PAY by John Lanchester. Mr. Lanchester, who is British, isn’t an economist or a business journalist. He’s a novelist (and a talented one) who happened to become obsessed with the global banking crisis, and who has written a shrewd, bleakly funny book about it. He explains complicated things like credit default swaps with rigor, but he is also guided by perception and instinct. (Simon & Schuster, $25)

THE POSSESSED: ADVENTURES WITH RUSSIAN BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE WHO READ THEM by Elif Batuman. Ms. Batuman’s funny and melancholy first book is ostensibly about her favorite Russian authors but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs and how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. It asks this plaintive question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15)

OPERATION MINCEMEAT: HOW A DEAD MAN AND A BIZARRE PLAN FOOLED THE NAZIS AND ASSURED AN ALLIED VICTORY by Ben Macintyre. What makes “Operation Mincemeat” — a book about a corpse with false papers that Allied spies set afloat off the coast of Spain during World War II — so winning, beyond the author’s research, is his elegant, jaunty and very British high style. The major players seem to have emerged from an Evelyn Waugh novel that’s been tweaked by P. G. Wodehouse. (Harmony Books, $25.99)

PARISIANS: AN ADVENTURE HISTORY OF PARIS by Graham Robb. Mr. Robb’s ebullient book is a defiantly nonlinear history of Paris from the dawn of the French Revolution through the 2005 riots in Clichy-sous-Bois, told from unlikely perspectives and focusing on lesser-known but reverberating moments in the city’s history. Mr. Robb smuggles into his text a tremendous amount of real feeling and playfulness, those unmistakable signs of a mind that’s wide awake and breathing on the page. (W. W. Norton & Company, 28.95)