Library Journal's Top 10 Best Books for 2010

For the first time, Library Journal has selected the Top 10 Best Books from Fiction and Nonfiction publications for 2010. If you are looking for a great read during the holidays or to purchase for family and friends, try one of these!

Library Journal's Top 10 Best Books for 2010.


American Terroir by Rowan Jacobsen --"Terroir" is French for taste of place. In this book, a James Beard Award-winning author explores many of the North American foods that depend on place for their unique flavor, including salmon from Alaska's Yukon River and honey from the tupelo-lined banks of the Apalachicola River. (641.013 Jacobsen)

By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham--Peter and Rebecca Harris: mid-forties denizens of Manhattan's SoHo, are admirable, enviable contemporary urbanites with every reason, it seems, to be happy until her much-younger look-alike brother shows up for a visit. Like his legendary, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, Cunningham's masterly new novel is a heartbreaking look at the way we live now. (Fiction Cunningham M.)

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen--From the National Book Award-winning author of The Corrections comes a darkly comedic novel about family. Franzen's intensely realized characters struggle to learn how to live in an ever-confusing world--one with the temptations and burdens of liberty, the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, and the heavy weight of empire. (Fiction Franzen J.)

How To Live, Or, a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell--A spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Michel Eyquen de Montaigne in English for nearly 50 years) that relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. (Biography Montaigne, M.E. de)

Room by Emma Donoghue--Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, "Room" is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another. (Fiction Donoghue, E.)

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot (Crown)--Skloot brilliantly weaves together the story of Henrietta Lacks--a woman whose cells have been unwittingly used for scientific research since the 1950s--with the birth of bioethics, and the dark history of experimentation on African Americans. (616.02774 Skloot)

The Passage by Justin Cronin--In just 32 minutes, a military experiment gone wrong would unleash a virus that would change the world forever as man fears darkness, death, or a life of the undead. A whole new approach to a post-apocalyptic world which taps into the frenzy of vampirism found in fiction. (Fiction Cronin, J.)

The Tiger by John Vaillant--A haunting, gripping exploration of predators and prey, and an intimate portrait of a remarkable animal increasingly threatened by interaction with humans, this work recreates the hunt for a man-eating tiger across the forbidding landscape of Russia's Far East. (599.756 Vaillant)

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson--With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells the story of the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, from 1915 to 1970, through the lives of three unique individuals. (304.8 Wilkerson)

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade text by James Crump--Walker Evans is best known for his Depression era photos and his collaboration with James Agee to publish Let Us Now Praise Famous Men which portrays three white tenant farmers in Southern Alabama during the depression. This book presents all of Mr. Evans photos, mainly rarely seen. (779 Crump) SH