The Top 10 of 2010

It’s pretty difficult to choose my top 10 books read during 2010, especially since so many of them were read for a specific purpose (ex. studying war). But because the purpose of this list would be to recommend books to others, I’m going to exclude all time bestsellers, such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, or classics, such as Hemingway—because that doesn’t put anything new on anybody’s radar.

Given those criteria…here’s a list of my top 10 books read in 2010, culled from the 47 that I posted a few nights ago:

Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy (short stories)

The Coast of Nowhere by Michael Delp (essays & poetry)

Uncoded Woman by Anne-Marie Oomen (poetry)

Tunnels of Cu Chi by Tom Mangold and John Penycate (nonfiction)

Electric Literature volumes 1, 2, 3 by various authors (short stories)

Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska by Rockwell Kent (nonfiction)

The Good Soldiers by David Finkel (nonfiction)

Vacation by Deb Olin Unferth (novel)

Male of the Species by Alex Mindt (short stories)