(click through for a larger image)I recently did a cover post with the books read in 2010 up to early December. Now I will present my personal list of top 25 novels published in 2010 in ranked order as a collated cover post. For the titles on the list, you can go HERE, while all but one have FBC reviews indexed HERE. I have read some of them in 2009 as advance review copies, so not all will appear in the 'read in 2010' cover collage.
Actually this list has 28 titles since I consider two pairs of series books (both #4 and #5 for that matter) published in 2010 as two combos for ranking purposes and I wanted to include the much controversial The Left Hand of God after all...
With 17 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though three of them have also literary overtones, only one being closer to genre and a contemporary literary one, the books above are the ones that most reflect what I appreciate and enjoy in fiction - first and foremost "interesting-ness" in content, second flowing prose without narrative walls and finally "literary-ness" in aspects different from the narrative flow. While the list itself is of course a personal choice one with no claim to anything beyond, some of the choices are even more personal so to speak...
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Actually this list has 28 titles since I consider two pairs of series books (both #4 and #5 for that matter) published in 2010 as two combos for ranking purposes and I wanted to include the much controversial The Left Hand of God after all...
With 17 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though three of them have also literary overtones, only one being closer to genre and a contemporary literary one, the books above are the ones that most reflect what I appreciate and enjoy in fiction - first and foremost "interesting-ness" in content, second flowing prose without narrative walls and finally "literary-ness" in aspects different from the narrative flow. While the list itself is of course a personal choice one with no claim to anything beyond, some of the choices are even more personal so to speak...
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Here is the cover collage of 30 more highly recommended books of 2010 with the title list HERE. The order is though random since I do not see any point in making finer distinctions. We have reviews of 27 of them again indexed HERE. This list was a bit more surprising for me since I started with some extra 50 2010 titles I enjoyed and would recommend but I wanted to pare down to the ones that stayed the best in my memory, so I left out some titles I was more enthusiastic on reading them but which faded somewhat as time passed.
There are 19 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though here 3 are pure genre and one with literary overtones and a contemporary literary one, so the distribution of the first 28 titles continues. This is no surprise since after all my first criterion is "interesting-ness" in content and that one scales as in "like with like".
There are 19 more-or-less fantasy titles, 6 sf titles, 4 historical fiction titles, though here 3 are pure genre and one with literary overtones and a contemporary literary one, so the distribution of the first 28 titles continues. This is no surprise since after all my first criterion is "interesting-ness" in content and that one scales as in "like with like".