Favorite Books of the 2010s

See also: my favorite films, TV shows, and albums of the 2010s.

This list happens to coincide perfectly with the period of time I began (1) reading for fun once I graduated college, (2) tracking my reading, and (3) reading a lot more.

This means I had tons of titles to consider. I forced myself to determine which books both expanded my mind and soul, and exhibited exceptional writing or creative vision. Not for nothing, almost all of the chosen ones got 5-star ratings on my Goodreads.

(My yearly best-of lists have a lot more gems that just missed the cut. Consider them honorable mentions.)

Here—listed alphabetically because I spent all my ordering energy on my movies list—are my favorite reads from the last 10 years.

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City by Sam Anderson

Circe by Madeline Miller

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches by S.C. Gwynne

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton

Here by Richard McGuire

How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson

The Hunt for Vulcan: And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

The Shepherd’s Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape by James Rebanks

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker

Station Eleven by Emily Mandel

The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century by Richard Polt

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper

Just missed the cut:

Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler

But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard

The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us by Nicholas Carr

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction by Alan Jacobs

Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion by Robert Gordon

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple