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