Earlier this month, the New Yorker published a column called “A Year’s Reading: Reviewers favorites from 2010.” Fifty-one new books were cited; for each, the magazine presented a title, author, publisher and list price, followed by a single line to describe the work.
It struck me that by stripping away identifying details, the editors’ blunt summaries offer a kind of window on our collective attention. What kinds of narratives mattered to us in 2010? What earned our brains’ regard? (And for the truly lit-obsessed among you: How many books can you identify from these brief blurbs? Check your answers here.)
Conspicuously absent from the record: vampires, zombies, and endangered Cerulean Warblers.
NONFICTION
Soviet Jewry’s underground support networks.
Three needless wars and American grandiosity.
On the creator of Time and Life.
The dazzling success of a mid-century art dealer.
Reconstituting the journey.
An argument for smart aquaculture.
How medieval Europe became the modern West.
A quirky hunt for the real detective.
A historical approach to intellectual property.
The subtle shadings of a complicated history.
The Second World War spy caper.
How two decades of haplessness led to the financial crisis.
The history of cancer.
A journalist’s account of the Kashmiri war.
How the man of feeling became the god of finance.
A slurry romp.
The world of the arts in Nazi-occupied Paris.
New revelations about the dancer.
The siren queen, artfully examined.
F.D.R.’s court-packing scheme.
The source of the first undying cell line.
Writings from an adventurous mind and an eventful life.
Antihumanist, polymath, and autodidact.
The heroic exodus from the South.
Finding patterns in the fates of information empires.
FICTION AND POETRY
One year’s turmoil for five appealingly aimless Montanans.
A comic historical picaresque.
On the contours of absence.
A fictionalized memoir.
An art dealer and a precocious ex-addict.
A cynical novel of insider trading.
A horror story redeemed by radiant prose.
A man derailed by a perambulatory illness.
An intricate homage to two nineteenth-century poets.
Romantic entanglements during the dot-com boom.
A hike in the Galilee carries two characters into the past.
Slyly witty stories in a posthumous collection.
A lucid new translation.
A Jamaican’s enslavement.
Satirizing America after the meltdown.
A formidable historical novel.
The consequences of grief.
Irish boarding-school life, told with grinning morbidity.
A capacious Holocaust love story.
A taut retelling of “The Ambassadors.”
The novel as Möbius strip.
The 1944 polio outbreak is the backdrop for a tragic fall.
Economical, melancholy poems.
A novel of manners about modern motherhood.
A woman constrained by marriage to an eccentric scientist.
Adolescent attachment in an ambitious monologue.
Wordstock is a year-round Oregon nonprofit that works to promote writing in the classroom. And once a year, the 