Reading List · Lisanne Swart
The Best Books of 2010
2010 was the year Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of Time magazine and Freedom became the most argued-about novel of the decade. It was also the year a small independent press published a debut novel called Tinkers, which almost nobody reviewed and which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Room by Emma Donoghue was shortlisted for the Booker. David Mitchell published his most formally restrained novel. The year offered no single consensus masterpiece — instead it offered a range of serious fiction that kept disagreeing with itself about what a novel was for, which is usually a sign that something important is happening.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Fiction · Published 2010
Freedom
Walter and Patty Berglund are a liberal couple in St. Paul, Minnesota, trying to do everything right — environmentally, politically, personally — and failing in ways they cannot see clearly until it is too late. The novel follows them across three decades, through their son’s rebellion, Walter’s friendship with a rock musician, and the slow collapse and reconstruction of their marriage. Franzen uses the Berglunds to ask a question that has no clean answer: what happens to people and communities when everyone exercises their freedom simultaneously, without accountability to anyone else?
The criticism of Freedom — that it is too long, too focused on white middle-class anxieties, too assured of its own importance — is not entirely wrong. But it is also missing what Franzen does better than almost any contemporary American novelist: he makes the ordinary life of ordinary people feel genuinely consequential, with the same weight and complexity that nineteenth-century novelists gave to aristocrats and heiresses. The scene in which Walter finally loses his composure is one of the finest in recent American fiction.
Room
Jack is five years old and has never left the room where he was born. His mother, held captive there, has raised him in the eleven-by-eleven-foot space, constructing a world for him in which Room is the entire universe and everything outside its skylight is outer space. The novel is narrated by Jack, in Jack’s voice — curious, literal, loving — which means the horror of the situation is consistently refracted through the consciousness of someone who does not experience it as horror. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and later adapted into an Oscar-winning film.
The formal decision to narrate through Jack is what makes this novel work and what makes it genuinely difficult to read. Donoghue never lets you forget that you are seeing a five-year-old’s experience of imprisonment and love simultaneously — that what Jack understands as his whole world, you understand as a crime. The second half of the novel, in which Jack encounters the world outside Room for the first time, is as good as the first and entirely different in its concerns.
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Nagasaki, 1799. Jacob de Zoet arrives as a clerk at Dejima, the tiny artificial island where Dutch traders are permitted to conduct business with Japan — the only point of contact between the country and the outside world. He falls in love with a Japanese midwife called Orito Aibagawa, who disappears into a mountaintop shrine from which women do not return. The novel is Mitchell’s most conventionally structured — a single timeline, a linear plot — and his most historically detailed. It is also, quietly, one of his most moving.
Mitchell made his reputation with formally experimental novels in which structure is the point — Cloud Atlas, number9dream. The Thousand Autumns is a different kind of achievement: a historical novel that earns its period detail without becoming a museum piece, and a love story that earns its ending because Mitchell never cheats on what the period would actually have allowed. Jacob de Zoet is one of the most fully realised protagonists in his fiction.
Tinkers
George Washington Crosby is dying. As he lies in the bed set up in his living room, his mind moves between his own life and the life of his father Howard — an epileptic tinker who travelled rural New England selling goods from a cart — in a series of fragments and meditations that grow more compressed and luminous as the novel progresses. Harding wrote it over several years while teaching music and working other jobs. It was rejected by major publishers and released by Bellevue Literary Press with a print run of a few thousand copies. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010.
This is a short novel — under 200 pages — that works entirely through accumulation. Harding is interested in the texture of consciousness at the edge of death: how memory fragments, how time collapses, how the self extends backward into its parents and forward into its children simultaneously. The prose is not easy but it is not difficult in a deliberate way — it is difficult in the way that anything worth reading carefully is difficult. It rewards exactly the amount of attention you bring to it.
Super Sad True Love Story
Lenny Abramov works for a company that promises immortality to the very rich. He falls in love with Eunice Park, a young Korean-American woman who communicates primarily through screens and does not read books. The novel is set in a near-future America where everyone’s credit score and attractiveness rating are broadcast publicly from the device they wear around their necks, the dollar has collapsed, and the country is governed by a media-saturated political class that nobody believes in anymore. Published in 2010, it has become more accurate with each passing year.
Shteyngart is a satirist in the tradition that takes satire seriously — the comedy is sharp, but the novel underneath it is genuinely melancholy. Lenny’s love for Eunice is real and the gap between what he feels and what the world they inhabit allows him to express is where the novel’s sadness lives. The near-future setting was not particularly speculative in 2010. It is less speculative now.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
In 1951, a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Without her knowledge or consent, cells were taken from her tumour and cultured in a laboratory. They became the first human cells to survive and reproduce outside the body — HeLa cells — and have been used in virtually every major medical advance of the past seventy years, from the polio vaccine to cancer research to the development of IVF. Rebecca Skloot spent ten years reporting this book, tracking down Henrietta’s family and documenting both the science and the story of what was taken from them.
This is one of the best science books written for a general audience in the past two decades, and it is also a book about race, consent, and medical ethics that has not resolved itself since Skloot wrote it. The Lacks family never consented to the use of Henrietta’s cells, never benefited financially from the industry built on them, and were often not even told what HeLa cells were when they encountered them in the research literature. Skloot handles all of this without simplifying any of it.
How to navigate this list
If you want the most debated novel of the year
→ Read Freedom. Franzen is not always right, but he is always arguing for something, and the argument is worth engaging with.
If you want the most emotionally affecting read
→ Room by Emma Donoghue. The formal decision to narrate through a five-year-old makes it harder than almost anything else on this list.
If you want the best nonfiction
→ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Science, race, ethics, and a family whose story has never stopped being relevant.
If you want the most precise prose
→ Tinkers — short, slow, and built to last.
Frequently asked questions about the best books of 2010
What were the best books published in 2010?
The most acclaimed books of 2010 include Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, Room by Emma Donoghue (Booker Prize shortlist), The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, Tinkers by Paul Harding (Pulitzer Prize), Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot. It was a year of significant range — experimental, traditional, satirical, and narrative nonfiction all producing strong work simultaneously.
What book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2010?
Tinkers by Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2010. It was published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small independent publisher, after being rejected by major houses, and became one of the most unexpected Pulitzer Prize winners of recent decades. Its success drew attention to the strength of independent publishing and to a kind of quiet, formally ambitious fiction that commercial publishers were largely ignoring at the time.
Is Freedom by Jonathan Franzen worth reading?
Yes — despite the backlash it has accumulated since publication. Freedom is a genuinely ambitious attempt to write a nineteenth-century-style social novel about contemporary American life, and it largely succeeds. Franzen is interested in how good intentions fail, how love becomes control, and how the ideology of personal freedom produces its own forms of constraint. The novel is long and sometimes self-satisfied, but it is also frequently brilliant and structurally very precise.
What is Room by Emma Donoghue about?
Room is narrated by Jack, a five-year-old boy who has spent his entire life in a single room where his mother is held captive. Donoghue narrates from Jack’s perspective throughout — his voice is curious, loving, and entirely without the understanding of his situation that the reader carries throughout the novel. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010 and later adapted into a film directed by Lenny Abrahamson, which won Emma Donoghue an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
What is The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks about?
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells the story of a Black woman whose cancer cells were taken without her consent in 1951 and became the most widely used human cells in medical research history. Rebecca Skloot spent ten years reporting the book, interviewing Henrietta’s family and tracing the medical and ethical history of HeLa cells. It is a book about science, race, consent, and the systematic exclusion of Black Americans from the benefits of medical research that their bodies helped produce.
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