New York Times best books of 2010

[The Exploding Vole]

Any thoughts? I've not read any of these as I'm almost always too cheap to go hardback, but the last one in particular appeals to me.

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FREEDOM
Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

THE NEW YORKER STORIES
Ann Beattie (Scribner)

ROOM
Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown & Company)

SELECTED STORIES
William Trevor (Viking)

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD
Jennifer Egan (Alfred A. Knopf)

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APOLLO’S ANGELS: A HISTORY OF BALLET
Jennifer Homans (Random House)

CLEOPATRA: A LIFE
Stacy Schiff (Little, Brown & Company)

THE EMPEROR OF ALL MALADIES: A BIOGRAPHY OF CANCER
Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner)

FINISHING THE HAT: COLLECTED LYRICS
Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) WITH ATTENDANT COMMENTS, PRINCIPLES, HERESIES, GRUDGES, WHINES AND ANECDOTES
Stephen Sondheim (Alfred A. Knopf)

THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS: THE EPIC STORY OF AMERICA'S GREAT MIGRATION
Isabel Wilkerson (Random House)

[Anton Gramscescu]

New York Times best books of 2010

Room sounds fucking horrible, though WOM liked it (and reviewed it in the Booker thread).

I got the Franzen book for XMAS - haven't read it yet but will let you know when I do (probably February).

[The Exploding Vole]

New York Times best books of 2010

Great!

When they interviewed him on Wisconsin Public Radio over Christmas, our man at the NYT – once they'd located him – had a lot of love for Freedom. The interviewer said The Warmth of Other Suns was her favourite book of the year.

[tee rex]

New York Times best books of 2010

I'm reading it now, halfway through. It's a period/subject I thought I knew pretty well, but there are still plenty of "well I'll be ..." moments.

The doctor who drives from Louisiana to California, and fully realizes he has to get out of Jim Crow country before he can get a motel room, so he tries his luck in West Texas (the "white/colored" signs are starting to disappear), no joy, carries on to Arizona, no official segregation, just "no vacancy" when he asks, keeps going, waiting for the invisible boundary, never finds it, has to sleep in his car, then finally gets to California and asks for a "colored" hotel because the system has beaten him down. This is the 1950's.

It seems Wilkerson has only written this one book, but it's quite the magnum opus.