Si avvicina la fine dell’anno e cominciano ad arrivare le liste dei migliori libri del 2010. [Ovviamente la nostra lista – in realtà è molto di più di una lista – è il nostro principale orgoglio].

Cominciamo con quelle che il Guardian ha chiesto agli scrittori che collaborano con la testata. Eccole in sintesi. Ho inserito solo le scelte di alcuni scrittori. L’elenco completo nell’articolo del Guardian.

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Jackie Kay, Red Dust Road (Picador)
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House)
Chang-rae Lee, The Surrendered (Little, Brown)
David Remnick, The Bridge (Picador) [E’ la biografia di Obama]

— John Banville
Robert Richardson, In The Heart of William James (Harvard University Press)
Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet (William Heinemann)
Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber) [poesie]

— Julian Barnes
Philip Larkin, Letters to Monica (Faber)
Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat ((Virgin Books)
Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus)

— Mary Beard
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (Allen Lane)

— AS Byatt
Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky (Continuum)
Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (Chatto & Windus)
Neel Mukherjee, A Life Apart (Constable)
Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Fourth Estate) [short stories]
Seamus Heaney, Human Chain (Faber)

— Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (Cambridge)
Alasdair Gray: A Life in Pictures (Canongate)

— William Dalrymple
Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin (Jonathan Cape)
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22 (Atlantic)
Salman Rushdie, Fire of Life (Jonathan Cape)

— Roddy Doyle
Amy Bloom, Where the God of Love Hangs Out (Granta) [short stories]
Emma Donoghue, Room (Picador)
Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light (Harvill Secker)

— Geoff Dyer
David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Hamish Hamilton)
David Markson, This Is Not a Novel (CB Editions)

— Dave Eggers
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women (Oneworld Publications)

— Richard Ford
Jonathan Dee, The Privileges (Corsair)

— David Hare
Jonathan Franzen, Freedom

— Eric Hobsbawm
John A Davis, The Jews of San Nicandro (Yale University Press) [Una ricerca storica su contadini italiani convertiti all’ebraismo]
Charles Van Onselen, Masked Raiders: Irish Banditry in Southern Africa (ZebraPress, Cape Town)

— Hanif Kureishi
Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression (Bloomsbury)
Mike Jay, High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture (Thames & Hudson)
Renata Salecl, Choice (Profile Books) [about the political use of anxiety and insecurity as a form of social control]

— Pankaj Mishra
David Means, The Spot (Faber) [short stories]
Yiyun Li’s Gold Boy, Emerald Girl
John Calvert, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism (C Hurst & Co)
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations (University of Chicago Press)

— Paul Theroux
Jonathan Raban, Driving Home: An American Scrapbook (Picador)
Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand (Bodley Head)[Custer contro Toro seduto]

— Colm Tóibín
David Grossman, To the End of the Land (Jonathan Cape)
David Malouf, Ransom (Vintage)
Seamus Heaney, Human Chain
John Lanchester, Whoops!
Fintan O’Toole, Enough Is Enough (Faber) [sulla crisi finanziaria]