1. Star Island by Carl Hiaasen
2. Autobiography of Mark Twain ed. by Harriet Elinor Smith
3. Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin
4. Getting to Happy by Terry McMillan
5. Spiritual Envy by Michael Krasny

6. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
7. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
8. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
9. Tinkers by Paul Harding
10. Tri-Valley Trails by Nancy Rodrigue & Jacky Poulsen
    

One of the great pleasures of working in a bookshop is people coming in saying how much they adored a particular book. Or hated it. Talking about books. Responding to books. The books that make people care, sometimes passionately.

Out of these enthusiasms come our selections for Books of the Year. These are the books that most often began conversations in 2010. We feel that each is worthy of inclusion in your permanent library.

Cheryl's Book of the Year
Work Song by Ivan Doig (Scribner, $25.95). Poetic, impeccably crafted prose; quirky and lovable characters; a significant slice of American history from an off-the-beaten-path locale; an homage to the power of literature; an adult novel appropriate for teens on up: Montana native and Seattle author Ivan Doig delivers it all in his thirteenth book. Set in Butte, Montana at the height of copper miners' labor strife, the novel begins with itinerant (and on the lam?) teacher Morrie Morris's arrival at one of the town's respectable rooming houses, fresh from his disappearance at the end of Doig's twefth book, Whistling Season. As a member of my book group said: "When I settle in with an Ivan Doig book, it's like being covered in a warm, familiar afghan; I just want to stay there and lose myself in the story."

The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall (W. W. Norton, $26.95). Golden Richards, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children, is having the mother of all midlife crises. His construction business is failing, his family has grown into an overpopulated mini-dukedom beset with insurrection and rivalry, and he is done in with grief: due to the accidental death of a daughter and the stillbirth of a son, he has come to doubt the capacity of his own heart. Brady Udall, one of our finest American fiction writers, tells a tragicomic story of a deeply faithful man who, crippled by grief and the demands of work and family, becomes entangled in an affair that threatens to destroy his family's future. Like John Irving and Richard Yates, Udall creates characters that engage us to the fullest as they grapple with the nature of need, love, and belonging. Beautifully written, keenly observed, and ultimately redemptive, The Lonely Polygamist is an unforgettable story of an American family – with its inevitable dysfunctionality, heartbreak, and comedy – pushed to its outer limits.

Cameron's Book of the Year
At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (Random House, $28.95). "Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up." Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home." The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig-ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture. Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi-tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life. *Signed copies available.*

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Novella Carpenter (Random House, $30). I'm going to let Isabel Wilkerson introduce her remarkable book, "The actions of the people in this book were both universal and distinctly American. Their migration was a response to an economic and social structure not of their making. They did what humans have done for centuries when life became untenable ? what the pigrims did under the tyranny of British rule . . . what the Irish did when there was nothing to eat, what the European Jews did during the spread of Nazism . . . They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left." The Warmth of Other Suns is a brilliant and wonderfully readable addition to American history and a necessary addition to your permanent bookshelf.

Julie's Book of the Year
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson (Random House Trade, $15). Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout had this to say, "In the noisy world of today it is a delight to find a novel that dares to assert itself quietly with the lovely rhythm of Helen Simonson's funny, comforting, and intelligent debut, a modern-day story of love that takes everyone " grown children, villager, and the main participants by surprise, as real love stories tend to do." If you loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, then you must check out this fine first novel. It's smart. It's kind. It's a great celebration of book, reading, and friendship. And, it's perfect for a rainy afternoon. What's not to love? ***Now in paperback!***

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit (University of California Press, $24.95). What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place: the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically — connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of "Vertigo." Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures — butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us or to discover our own infinite city. ***Back in stock!***

Kevin's Book of the Year
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, $7.99).It takes a graveyard to raise a child. Nobody Owens, known as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be "completely" normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised by ghosts, with a guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the dead. There are adventures in the graveyard for a boy — an ancient Indigo Man, a gateway to the abandoned city of ghouls, the strange and terrible Sleer. But if Bod leaves the graveyard, he will be in danger from the man Jack — who has already killed Bod's family. Neil Gaiman over and over proves himself one of our foremost storytellers. By turns funny and smart and scary, he's can hit that part at the back of species brain where we're still just gathered around the campfire in the dark.

Dash & Lily's Book of Dares by David Levithan & Rachel Cohn (Knopf, $16.99). "I've left some clues for you. If you want them, turn the page. If you don't, put the book back on the shelf, please." So begins the latest whirlwind romance from the "New York Times" bestselling authors of "Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist." Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on a favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. But is Dash that right guy? Or are Dash and Lily only destined to trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations across New York? Could their in-person selves possibly connect as well as their notebook versions? Or will they be a comic mismatch of disastrous proportions? Rachel Cohn and David Levithan have written a love story that will have readers perusing bookstore shelves, looking and longing for a love (and a red notebook) of their own. I've read this stylish and romantic comedy twice now and it leaves me with a single question: why aren't more adults as articulate and self-actualized as these two teens?

Reader's Choice Book of the Year
The results of our poll of our customers, and the readers of our e-newsletter "Bookpost" are clear. Although other books received great support from you, the winner was impossible to contest:

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Vintage, $15.95).Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother's death and their father's disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles--and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined. Readers praised its "sense of place," and "compelling characters" and, above all, its "generous and compassionate spirit."

Michael's Book of the Year
Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin (Harper, $25.99). Twenty years have passed since Mary Ann Singleton left her husband and child in San Francisco to pursue her dream of a television career in New York. Now a pair of personal calamities has driven her back to the city of her youth and into the arms of her oldest friend, Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, a gardener happily ensconced with his much-younger husband. Mary Ann finds temporary refuge in the couple's backyard cottage, where, at the unnerving age of fifty-seven, she licks her wounds and takes stock of her mistakes. Soon, with the help of Facebook and a few old friends, she begins to reengage with life, only to confront fresh terrors when her checkered past comes back to haunt her in a way she could never have imagined. After the intimate first-person narrative of Maupin's last novel, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn marks the author's return to the multicharacter plotlines and darkly comic themes of his earlier work. Among those caught in Mary Ann's orbit are her estranged daughter, Shawna, a popular sex blogger; Jake Greenleaf, Michael's transgendered gardening assistant; socialite DeDe Halcyon-Wilson; and the indefatigable Anna Madrigal, Mary Ann's former landlady at 28 Barbary Lane. More than three decades in the making, Armistead Maupin's legendary "Tales of the City" series rolls into a new age, still sassy, irreverent, and curious, and still exploring the boundaries of the human experience with insight, compassion, and mordant wit. I loved selling this book. I loved talking about it with readers (and hearing what they had to say!). And, I will remember Maupin's visit here for a long time.

A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California by Laura Cunningham (Heyday, $50). Vernal pools, protected lagoons, grassy hills rich in bunchgrasses and,where the San Francisco Bay is today, ancient bison and mammoths roaming a vast grassland. Through the use of historical ecology, Laura Cunningham walks through these forgotten landscapes to uncover secrets about the past, explore what our future will hold, and experience the ever-changing landscape of California. Combining the skill of an accomplished artist with a passion for landscapes and training as a naturalist, Cunningham has spent over two decades pouring over historical accounts, paleontology findings, and archaeological data. Traveling with paintbox in hand, she tracked the remaining vestiges of semi-pristine landscape like a detective, seeking clues that revealed the California of past centuries. She traveled to other regions as well, to sketch grizzly bears, wolves, and other magnificent creatures that are gone from California landscapes. In her studio, Cunningham created paintings of vast landscapes and wildlife from the raw data she had collected, observations in the wild, and knowledge of ecological laws and processes. Through A State of Change, readers are given the pure pleasure of wandering through these wondrous and seemingly exotic scenes of Old California and understanding the possibilities for both change and conservation in our present-day landscape. A State of Change is as vital as it is visionary.