Welcome to Infinite Lit
because there are always more books
Thank you for signing up for Infinite Lit!
What have I just signed up for?
Like many people, I’m having trouble concentrating right now, even for something I rely on for leisure, so I’m reading fewer books than I ever have in my life. Some might say it’s a bold, even ill-advised move to start a newsletter about books at such a time, but I figure that if I can’t focus enough for my favorite pastime of reading, I can at least focus enough for my second favorite pastime of talking about reading.
This newsletter may evolve into a general discussion of books, but for now it’s going to be a countdown in no particular order of my favorite books of the last decade. I read a lot of books in those ten years, and I kept track of every one. Lucky for you, I’ve narrowed it down to my top 1%! Or maybe 2%. Honestly, the list is still evolving.
Where can I buy these books?
Naturally you will immediately want to run out and read each book I mention, so after every email, I will add the books I’ve discussed to my Bookshop page, which you can find here. Bookshop is a great organization that benefits indie bookstores. It went into business shortly before the pandemic and has given readers an indie option at a time when Amazon has deprioritized books and indie stores a clearinghouse at a time when they’ve had to shift to shipping. Maybe because of this strange confluence of events, in the last couple of months, Bookshop has earned over $1 million for indie bookstores.
I do get a small commission if you buy a book through my Bookshop page. You may prefer to instead buy directly from an indie. My personal favorite is Porter Square Books, but there are many wonderful options. If you’re over print books, Libro.fm sells audiobooks with a share going to independent bookstores. If you’re an ebook reader, well, it’s probably still going to be Amazon unless you are the rare person who has a non-Kindle reader or my cousin who reads exclusively on her phone.
In any case, if buying is not an option for you right now or you don’t trust my recommendations enough to bet your hard-earned cash on them, remember that your local library can deliver ebooks and audiobooks directly into your home. Many things about our current time feel like a nightmare, but that little fact remains the highest form of magic. I treasure few things in life more than my Libby app, which keeps my eight library memberships straight, and that was true even before lockdown closed most physical libraries.
What can I expect from the best of the 2010s?
A few notes about my list of favorites. I do consider diversity when I choose what to read. I will never get around to reading every book on my TBR (seriously - I will post photos of the spreadsheet sometime but it’s at almost 3,000 and those are just the ones I remember to write down), so diversity is one of the factors I consider when deciding which book to bump up my list. I don’t know the numbers for adult books, but less than a quarter of children’s books are by or about authors of color, while 76% of the publishing industry self-identifies as white. Though over the last few years I’ve increased the number of books I’ve read by authors of color, I would estimate that for the majority of the decade, books by authors of color represented roughly around a third of what I read, and this list probably reflects that.
On the other hand, I pay absolutely no attention to an author’s gender when choosing what to read, and yet only a few of those books end up being by men. Since I read so few, the ones I do read tend to be pre-vetted, which means men are almost certainly overrepresented here.
Finally, even though I read a lot of romance novels, this list contains none. I could tell you that it’s because adding romance novels to the pool would cause my numbers to balloon into complete unwieldiness, and that would be technically true, but the real reason is that in the last few years alone, I have read The Duke and I, One Dance with the Duke, A Duke of Her Own, From Duke to Dawn, One Fair Duke, Between the Devil and the Duke, If I Only Had a Duke - the list goes on. It’s like historical romance authors have to choose their titles from a mad libs sheet where the noun spot has been pre-filled. The occasional iconoclast will smuggle in a titular Rake, who can then be Reformed, Redeemed, Romanced, or Ruined, but the Rakes are usually Dukes as well, so forget trying to use that as a distinguishing characteristic. Basically, it’s completely impossible for me to remember the titles of historical romances I’ve liked, and that being the case, it felt unfair to include contemporary romance. Somewhere down the line, I might do a separate list for those books, but until then, if you want recommendations, just email me!
Some of the books I discuss I read at the beginning of the decade, and I may not remember them in enough detail to do a thorough write-up, which makes me feel very guilty. Just know that a shorter description is a reflection only of my poor memory and not of the book’s quality.
Okay, that’s enough preamble! The next time you hear from me, it will be about one or more specific books!