saying goodbye to 2010, list style

Well, this is it folks, time to say goodbye to 2010. And what better way to do so than with a some good-old-fashioned best-of lists? I thought about doing a looking back over the year in art, design and craft type of post, but found it way to difficult to pick out just a few favorite things for the year. Basically, if it's something that I post here, it's already because I think it's really wonderful to begin with. The task of shortening a year's worth of posts to a best-of list? Impossible. Instead, I thought it would be fun to focus on some of my favorite things of the year in categories that I don't generally talk about here much at all: books, music and movies.

So, to start the ball rolling, I thought I'd share my 5 favorite books of the year, with Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Squad as far-and-away my favorite. Now keep in mind, while I'm a fairly voracious reader, there a few books that won tons of praise this year that I just didn't get around to picking up yet (here's looking at you, Jonathan Franzen and David Grossman). Of the ones that I did read, however, there were quite a few that were pretty darn enjoyable.

1. Jennifer Egan: A Visit From the Goon Squad
2. David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet
3. Joshua Ferris: The Unnamed
4. Maira Kalman: And the Pursuit of Happiness
5. Aimee Bender: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Next, it's on to the music. I was going to only do the requisite top 5 list, but just had to add on The Bird and the Bee as no. 6, mostly because I love a great covers album. So here you have it, in no particular order, and because 5 just wasn't enough:

1. Arcade Fire: The Suburbs
2. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
3. The Black Keys: Brothers
4. Cee Lo Green: The Lady Killer
5. The National: High Violet
6. The Bird and the Bee: Interpreting the Masters, Vol.1 - A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates

Finally, I had every intention of ending this post with a best-of movies list, but it seems that I really didn't see many films this year, or at least, very few that I really loved. The King's Speech, The Kid's Are All Right and True Grit were probably my favorites, with Toy Story 3, The Social Network and yes, the adorable Babies, up there as well, but really, it was a pretty slow movie year for me, at least in terms of new releases. As for older movies that I saw and loved this year, the list is quite a bit longer, with A Single Man, An Education, Summer Hours, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Mermaids (which I still can't believe I just saw for the first time), topping the list.

Anyway, that's about it for the unusually media-heavy portion of our blog today, as well as my last post of 2010. I just wanted to say one last thank you to everyone who stops by this little blog; I hope you all love reading and commenting here as much as I love posting. Wishing you all the best in the new year, and I'll see you back here in 2011!