There was so much sound and fury about the critical estimation of novels in 2010, you’d think that coming up with a list of the year’s best fiction would be an awfully fraught enterprise. Yet it wasn’t, mostly because the five titles on this list are just so good it’s impossible to be tentative about any of them. They offer great sentences and intriguing attempts to tweak the form, but above all each of these books provides an immersive reading experience — that’s been the bedrock criterion for Salon’s annual best-books list for the past 15 years. To put it simply: We love these books. Were we willing to lose sleep and blow off parties just to devour another chapter or two? Did we urge copies on everybody we knew because we couldn’t wait to talk about them? Will we be recommending these novels to fussy friends and relatives for years to come? Yes, yes and, again, yes.

Room by Emma Donoghue
Don’t be put off by the lurid-sounding premise of this novel; it’s narrated by a little boy who has spent every moment of the first five years of his life in the 11-by-11-foot outbuilding where he and his mother are held prisoner by a man he knows only as Old Nick. Jack’s Ma has protected and nurtured him so fiercely the boy has no idea how stunted their circumstances are; she’s created an astonishingly rich world to share with him. Then hints of an impending crisis prompt Ma to train Jack for a desperate escape plan. Their bid for freedom makes for plenty of suspense, but it’s after Jack and Ma break out that “Room” ripens into a truly profound work, a meditation on the interplay between innocence and experience and on the paradoxes and reversals of mother-child love.
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A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A woman steals her date’s wallet. Two teenage girls make the punk scene with a lecherous record producer in 1970s San Francisco. A disintegrating family goes on an African safari. A once-powerful New York publicist agrees to work for a sinister dictator. An exhaustively target-marketed concert — in a near-future America in which toddlers have become the premiere tastemakers — takes an improbable turn toward the transcendent. Each chapter of Egan’s novel at first seems only tangentially connected to the others, but as the book unfolds, jumping back and forth chronologically, these stories miraculously knit together into a many-faceted epic about popular music (so glorious, and yet so sordid!) and the dirty tricks and rough justice of time itself.
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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
After the dust cleared — once the cover stories had run, the concerns had been raised and the h8rs had finished their howling — what remained were the hours we spent utterly transfixed by the story of the Berglund family and their flailing attempts to reconcile conscience and contentment in Bush-era America. Mere plot summary can’t convey the scope, humor, pathos and intelligence of this novel as it ranges through gentrification, YouTube, environmentalism, neoconservatism and the Iraq war, as well as such perennial concerns as parenthood, betrayal, sex, self-doubt, contrition and that most confounding and demanding of institutions, marriage. Filled with breathtaking prose and often painfully astute observations about contemporary life, “Freedom” is above all populated by characters who seem impossibly, miraculously, astonishingly real.
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Faithful Place by Tana French
In French’s hands, the crime novel (this is her third) is transformed from a serviceable entertainment into a supple instrument for investigating the unfathomable mysteries of the human condition. Detective Frank Mackey gets dragged back into the world he thought he’d left behind, specifically Faithful Place, a working-class Dublin street where everybody resents tall poppies, big dreams and cops. A suitcase discovered in an abandoned building suggests that Frank’s first love didn’t abandon him, as he has long believed, but may have met a darker fate. Figuring out what really happened 22 years ago forces Frank back into the toxic embrace of his family and a reckoning with his own equivocations and denial. As with all of French’s novels, the real puzzle lies in the dark heart of the detective himself.
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Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Not too many years from now, in an America teetering on the brink of political and economic collapse, where people carry souped-up mobile devices that constantly emit, absorb and rank such data as the income, social status, physical fitness, emotional damage and “hotness” ratings of everybody in the room, an aging, nebbishy bibliophile falls in love with the young daughter of striving Korean immigrants. Is real love even possible in a society that revels in transparent jeans and a messaging service that urges its users to give up text and “switch to Images today”? What can Lenny Abramov, with his embarrassingly smelly collection of old books and his dubious blood serum cholesterol, have to offer the lovely, but self-hating Eunice Park? Shteyngart moves from the post-Soviet settings of his first two books to another faltering superpower, which turns out to be every bit as absurd. The razor edge of his social satire, however, is always in service of the fragile humanity we often seem eager to efface. Super-sad, yes, but most of all, true.
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As a person whose job it is to develop digital products, I’m online nearly every moment I’m awake (whether I’m looking at my phone, my iPad or a laptop), and I’m often asked for recommendations. Frankly, every year it gets tougher to be in-the-know. Just like there’s more and more content published on the Web every year, there are new technologies, sites, apps and devices rolling out at a breathless pace. But you don’t need me to tell you this; it’s a problem we all face on some level.

Given that, I tend to gravitate toward things that are either curatorial in nature — offering me new ways to skip past the chaff (of whatever variety) and get straight to the wheat — or that make it easier for me to do things I’ve always done. So while this is by no means a definitive list, what follows are the five things that elbowed their way out of the crowd and onto my pinned tabs or my home screen in the past year.

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To say 2010 was an eventful year would be quite the understatement. It was an election year, of course. Also a year of plane crashes, landmark legislation, meat dresses, flash mobs, Tea Party protests, faux scandals, Wikileaks and more devastating floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcano eruptions, factory explosions, mine collapses, oil spills and forest fires than we could even begin to count. The world cheered the Olympics, the World Cup and the return of Tiger Woods, and mourned the death of Paul the Octopus. Election disputes turned bloody. The Roma were driven out of France. Celebrities posed for their mug shots. And through it all, the situation in Haiti — which began with an earthquake on January 12 — went from bad to worse to indescribably tragic.

Don’t worry — the tsunami of Best Of lists is almost over. I think we’re all looking forward to the fresh mystery of the new year. And right now, our necks ache from looking back so much; we’re particularly sick of the forced remembering of Christine O’Donnell and the Trololo guy. To the annals of footnoted history, we banish ye!

But we did want to highlight the pieces in Salon that — through an unscientific staff poll — we decided we liked the best this year. None of these should be a huge surprise to Salon readers; they were all big hits with you, too. From Glenn Greenwald’s incisive exploration of WikiLeaks, to Mary Elizabeth Williams’ gripping accounts of her cancer diagnosis and treatment, our favorite stories this year run a familiar Salon gamut of world-changing importance to the expressly, meaningfully personal.

I’m reluctant to use the word “remake” to describe strong new versions of material that was great the first time around. The directors of such films sometimes call them “cover versions.” That’s a somewhat defensive term — “I liked the original, too! This is just my version!” — but it’s more palatable and in some ways more accurate. The filmmakers aren’t presumptuously trying to fix what wasn’t broken but trying to bask in the success of a beloved work while putting their own (hopefully unique) spin on it. Any music buff will tell you that cover versions of a great recording sometimes end up being different from but equal to the original. Not always, but sometimes.

Oh, come on! They wouldn’t kill off Cowboy Woody and Buzz and Jessie and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and Hamm and Rex and Slinky Dog!

Would they?