End of year lists are fluid; the best book you read in January may not make a list made in December, even if it is, in many ways, a better book than one you read in November. Stellar prose, tight plotting, even memorable characters are not enough to keep a book in mind for three months, let alone 12. This may seem harsh, but for a book to truly belong on a Best Of list, it has to meet one extra, often forgotten criterion: it must be engaging. “Best books” must capture the reader on not just an intellectual level, but on an emotional one, too…[more.]

This is the introduction to the introduction I wrote for this week’s PopMatters Best Books of 2010 Fiction feature (up now! Yay!). It’s a fairly simple opening – four lines. Four lines that took me over a week to write.

Fiction is fun. I’m passionate about writing stories, about exploring the ideas that pop into my head at the oddest (read: running/walking/chocolate gorging/Nigella watching) times. Fiction is also easy–for me, at least. I don’t write historicals, or “inspired by” stories. For me, almost everything is conjured from my own head, the hard, creative work already done.* (That said, I am researching a little for my latest work-in-progress, but I’ll post more about that later this week.)

Non-fiction is also fun but difficult for me. For every piece of non-fic I write – including many blog posts – I run up a detailed outline and compile several pages worth of research with margin comments and flags, which I later pick through. The intro for the Best Books list required more than my usual reading, though, because I had to read about every book listed, originally almost 40 titles.

How does one get from a list of titles to general thoughts? For me, it’s about notes, summaries, and overviews. For every title that made the cut, I read the PopMatters details and made notes, then checked Amazon and B&N for publisher details and reviews. This isn’t to say the PopMatters reviews were bad–they were all well-thought out and well-written, but no one piece of material can give a complete overview of a book. After making notes from all three sites, I added comments and genre specifics, along with an * for anything I desperately wanted to read that very moment (more than half the list).

For someone with a lot of time, noting 40 titles may only take a couple of days. For me, it was about five, as I did almost all the notes after the kidlet went to bed, between 8 and 12, my usual unwinding/catch up period of the workday. (A workday for me starts post run, around 8-8:30am, and finishes when I’m no longer coherent, any time from 4pm to 2am. With the exception of nap time, baby wrangling covers the day up until 7ish, with odd bits of work thrown in while Mir colors, or similar.)

After the original run of note-taking and stats–how many titles fit this, how many titles fit that–I entered the “oh, crap, where do I go from here?” phase. It’s a phase many writers are familiar with, where we know what we have and what’s important, but not how to interpret it. And as much as I’d like to say simply hashing it out eventually works, it doesn’t. Sitting in a chair at a computer is not how I write. It’s how I record. Most of the real stuff is done as I go about my day. So Mir and I chatted about titles for hours on end, him presenting me with board books he loves, and me throwing back “but why does The Infinities stand out? What do these books have in common?” Joe, too, suffered, listening to endless, atrocious first lines:

1. PopMatters’ Best Books of 2010 is a collection of the year’s best fiction.
2. This list of thirty-something books represents the novels we at PopMatters have loved over the past year.
3. This is a list of good books. Go read it, then buy some novels. When you love the novels, write to me and tell me why, so I can add an intro to this section and mock you for your tastes in the process. xoxo, Gossip Girl

Not my finest work.

After nearly two days of obsessing, though, something magical happened. No, I didn’t write the perfect intro–there is no such thing as a perfect piece of writing–but I did start to see the light. Talk about a group of books long enough, and themes will eventually jump up and bite you on the nose. The trick is recognizing them. The 2010 list, for all the other possible themes (and there are many) was actually quite simple to describe, once I pushed past the “it needs to be literary, it needs to be smart” fallacies needling the back of my brain. The most important thing the fiction list has in common this year really is engagement–reading about each of the books, and having read some of them, they all yank at something less intellectual and more emotional. Sure, they’re all full of pretty prose, but it’s more than that. After I found the hook, the rest of the intro (for good or ill) followed.

Would I write the intro to something as large and intimidating as a best books list again? Yes! It was difficult, and challenging, and awful as I plowed through reviews–and I loved every moment of it. I also quite enjoyed getting the email with the list as nominated and discussed with a subject line that read “For Your Eyes Only” – it made me feel very Bond Girl, but, you know, the kind with clothes, and a normal-ish name.

Curious about the list now? Jump over to PopMatters for some great picks, then hop over to the non-fic list for some more.

*Fiction is hard in other ways. I spend a long time polishing my prose, playing with words, and even doing exercises to get a story just right. Yet these are things I love–the revision process is actually my favorite part of writing–so they rarely feel like work.