For the fourth year in a row, I present my “Year in Review” in which I consider only the movies I watched and the books I read.  In terms of the numbers, I’ve  kept pace with previous years, in that I watched almost as many movies as I did in 2009 and read a few more books.

I saw 57 movies in 2010, about 70% of them on DVD and the rest in theaters.  Again, the genres ranged from animated to documentary; some were based on true stories or adapted from novels; there were comedies and classic dramas, fantasy and science fiction, a “rockumentary,” a slasher parody, and even a silent film. Here are my top 6, in alphabetical order:

• Fantastic Mr Fox
• Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
• Kids Are All Right
• King’s Speech
• Social Network
• Winter’s Bone

I read 47 books in 2010, of which 19 were fiction — detective and spy stories, an epic poem, a fable, fantasy and science fiction, Victorian and contemporary novels, as well as classics — and 28 non-fiction, with subjects ranging from political and social history, to biography and autobiography, to natural history, biology, physics, and geography. Here are my top 6, in alphabetical order:

• Animal Vegetable Miracle – Barbara Kingsolver
• Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
• Disturbing the Universe – Freeman Dyson
• Fortress of Solitude – Jonathan Lethem
• Hotel Honolulu – Paul Theroux
• Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño

I must say that this year I found it difficult to pick my top six in each category, and I’m not sure why.  I know that I wanted to expand the lists to at least ten entries each, but consistency with previous years overrode that desire.  Perhaps I started to think too hard about what criteria I used to single out these particular titles, and in fact, these choices are probably more arbitrary than not.  Did I pick the books and movies that I enjoyed the most, which made me laugh out loud?  Or the ones that were thought-provoking?  Or the ones that were stylistically innovative?  Or the ones that I think will become or remain classics and will be talked about a hundred years from now?  Thank goodness I’m not a professional critic, or I’d be out of a job.

Click here for the complete lists!