I don’t usually view reading as a race to the finish, but t around mid-November, I looked at a stack of about 10 books next to my bed and determined I had to finish it before the end of the year so that I could start 2011 and the Autobiography of Mark Twain at the same time. So I did.

Here’s what was on my nightstand when I started my reading marathon.

Two books, The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer and Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life came one on top of the other — mostly because I thought they would play nicely together. And they did. The former describes what life might be like if you suddenly found yourself wandering around the UK before 1400. It discusses food, drink, work, clothing. It certainly taught me things I didn’t know — for example, serfs attached to a particular manor might have been legally tied to that particular place, but that didn’t mean they were all dirt poor. Some of them were quite well off.

Bryson’s book looks at the history of life as told through the rooms in his house in the English countryside. How we bathed over the course of a century and a half, how life in the kitchen change, the role of the bedroom, what colors were popular for painting parlors. It’s not as amusing as many of his other books, nor as edifying as A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I read earlier in the year. But he is an engaging writer, and it’s a painless way to learn some history in an entertaining manner.

Brady Udall won me over with his book The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, so it was with great hope that I picked up The Lonely Polygamist. It was funny, and sweet, and sad. The women in the book are all unhappy, as is the protagonist, Golden Richards. The children don’t  fare much better. It should be a much more depressing book than it is. But it wasn’t as good as Edgar Mint, either, and if I was telling someone to read this guy because he’s a wonderful writer, I’d steer them first to that book.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is the kind of book that leaves you smiling: Older people finding love, staring down prejudice, and raising children to emotional adulthood who had long ago reached physical maturity. It’s all deftly handled by Helen Simonson. I’d revisit the neighborhood anytime.

I love Oliver Sacks. I want to have him to dinner. I want to pick his brain about brains. I believe I have read his entire oeuvre and preorder his books as soon as I hear of imminent publication. His latest, The Mind’s Eye, explores some of the unique vision problems his patients’ have brought to his attention, as well as the story of his own issues with facial blindness — the inability to recognize faces, even of those you know well — and a tumor in his eye that left him bereft of binocular vision. He can use rather erudite language, but I find it endearing.

The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe is a Brit Lit book about secrets and answers and how early relationships not only inform who we become, but what we do. It’s a bit of a mystery, although you work out the answer before it’s given in the book. Coe is a master with words, building beautiful sentences that describe place as clearly as a photograph. I’d read any of his books in the hope that all of his words are so evocative.

Similar in tone, with a mystery at its heart is Katie Crouch’s Men and Dogs. She is nearly as good with her words at evoking a sense of place (in this case South Carolina) and in describing the hurts of childhood and childish relationships gone wrong. Her work doesn’t feel as literary as Coe’s, but that’s not a bad thing. I’d read her again.

I’d heard of Jeanette Walls because of the memoir she wrote about her mother, The Glass Castle. Her more recent book, Half Broke Horses, tells the story of her extraordinary grandmother and the wild life she led in the undeveloped desert Southwest. She tells the story in a novelized fashion, creating conversations as they might have occurred. But that doesn’t take away from the stories. I imagine she wrote them the way she heard them.

I fell in love with Steve Martin’s writing when I wrote Shop Girl. Usually when someone famous writes a novel, I hear the voice of the famous person, not the voice of the narrator of the story. Steve Martin, in An Object of Beauty, wrote so well that I forgot he was the author. He tells the story — masterfully — of the rise and fall of a rather self-centered woman in the New York art world. It’s not a world I know anything of, but that didn’t take away from my enjoyment of the novel. Write another one, Steve. You do it very well.

David Sedaris is another writer who can’t do any wrong. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk is a fluffy little piece of wonderfulness. Buy it, pass it on. More laughter is good.

The last book I read in 2010 was Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. She tells the story of a time when severe illness confined her to bed for many months, her only companion a snail that lived in a terrarium next to her bed. It’s a delightful muse on nature and the importance of the little things in our world, particularly when our world has shrunk through illness. My only quibble with the book are some segues where the author tries to tie her observations of the snail’s little life to her own diminished existence. They seem forced, as if an editor said, “Hey, this is a little short. Put some stuff in here, here, and here.” Overall, though, a lovely meditation.

Those books took me until January 1, 2011 to finish up. I started the Mark Twain tome on January 2. It took me about three weeks to finish, from start to end, including notes and appendices. It fascinated me how fresh his voice remains, how funny he still is, and how modern his outlook. A couple weeks ago, I heard Garrison Keillor making fun of the book (he used it to stop a bullet in a road rage incident), and it startled me. The two writers are separated only by time. They both fictionalize their lives and use humor to make valid points about society. I am surprised that there wasn’t more homage in Keillor’s comments. Personally, I can’t wait for the second volume to come out.

I followed that with the biography of Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff. I wasn’t impressed. There just isn’t enough information known about her to make a biography of her. There was more in the book about Julius Caesar and Marc Antony and a lot of speculation about Cleopatra.

Since then, I’ve finished The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It was funny at first, then a little tedious, then weird. I liked the backstory better than the parts written about more current times. I followed that with I Thought You Were Dead, Pete Nelson’s love letter to a dog named Stella. Talking dogs in books are hard to get right. Stella had the best line, though: Speaking to her person on a walk, she turns around after doing her business and says, “Be a dear and get that for me.” My dog Kate used to look at me just like that.

That’s my reading up to date — I just started Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector which I hope is as good as Kaaterskill Falls. And I still have a giant laundry basket of books on the dining room table that I read last year but failed to blog about. My biggest concern about them, however, is finding space on the shelves for another 70 or so books. Good luck to me.