If you resolved to quit watching Jersey Shore in the New Year and pick up a book instead—hey, it's your year—there's no better place to stock your reading list than the Onion AV Club's roundup of the past decade's best books, fiction and nonfiction. (It came out before the holidays, but I put off reading it just to keep temptation at bay.) On the fiction list, bracketed by a pair of elegant mindscrews—Ian McEwen's Atonement and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin—you'll find Nashville author Ann Patchett's 2001 novel Bel Canto:
In December 1996, a group of Peruvian revolutionaries began a hostage crisis in the official residence of the Japanese ambassador in Lima that ended violently more than four months later. Ann Patchett was paying attention, and her novel finds a bittersweet lyricism in a fictionalized take on the same event. Stuck together, hostages and hostage-takers find the factors dividing them—politics, language, and in one of the central relationships, the distance between a famous opera singer and a devoted fan—matter less than the needs that unite them. The grace they find can't last, however, and like the music that helped inspire the novel, Patchett earns her novel's heartache by suggesting the possibility of a sweeter, more beautiful world.
