Those of us on The Takeaway staff love to read and have wildly eclectic tastes; we did a quick canvas of our reading lists to get our highly informal "Best Books We Read in 2010" list.

Arwa Gunja, Associate Producer:

Nothing to Envy

—Barbara Demick

As a journalist, there is a lot to envy about Barbara Demick’s incredibly gripping reporting on North Korea. Demick, the Beijing bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, is credited with having talked to more North Koreans than anyone outside the peninsula. In her new book, which we featured on The Takeaway, Demick recounts the harrowing tales of several North Koreans and their struggles for survival and understanding under the North Korean regime.

The six people we meet in the book begin their journeys whole-heartedly dedicated and devoted to the “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il. But as they watch their family members and themselves wilt away from lack of food, money and job security, each character slowly begins to question the ideals they were brainwashed to believe. Demick penetrates the closed society from the outside, speaking to those who defected.

Rupert Allman, Managing Editor

Where Good Ideas Come From

—Simon Johnson

From the man who brought this Londoner the story of the Ghost Map — here's a writer with clearly a brain the size of Africa but has fantastic clarity of thought. He shines a light on a whole range of people and their ideas but the genius in this book is the connections he makes between them. My takeaway — great ideas are rarely those Eureka moments. But given a bit of space you can bet your house some one will land a new idea that will force us all to think again.

Mythili Rao, Associate Producer, News:

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

—Michael Lewis

This book was essential to my understanding of the financial meltdown. Michael Lewis approaches the topic of the housing crisis and short-selling with an insider's grasp of financial products and derivatives and an outsider's sense of the absurdity of Wall Street. What results is a very clear explanation of what drove the economy' collapse, peppered with colorful anecdotes. While I was reading this, I couldn't stop recommending it to everyone I knew.

The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy

—edited by Cathy Porter

Sofia was her husband’s secretary, proofreader, editor, housekeeper, agent, and nurse – the person who darned Leo’s socks as well as the person who proofread the first draft of War and Peace. Spanning 57 years, these diaries chronicle the mundane (“Lev Nikolaevich [Leo] is better today; he has moved his bowels and is no longer in pain, and my soul is relieved of a terrible anxiety”) but also bear witness to her struggles. Sofia yearns for the pleasure of her own creative pursuits, often questions her fate, and sometimes contemplates suicide — but (luckily, for generations of Tolstoy’s readers) she never doubts her husband’s genius or wavers in her commitment to his legacy. By the end of the book, Sofia’s frayed nerves and endless crying scenes had nearly worn me out, but for most of it, I was entirely captivated by her world. Her life raises difficult questions about feminism, marriage, and the price of greatness in the arts.

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

—Greg Grandin

Henry Ford was an odd guy. The story of Fordlandia, his never profitable but truly colossal rubber-growing outpost in the Brazilian Amazon typifies his oddness, as well as his supreme self-confidence and stubbornness. This book is a portrait of a spectacular (and forgotten) failure brimming with historical trivia./p>

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

—John Vaillant

This book follows the trail of destruction left by one man-eating Siberian tiger in the farthest reaches of eastern Russia. One of my favorite lines: “As the encyclopedic reference Mammals of the Soviet Union puts it, ‘The general appearance of the tiger is that of a huge physical force and quiet confidence, combined with a rather heavy grace.’ But one could just as easily say: this is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator.”

Hsi-Chang Lin, Assistant Producer:

Best Comic of 2010

Richard Stark's Parker, Vol. 2: The Outfit

—Darwyn Cooke

This beautifully bound, hard cover graphic-novel is the sequel to last year’s incredible

The Outfit reads like the Mad Men of comic books. Similar to the AMC program’s minimalist mise-en-scene which artfully decorates 1950’s references in to every camera angle, the Parker graphic novels utilizes sparing use of ink-strokes to make the art-deco style of the 1960s come alive; no small feat, considering that artist Darwyn Cooke limits his palate to one or two colors in any given frame.

The story itself never strays far from the source material of Donald Westlake’s popular crime novels. The hardboiled anti-hero Parker begins the story where he left off: living a life of relative solitude and splendor after “one last heist.” That is, until a small time gangster decides to cash in on the bounty for Parker’s head. The stooge’s costly mistake sends Parker on a rampage spree that won’t stop until he takes out the head of “the Outfit.” A must read for comic fans or non-readers alike.

Adam Hirsch, Web Producer:

Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge

—Gerald Gunther

It's a doorstop of a book, let's be fair, but this biography of Federal Judge Billings Learned Hand feels like it warrants every page. Hand is "the smartest judge never to sit on the Supreme Court," and one of the most widely quoted judges ever.  His commitment to understanding and pondering every case that came before him shines throughout the book; he's one of the few judges who strike me as deserving of the title "Justice." Never willing to be 100 percent certain of himself, he believed in debate and a constant evolution of wisdom and jurisprudence. (Would that we had a constant supply of his ilk.) Gunther was a clerk to Hand for years, and his access to Hand's recollection and personal papers make this a very intimate (but never prurient) look through a truly fascinating life.

Skippy Dies: A Novel

—Paul Murray

Murray was clearly a fan of David Foster Wallace, as his "Seabrook College" has more than a few echoes of Wallace's "Enfield Academy," but despite the echoes of "Infinite Jest," this is a book that stands on its own.  Set in a Catholic boys' prep school in Ireland, half of Murray's characters are vividly, wincingly adolescent, complete with the obsessions and social jockeying familiar to anyone who's lived through their teenage years, while the other half are adults... but adults who are, by and large, muddling through their lives no more surely than the students under their care. The book manages to skate right up to the edge of painfully earnest in places, only to turn around and careen back into cynicism and painfully emotional violence (and violent emotion, to boot). Murray writes his characters with both generosity and skill: it's a heck of a read.