Sneak peek at my Best of 2010 lists

Although it'll be another month before I start posting my annual week-long selection of the year's best in a variety of fields, I have already begun sorting through my 2010 reads to see what I'm most likely going to be giving more coverage to in certain categories.  Here are the preliminary results:

• My overall Top 10 likely will not feature many speculative releases.  Although I still have about 3-4 dozen books left to read, there just have not been all that many 2010 spec fic releases that have wowed me as much as certain non-speculative titles.  This might change, but I think even if I were to expand it to 20 (which I'm inclined to do), that the majority of the titles would not be those you'd see praised on SF/F blogs.

• There are some damn fine non-fiction titles that I've read this year that I think will appeal to quite a few readers here.  Some award winners do deserve winning major literary prizes, after all...

• There will be more titles featured in both the Translated Fictions and Libros en otros idiomas categories.  The latter will feature more languages this time, as I'm starting to expand my reading fluency in other languages beyond Spanish.  It also helps that one of my favorite reads this year was published in Spanish early this year and that a certain prize-winning author released a new book recently...

• The Debut Author subset will be longer than in previous years, as some of my favorite reads this year have come from new authors in a variety of fields.

• For those that bemoan my lack of focus on epic fantasies, all I can say is that I think 2010 has been a poor year for that subgenre.

• Much as I love squirrels and squirrels in fiction, China Miéville's Kraken will not be featured in this year's list simply because I think it might be his poorest effort since his debut novel.  Lukewarm reactions from me do not equal placements in my year-end lists.

• Separate from the main lists will be a post released sometime later this week (I hope) highlighting pre-2010 releases that I think are among the best and books worthy of being considered for Christmas gifts.

Curiouser and curiouser now?