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In its November/December 2010 issue, Bookmarks looks back at fifty staff favorites from among the hundreds of books reviewed in the magazine in 2010.

Kindle readers will be pleased to learn that 48 of the 50 titles are available in Kindle editions. Here's a rundown of all forty-eight. Given the length of the list, I've divided the post into multiple consecutive parts.

36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, by Rebecca Goldstein. Pantheon, 2010. Print Length: 416 p. Kindle edition $15.37. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"After Cass Seltzer’s book becomes a surprise best seller, he’s dubbed 'the atheist with a soul' and becomes a celebrity. He wins over the stunning Lucinda Mandelbaum, 'the goddess of game theory,' and loses himself in a spiritually expansive infatuation. A former girlfriend appears: an anthropologist who invites him to join in her quest for immortality through biochemistry. And he is haunted by reminders of the two people who ignited his passion to understand religion: his mentor and professor - a renowned literary scholar with a suspicious obsession with messianism - and an angelic six-year-old mathematical genius who is heir to the leadership of a Hasidic sect. Through the enchantment of fiction, award-winning novelist and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shows that the tension between religion and doubt cannot be understood through rational argument alone. It also must be explored from the point of view of individual people caught in the raptures and torments of religious experience in all their variety." - Amazon.

Invisible, by Paul Auster. Henry Holt, 2010. Print Length: 320 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"New York City in the spring of 1967... twenty-year-old Adam Walker, an aspiring poet and student at Columbia University, meets the enigmatic Frenchman Rudolf Born and his silent and seductive girfriend, Margot. Before long, Walker finds himself caught in a perverse triangle that leads to a sudden, shocking act of violence that will alter the course of his life. Three different narrators tell the story of Invisible, a novel that travels in time from 1967 to 2007 and moves from Morningside Heights, to the Left Bank of Paris, to a remote island in the Caribbean. It is a book of youthful rage, unbridled sexual hunger, and a relentless quest for justice." - Amazon.

The Autobiography of Fidel Castro, by Norberto Fuentes. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner. W. W. Norton, 2009. Print Length: 592 p. Kindle edition $13.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Fuentes, an old friend of Fidel Castro who escaped a death sentence in 1990s Cuba and now lives in exile in Florida, delivers a clever, ballsy and colorful faux autobiography of the Communist icon. With this book, Fuentes-as-Castro writes, I am not trying to reject anything or defend myself, but to leave behind an interpretation from my own hands, or rather, from my own mouth, of the events in which I am the protagonist. Castro comes across as megalomaniacal and charming, his hilarious bravado a perfect complement to a profoundly unreliable narrator. Castro reflects on everything from the murder of his first political rival and his campaign against Batista to the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis to the almost present day... so convincing that readers may forget this is fiction." - Publishers Weekly.

A Friend of the Family, by Lauren Grodstein. Algonquin Books, 2009. Print Length: 223 p. Kindle edition $9.04. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Pete Dizinoff has it pretty good - an internist with a successful practice, loving wife, nice house in a safe New Jersey suburb and his best friend living close by - but there's some nasty muck beneath the surface. Some years back, Laura, the daughter of Pete's best friend, Joe, was suspected of murdering her baby upon birth. Now in her early 30s, Laura's returned to town after several years of leisurely work and travel and is seducing Pete's college dropout son, Alec, who is also back in town, pursuing the life of a painter in his parents' garage. Laura does not fit into Pete's idea of what's best for his son, but when Pete intervenes, things spin wildly out of control... Grodstein brings great insight into a father's protective urge for his son in this gripping portrait of an American family in crisis." - Publishers Weekly.

True Confections, by Katharine Weber. Crown, 2009. Print Length: 272 p. Kindle edition $12.79. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Katharine Weber's succulently inventive fifth novel...traces the history of the candy company and its founders, the Ziplinsky family of Hungary and the Lower East Side. Narrator Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky only married into the family but, much to the horror of her in-laws, winds up inheriting the lion's share of the company. After decades in psychoanalysis, saucy Alice is quite capable of dissecting the family's neuroses. 'In the interest of delineating every branch of this bonsai of a family tree,' she unearths many of the family's closeted skeletons, including the founder's involvement with the Jewish Mafia... Weber blends her fictional world with the very real and equally bizarre history of American candy manufacture, including the fact that our food contains red dye made from crushed South American insect carcasses; and that the pioneering Chicken Dinner bar, introduced in the 1920s, was advertised as wholesome. (It was actually regular candy, not chicken.) ...A novel should give us 'that unique blend of sweetness and pleasure and something else, a deep note of something rich and exotic and familiar' that a bite of good chocolate does. True Confections certainly delivers that delectability." - The Washington Post.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. Random House, 2010. Print Length: 368 p. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.
"Change is threatening the little world of Edgecombe St. Mary. Lord Dagenham is about to sell off part of his ancestral estate to developers, and Pakistanis have taken over the village shop. Major Ernest Pettigrew is definitely old school, but he has been lonely since his wife died, and though he is is prey to various unattached ladies it is with shopkeeper Mrs. Ali that he forms a bond, nourished by their mutual interest in literature. Meanwhile, his ambitious son Roger comes to town with a sleek American girlfriend and starts renovating a nearby cottage. And the village ladies are busy hatching plans for the annual Golf Club dance, for which this year’s theme is 'An Evening at the Mughal Court.' There is a great deal going on in these pages - sharply observed domestic comedy, late-life romance, culture clash, a dash of P. G. Wodehouse, and a pinch of religious fundamentalism. First novelist Simonson handles it all with great aplomb, and her Major, with his keen sense of both honor and absurdity, is the perfect lens through which to view contemporary England. - Mary Ellen Quinn for Booklist.