Easily the book from the 2010s which I enjoyed the most was Five Came Back by Mark Harris, his account of five Hollywood filmmakers who created propaganda films during World War II (it became a terrific documentary mini-series on Netflix). This book taught me a lot about film history which I hadn't known and changed how I thought about some significant people.
Other great films about filmmaking which I enjoyed were King Vidor's The Crowd: The Making of a Silent Classic by Jordan Young and Citizen Kane: A Filmmaker's Journey by Harlan Lebo.
I read a few great books about comics history, the best of which were Blake Bell's Fire & Water, a biography of Bill Everett; Christopher Priest's Klang! in which he aired his issues with Q2: Quantum & Woody Return; MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman and The Secret History of Marvel Comics by Michael J. Vassallo.
The best 2010s books on Christianity I read were Speaking of Jesus by Carl Medearis, The Skeletons in God's Closet by Joshua Ryan Butler, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus by Nabeel Qureshi and Insurrection by Peter Rollins.
It was in the 2010s that I first visited Africa (visited 7 times total) and that set off a passion for learning more about the continenent. With my focus primarily on Angola, the best books on that nation from the 2010s were Naulila 1914 by Jakob Zollmann and Angola: A Modern Military History by Stephen L. Weigert. I also enjoyed the fictional book A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa. Other great books about Africa were A Labyrinth of Kingdoms by Steve Kemper, Road Trip Rwanda by Will Ferguson, Prevail by Jeff Pearce, Crossing the Heart of Africa by Julian Smith and Congo: The Epic History of a People by David van Reybrouck. I also read Chasing the Devil and The Trigger by Tim Butcher, the first of which was about Sierra Leone. And I read Waiting for Dawn's First Light and They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children, both by Romeo Dallaire and concerned primarily with his experiences in Rwanda.
The books Bunk by Kevin Young and The Second Coming of the KKK by Linda Gordon were both helpful to me in understanding the current social climate of the USA by their emphasis on the histories of people believing in outrageous ideas and why it is that this happens.
Some other great history books were Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochschild, Erebus by Michael Palin, This Gulf of Fire by Mark Molesky and Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee. I also enjoyed Believing Is Seeing by Errol Morris in which he queried whether information seen in photographs can be considered 'staged'. And as an introvert I learned a lot from Quiet by Susan Cain.
Finally I read some good sci-fi/fantasy novels: The Goblin Emperor by Sarah Monette, A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin, Children of the Sky by Vernor Vinge, Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey and. The Sinister Shadow by Will Murray. I reviewed The Sinister Shadow here.
And that concludes my three-part look at media highlights of the 2010s!
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