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Yes, yes, I know the decade isn't really over, but I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon and put my own top 10 list out.

This isn't high-falutin' or literary by any means. I only have one criteria for a book on any top list: it has to be something that has stuck with me, for any reason. Some of the books on this list you'll also find on some more prestigious lists, but others may have you questioning my taste in books. But a top 10 list, in my opinion, should be a very personal and subjective thing.

So here is my top 10 list -- I'm sure I will forget about something obvious, leave something off, etc. -- off the top of my head (from 2000-2009), of the books that have left an impression on me over the past 10 years.

Top 10 books

1. Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling. I'm going to lump all the HP books that have come out this decade into one entry because they would take up nearly half the list otherwise. I got into Harry Potter books in the summer of 2000 during my first internship. I was working at a newspaper, and GoF was released that summer to some coverage. Someone gave me a copy of one of the earlier books, and I regret that my memory is so hazy now that I don't remember which I read first. I'm fairly certain it was CoS, but after I read it, I got all the books that were out and read them again in order. They were fantastic! A fully imagined world, a classic story and characters that captivate -- these books have it all. I've read them several times since then, and I imagine I'll be reading them for years to come.

2. "Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" by Barbara Ehrenreich. (2002) If you read no other nonfiction book, read this one. Very few books have stuck with me as concretely as this one has. It's an amazing account of a woman attempting to live on minimum wage for a year, and how she discovers it's nearly impossible to do so. There are so many things I have never had to think about (thankfully), like where I'm going to get $20 to get a prescribed medicine or how I'm going to get to the bus route to get to work. I didn't quite realize how much people in some jobs depend on things like tips and overtime to get food on the table, and this book makes me keep that in mind. You'll think long and hard about leaving less than a 20 percent tip after reading this book.

3. "Y: The Last Man" by  Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. (2002-2008) This was the series that made me a graphic novels convert. It has everything that a "real" book has -- good writing, well-paced plot, interesting characters -- plus amazing artwork. It's the story of what happens when all the men on Earth die, except one. If you've never read graphic novels before, I hesitate to tell you to start with this one -- because your expectations will be forever spoiled.

4. "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger. (2003) This is what I get for ignoring a book I wrongly assumed to an Oprah's pick for so long. (Not that I'm disparaging her list, I just typically haven't liked books I've read from it.) I finally picked it up recently, and it was a fascinating read. It's the story of two people in love, and how the man's forced time traveling affects both of their lives, past, present and future. And yet I wouldn't classify it as a romance or chicklit -- it's an uncomfortable read at times, but always engaging.

5. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. (2006) I hesitate to put this on here simply because one of my definitions of a great book is one that I will read again and again -- and this is a book I will never read again. Not because it wasn't amazing -- it was lyrical and elegant and beautiful and tragic and everything you want in a post-apocalyptic work of art -- but because I don't think I could stomach reading it again. It was so depressing and stuck with me for so long, I doubt I'd put myself through it again. But I am grateful that I made the journey once.

6. "The Thirteenth Tale" by Diane Setterfield. (2006) I actually "read" this one by way of audiobook, and I would urge you to listen to it whether you've read it or not. The narrators are amazing storytellers and draw you in from the first sentence. As for the book itself, it's a well-written ghost story with wonderful characters, a story where you can't wait to find out what happens on the next page, and one where even I didn't expect the ending. Also, the descriptions of books and reading will resonate with any true bibliophile's heart.

7. The Sookie Stackhouse books by Charlaine Harris. (2001-?) A white trash waitress as the heroine of a series of books about vampires? It works, and amazingly well. I read my first Sookie novel a few years ago when we got a copy at the newspaper, but it wasn't until this year that I sat down and read them all in a row. Charlaine Harris paints a world like few do, and it's as rich and full of detail as the Harry Potter books. Even if you pooh-pooh vampire novels, you should pick these up. They're smart, funny, engaging and well-written -- in other words, they're as far from Twilight as you can get.

8. "Hominids" by Robert J. Sawyer. (2002) Speculative fiction at its best. Sawyer (who also wrote FlashForward) is a master at writing science fiction that is well-researched, sounds plausible, and brings up the philosophical, moral and ethical questions that truly make you think. In this first book of his Neanderthal Parralax series, humans find that there is a parallel world where the Neanderthals flourished and humans died out when a Neanderthal scientist crosses into our world. Most authors would have been content with just this as a plot, but for Sawyer, it's just the beginning. Murder, interspecies relationships, and what justice entails are just a few things covered.

9. "Escape" by Carolyn Jessop. (2007) A fascinating nonfiction account of how one woman's difficult upbringing in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, her time as a plural wife, and her subsequent escape with her 8 children, despite being one of the wives of a high-placed man in the FLDS. It would be a great read even if it were fiction, but the fact that it's all real gives even more impact to the story. The FLDS is not a group I had known a lot about, and it helped me learn a lot about the difference between the FLDS and the LDS, when I had wrongly assumed that they were all the same group. It's also a book that will make you question how people can do such horrible things to each other.

10. "Stray" and the other Shifters books by Rachel Vincent. (2007-?) In a field that is overly crowded at the moment, this is the pinnacle of the shifters/werecats/urban fantasy genre. What else do you need besides a kickass female shifter who's bucking against a patriarchal system, a well-crafted mythology and awesome writing/plotting/pacing? While most of the books in this genre focus on the romance, that's only a small part of this series that has yet to disappoint.