A Year in Reading 2012

The end of another year is here (so soon? Ah, I’m getting old), and with it a flood of valedictory lists and wrap ups, accountings and scorecards. Each year, as these lists spill out across the landscape, the onslaught becomes difficult to parse and begins to feel suspiciously (to us, anyway) like a marketing boondoggle to support the promotional-book-cover-sticker-and-blurb industry. There are so many “best of the year” lists that everything is the best (and sometimes also the worst).

So, how can we have some year-end fun while still extracting something meaningful from the effort?

We readers tend to be a thoughtful bunch, noting down the titles we have read or lining them up one by one on a shelf. We are intellectually omnivorous as well and not too overly prejudiced toward the new or the old, picking up a 130-year-old classic of Russian literature and then following it up with the bestselling, beach read of the moment. Taken together, a long list of books read is a map of our year, and the best of these books are the year’s pinnacles, and the challenging books, its rewarding treks. The “10 best books of 2012” list is so small next to this.

And so in preparing our annual Year in Reading series, we’ve asked our esteemed guests to take us on a tour of these pinnacles and to give an accounting of these treks.

With this in mind, for a ninth year, some of our favorite writers, thinkers, and readers will look back, reflect, and share. Their charge was to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them, regardless of publication date. Grouped together, these ruminations, cheers, squibs, and essays will be a chronicle of reading and good books from every era.

We hope you find in them seeds that will help make your year in reading in 2013 a fruitful one.

As in prior years, the names of our 2012 “Year in Reading” contributors will be unveiled one at a time throughout the month as we publish their contributions. You can bookmark this post and follow the series from here, or load up the main page for more new Year in Reading posts appearing at the top every day, or you can subscribe to our RSS feed and follow along that way.

• Stephen Dodson, co-author of Uglier Than a Monkey’s Armpit, proprietor of Languagehat.
• Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.
• Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures.
• Choire Sicha, co-proprietor of The Awl.
• Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex.
• Madeline Miller, author of The Song of Achilles.
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of A Sense of Direction.
• Rob Delaney, comedian and writer.
• Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World.
• Tania James, author of Atlas of Unknowns.
• Alexander Chee, author of Edinburgh.
• Maria Popova, founder and editor of Brain Pickings.
• Lauren Groff, author of Arcadia.
• David Vann, author of Dirt.
• Helen Schulman, author of This Beautiful Life.
• Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti.
• Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men.
• Rachel Fershleiser, co-editor of Not Quite What I Was Planning.
• Bill Morris, author of All Souls’ Day, staff writer for The Millions.
• Scott Esposito, co-author of The End of Oulipo?, proprietor of Conversational Reading.
• Nick Moran, social media editor for The Millions.
• Emily St. John Mandel, author of The Lola Quartet, staff writer for The Millions.
• Edan Lepucki, author of If You’re Not Yet Like Me, staff writer for The Millions.
• Janet Potter, staff writer for The Millions, blogger at At Times Dull.
• David Haglund, writer and editor at Slate.
• Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth.
• Chris Ware, author of Building Stories.
• Kevin Smokler, author of Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School, on twitter as @weegee.
• Thomas Mallon, author of Watergate.
• Geoff Dyer, author of Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room.
• Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, author of Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend.
• Michael Schaub, book critic for NPR.org.
• Matt Dojny, author of The Festival of Earthly Delights.
• Nell Freudenberger, author of The Newlyweds.
• Ed Park, author of Personal Days.
• Hamilton Leithauser, lead singer for the rock band The Walkmen.
• Meg Wolitzer, author of The Interestings.
• Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?.
• Paul Murray, author of Skippy Dies.
• Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them.
• Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins.
• Antoine Wilson, author of Panorama City.
• Paul Ford, author of Gary Benchley, Rock Star, writer at Ftrain.com.
• Garth Risk Hallberg, author of A Field Guide to the North American Family.
• Lydia Kiesling, staff writer for The Millions.
• Mark O’Connell, staff writer for The Millions.
• Christian Lorentzen, editor at the London Review of Books.
• Michael Bourne, staff writer for The Millions.
• Emily M. Keeler, editor of Little Brother Magazine.
• Elizabeth Minkel, staff writer for The Millions.
• Nichole Bernier, author of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D.
• Alix Ohlin, author of Inside.
• Lars Iyer, author of Exodus.
• Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.
• Malcolm Jones, senior writer at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, author of Little Boy Blues.
• Susan Straight, author of Between Heaven and Here.
• Christine Schutt, author of Prosperous Friends.
• Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River.
• Lydia Millet, author of Magnificence.
• Jennifer duBois, author of A Partial History of Lost Causes.
• Nick Dybek, author of When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man.
• Reif Larsen, author of The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.
• Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise.
• Ellen Ullman, author of By Blood.
• Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief.
• Michael Robbins, author of Alien vs. Predator.
• Jeet Thayil, author of Narcopolis.
• Thomas Beckwith, intern for The Millions.
• Benjamin Anastas, author of Too Good to Be True.
• Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines.
• Carolyn Kellogg, staff writer for the LA Times, a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle.
• Buzz Poole, author of Madonna of the Toast.
• Robert Birnbaum, editor-at-large at Identity Theory.
• Brian Joseph Davis, creator of The Composites, co-publisher of Joyland Magazine.

Don’t miss: A Year in Reading 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

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Year in Reading Graphics by LK Magee