Another year, another Year In Reading. Another year, a bigger Year In Reading. The site gets older, the site continues to grow – for that we thank everyone who wrote and shared the pieces in this series, as well as everyone who read along.

The numbers this year were simply bonkers. Up from 2011, our 2012 totals amounted to a whopping 74 participants and 261 different books. These books run the gamut from graphic memoirs to cookbooks, and they were written by 238 authors – we’re happy to note that 15 of those authors submitted their own pieces in the series.

Our participants included a finalist for this year’s National Book Award;  a past winner of the Pulitzer Prize; not one, but two authors whose books appeared on The New York Times’s “10 Best Books of 2012” list; a longtime New Yorker staff writer; and a comedian who, for a few incredible months, made the life of Mitt Romney’s social media director into a living hell.

The mission of the series is to put good books – regardless of publication date – into the minds of our readers. In that regard we’ve succeeded. The “average” year of publication for all 261 books was 1992. (No doubt that date has something to do with Michael Robbins’s recommendation of The Temple, which dates back to 1633.) But in order to highlight the true range of the books selected, I feel there are some awards in order. So here we have it.

Presenting the 2012 edition of The Millions’s annual Year In Reading Wrap-Up Awards:

The Golden TARDIS for Excellence in Time Travel is hereby bestowed unto Emma Straub. We recognize Emma’s ability to read in the past year four different books that will not hit shelves until 2013. Tell us, Emma, where do you keep your flux capacitor? (I know, I know, I’m mixing time travel references here. Apologies to the nerds.) Runner-up: Michael Robbins, who went the other way and tapped two books from the 1600s.

The George Wallace Commemorative Airhorn for Multiple Shout Outs goes to none other than Alexander Chee, who, before settling on Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai as his favorite read of the year, gave much-deserved props to no fewer than twenty-three different books and authors. Runner-up: Kate Zambreno, who named fifteen texts – two of which are actually blogs, which is awesome – in her Year In Reading (Apparently Everything there is to Read).

“Mr. Consistent” is from now on the epithet we’ll use to describe Scott Esposito, who recommended fourteen different Oulipo books. (Out of respect for Scott’s theme, none of the words in that first sentence included the letter “a”.) Runner-up: David Haglund, who laid out a literary and historical tour of the real Mormon faith.

The Bob Ross Memorial Golden Paintbrush is awarded to Matt Dojny, whose Year In Reading entry is beautiful and succinct, but also comprehensive and fresh. That book on his list from The RZA? It wasn’t a mistake. There aren’t mistakes. Just happy accidents. Runner-up: Chris Ware. (Duh.) Not for his text-based Year In Reading post, but for his most recent book.

The George Washington Cup for Honesty goes, of course, to Michael Schaub for his elegant, heart wrenching essay about his brother, his family, and A. M. Homes’s latest book. Thank you for this one, Michael. Runner-up: Mark O’Connell, who finally came clean. Those books on his shelf? Hasn’t read most of ‘em. (One additional prize is in order as well. The “Oh Man, Please Don’t Accuse Me of Stealing Your Idea” Memorial Fruit Basket should go to Janet Potter, whose list of literary awards served at least in some way as inspiration for this post.)

Overall, a collection of seven books were named by more than three Year In Reading participants. These lucky few are: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (picked by Edan Lepucki, Janet Potter, Ed Park, Michael Bourne, and Jennifer duBois); Chris Ware’s Building Stories (picked by Zadie Smith, Mark O’Connell, and Reif Larsen); David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (picked by Janet Potter, Matt Dojny, and Elizabeth Minkel); Edward St. Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels (picked by Meg Wolitzer, Elliott Holt, and Alix Ohlin); Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins (picked by Emma Straub, Roxane Gay, and Robert Birnbaum); Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians (picked by Alexander Chee, Ed Park, and Antoine Wilson); and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia (picked by Alexander Chee, Emily St. John Mandel, and Janet Potter)

And so we come to the end of 2012. May 2013 be better than the year that led into it. May your eyes fly quickly over the page. We hope you enjoyed the time, and we’ll see you again next year.

P.S. Special shout outs are due to C. Max Magee, founder of The Millions, without whom none of this would be possible – and also to Ujala Sehgal and Adam Boretz, our tireless editors, without whom all of these posts would look horrendous. Last but not least, shout outs are owed to Rhian Sasseen and Thom Beckwith, both of whom have helped make this our biggest Year In Reading to date. Thanks to you all, and to all a Happy New Year!

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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

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The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

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It’s safe to say that Tumblr saved my reading life. By the time I began using police composite sketch software to create images of literary characters suggested by Tumblr users I had really stopped reading fiction. Between sorting short stories every month at Joyland and switching from writing unsold novels to working on film and television scripts, my relationship to fiction had trailed off to a sluggish pulse. When The Composites took off, I started reading what thousands of complete strangers told me to read and, in the process, I rid myself of a lifetime of habits, biases, and poorly formed opinions on what literature should be. I killed my inner pundit.

Answering the hive mind of Tumblr, I was sent rummaging through my books in storage. I searched Project Gutenberg. I skulked the aisles of The Strand bookstore with pen and notebook, hoping to not get caught. While I thought I probably looked thoroughly insane, I’m confident the staff had seen worse. Hell, I even bought a few books.

This accelerated thesis-style surveying of 400 random novels over eight months allowed me to revisit books from my past and to see their forgotten influence on me now. Stephen King may have unknowingly swiped the title Joyland, but I still think Misery is a bitter, hilarious, and brilliant novel. Not before or since has such a popular author figuratively punished his fans with effortless postmodernism — a nuance I may have missed when I first read it at age 13.

I re-read The Recognitions, William Gaddis’s messy, vital book about the impossibility of living authentically. His consciousness-altering writing merged with The Composites, from the definite article title to the heady brew of ideas about representation and originality. Even the resulting composite image of the protagonist, Wyatt Gwyon, felt like a mystery solved. Gaddis had described a face much like his own.

Mikhail Bulgakov’s perfect novel The Master and Margarita was something I boldly lied about having read before and once you lie about having read a book it’s very difficult to undo deceptions you’ve built your life on. Jonathan Lethem’s funny and affecting The Fortress of Solitude was a novel that sat on our shelf for years (it’s one of my wife’s favorite books). Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is the story I now most want to see as a TV show adaptation.

The default of the hive mind is to reiterate the popular. A composite drawn from Gaiman’s novel created waves of nerdgasms throughout Tumblr while something like the composite from The Recognitions brought a smattering of applause from five men in cardigans. I tried to keep the balance of popular and unpopular in phase during my nine months of social reading but what most changed my understanding of literature was being asked to look at staggeringly popular books.

Women who write popular books are given a raw deal out of the critical gates, judged on criteria that similarly popular male authors never face. How much had I unconsciously absorbed that bias? Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games is not a book I would have read without hundreds of requests for me to do so, but I’m glad I did. It is a damn good book. Collins’s writing is economical and elegant and the novel’s allegories about class and entertainment are sharper than literary attempts to explore the same subjects.

Having spent a year speed-reading and skimming 400 books, I think I deserve another few years off. When I do start again, though, I know it will be as a freer, more open reader.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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From the gaggle of books I have read over this past year Beautiful Ruins, Gods Without Men, and The News from Spain stand out as especially special.

Jess Walters’s novel Beautiful Ruins is a lovely story in which a handful of likable characters wend their disparate ways across nearly a half of the last century, from an obscure Italian coastal town to an array of locales on the shores of America, to resolve an unlikely but plausible narrative. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor make appearances.

Gods without Men is a sprawling high-powered multi-threaded story that diverges into some rarified and elevated subjects — parents flailing at the near impossible task of raising a seriously autistic child, a stock trader searching for and believing he has found an algorithmic formula for trading that in its Kabbalistic form is the Holy Grail, recondite anthropologists studying southwestern Native American culture, hippy cults, and more, spark a steady forward fugal motion. Reading this story sometimes feels like a breathtaking roller coaster ride as it shoots from one dissimilar point of view to another. It’s an exciting read with some brainy and amusing digressions.

Andre Gregory’s blurbs on Joan Wickersham’s collection of stories The News from Spain asserted that the stories were sufficiently weighty that they could be read twice in succession — an unusual notion, methinks. And yet I found that the stories were so engrossing and rich with thoughtful characters that I easily followed Gregory’s suggestion. And was indeed rewarded with another pleasurable read. Not linked stories, but bound by the author’s conceit of having the phrase The News from Spain appearing in each — without, I must say, an appearance of contrivance or showiness.

I volunteered to participate in this exercise because it required me to focus my attention on my own reading habits — which I otherwise wouldn’t do, as I am not usually interested in the meta-gesture of thinking about or reading about reading (though I do recommend Andrew Piper’s Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times).

What did I learn? Looking over what I read in the past 12 months, the list confirmed what I already knew — that I am a literary omnivore and any litany of books tells more about the reader than individual the books listed. No big surprise there.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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After years of taunting me from a bookshelf close to my desk, I’ve finally faced up to the portrait of Robert Musil spread across the two spines that hold together The Man Without Qualities. The decision to read this modernist masterwork started out as a reluctant acceptance of a self-imposed challenge. I mean, who really wants to read over 1,000 pages about Austrian-Hungarian aristocrats trying to invent ideas about how to maintain power structures that have already crumbled? Yet Musil, who started the book in 1921 and worked on it until his death in 1942, wastes no time establishing a scope of ideas that are prescient and read as if written today, fully-realized observations of how commerce and industry render us anonymous cogs in a great global machine that chips away at the individual. Here are two gems to whet your appetite: “A world of qualities without a man has arisen, of experiences without the person who experiences them, and it almost looks as though ideally private experience is a thing of the past;” “Democracy means, expressed most succinctly: Do whatever is happening!”

I don’t like toting around big books though, so when on the move my reads were physically lighter but just as memorable. Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero is like a translation of itself, stories told and retold across eras between Northern California and rural France, hauntingly delicate like whispers not meant to be heard. The Bay Area is also a character in McTeague. Frank Norris’s tale of a boarding house dentist has all the qualities of any good story — faith in the future, betrayal, soured romance, comic relief — not to mention a Death Valley showdown that makes for one of those pitch-perfect endings. All writers should aim to wrap up their stories with such precision.

And though I read it early this year, and reviewed it here, I keep thinking about Geoff Dyers’s Zona, erudite, intimate, and humorous, I wish more books about other works of art were so assured and capable.

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In March I bought a cabin in Joshua Tree: 1958, with cinder block walls, cement floors, a massive stone fireplace and a wood-beamed ceiling. Once it was truly mine, I realized I had to figure out what to put in it. What would the people who had built this place have done? I borrowed the Guide to Easier Living. Originally published in 1950 and reissued in 2003, it’s a thoroughly articulated idea of a new American style and lifestyle from Mary and Russell Wright. Like the Eames, the Wrights were a design team that created sleek furniture and housewares; they had a strong philosophy about making good-looking things affordable, so they created lines for Montgomery Ward. The best known, the ceramics line American Modern, was designed to be beautiful as well as durable and unfussy. Unfussiness, in fact, is their approach to easier living: using indoor and outdoor space together, designing open floor plans, emphasizing ways to share space together. It’s illustrated by their drawings, often from an angle above like the one on the cover: see how it’s OK to put your feet on the coffee table? The chore lists were a tad exhausting, but the living has only gotten easier since those days (less ironing). The only thing I didn’t like about the book is that it’s out of print a second time — I had to borrow a friend’s copy. Collectible again, the book is $40 and up.

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Two works of what I might, perhaps awkwardly, think of as creative theory influenced my thinking about literature this year — Jack Halberstam’s The Queer of Art of Failure (Duke University Press), which argues against mastery, as well as Wayne Koestenbaum’s lyric series of “fugues,” Humiliation, part of Picador’s Big Ideas, Small Books series. The literary texts I have been drawn to this year often perform what Halberstam characterizes as a “radical passivity,” set often in a space of unknowing, often featuring alienating or abject encounters. I redevoured the works of Mary Gaitskill this year, and loved especially her novel of girlhood trauma, Two Girls Fat and Thin. I was really energized and wowed by Emily Gould and Ruth Curry’s curation of their ebook venture Emily Books– my favorite types of novels, the ones that cannot be categorized, a curious blend of fiction and nonfiction — like the bonkers and amazing Making Scenes by the pseudonymous Adrienne Eisen; also I’m Trying to Reach You, Barbara Browning’s multimedia noirish conspiracy set in the world of performance theory published by the always amazing Two Dollar Radio; and Tamara Faith Berger’s brilliant and philosophical erotic novel, Maidenhead, put out by Toronto’s Coach House. Emily Books also featured my good friend Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women, published by Danielle Dutton’s exciting Dorothy Project, a series of fragmented, poetic portraits of girls in a psych ward, pieces marked by Suzanne’s really gorgeous, wry, erudite voice. Promising Young Women reminds me of another favorite text I read this year, Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, published in the late 90s by Chris Kraus at Semiotext(e), a work that I began weirdly the day before I found out that Firestone had died. In Airless Spaces, Firestone draws from her own experiences being institutionalized to write vignettes of those she encountered who were forgotten by the system, including Valerie Solanas. The books Danielle’s Dorothy Project and Emily Books are putting out remind me, in a glorious way, of Chris’s Native Agents series at Semiotext(e), those beautiful books of the relentless female first-person, but a first-person that misbehaves, that questions, is eminently aware in a way of its own failure.

I can’t believe I hadn’t previously read David Wojnaworicz’s ecsatic essay-memoir-rant Close to the Knives — a furious portrait of America and alienation and the AIDS crisis. Another ecstatic, excessive work I was really blown away by this year was Ronaldo Wilson’s poetry collection Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem) — unbelievably gorgeous lyrics on the body, on blackness, on queerness, on desire.

Speaking of a first-person that refuses to behave, of rebel voices, I loved Violence, the conversation on violence, patriarchy, and publishing, conducted between explosive awesomes Vanessa Veselka and Lidia Yuknavitch, published in a condensed form originally on The Believer online but then published in gorgeous print by Sarah McCarry (she of The Rejectionist blog) in her new radical essay chapbook venture appropriately named Guillotine. Some of my favorite writing I read this year was online — Bhanu Kapil’s brilliant notebooking performance on her blog; also online meditations on literature, the body, and alienation by a blogger called The Bookbat; Masha Tupitsyn’s Barthes-like fragments on love for her Tumblr Love Dog; Jackie Wang’s essays that are brilliant explorations of politics and aesthetics, especially her piece on innocence that was part of Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism. I’ve never really understood all those who are worrying themselves sick over the state of publishing — there’s never been more urgent, exciting stuff out there, you just have to look in the margins.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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

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My favorite book this year — at least it’s the one I’ve picked out of the stack beside my bed the most often — is Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton (Blue Rider Press), a memoir of competitive swimming and a meditation on the swimming pool that defies any attempt to sum it up in a single line. I first read about it on the Paris Review Daily in the depths of February, when it seemed like swimming pool weather would never come; Shapton is an artist and an illustrator to go along with the equipoise of her prose style, and reading the book from night to night is like sitting on the stands at poolside and watching her swim the 4X100 meter medley of a life. The chapters are interspersed with portraits in watercolor, photographs of swimsuits on soft mannequin torsos, and abstract renderings of all the swimming pools that Shapton has known. ”Ever present is the smell of chlorine,” Shapton writes of her childhood in Toronto, “and the drifting of snow in the dark.” The cover is even the color of poolwater in sunlight, with the darker silhouette of a swimmer’s bathing cap.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

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I began my literary life as a fanboy of Dave Barry, so in some ways it makes sense, I suppose, that around my 25th birthday I picked up The Best of Myles. The book collects the Irish Times columns of the novelist Flann O’Brien, who depicts the absurd minutiae of mid-century life in Dublin. Included amongst its nuclear riffs are dialogues with the Plain People of Ireland, who plainly (and reliably) disapprove; a report on a gang of rogue ventriloquists who terrorize people at operas; and a breathless description of a purplish liquid, “the opposite of drink,” that gives the imbiber a “hangunder.” Ever since the beginning of the holidays, I’ve been sad that last one is fiction.

In part because O’Brien’s work is nothing if not irreverent, it’s funny that it led me to pick up John Banville’s novel The Sea. The novel, which won the Man Booker prize in 2005, orbits around the depression of an elderly widower named Max. Unsure of what to do in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer, Max decamps for a little chateau on the coast near his childhood home. At the chateau, he remembers the Graces, a family who stayed there when he was young. He recounts in unflinching detail his shock at their confidence and verve. To a child like Max, the Graces, who appear more hale than any family should appear, inevitably call up comparisons to the gods of Greek mythology. His memories conjure up awful parallels between his wife and the young Chloe Grace. As always when I read Banville, I couldn’t believe his deftness — how easily, for example, he rolls off a pun; how well he understands the nuance of Latinate terminology; how aptly, above all, that he paints fate as a wolf at the door. When I got to the ending, I thought it was easily the sharpest I’d read in years. My views haven’t changed.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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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Dom Moraes: Selected Poems. Edited with an Introduction by Ranjit Hoskote. (Penguin India, Modern Classics, 2012)

For a season, Dom Moraes (1938-2004) was one of the most famous poets in Britain. He was 19 when he won the Hawthornden Prize. He is still the youngest poet to have won the prize, as well as the only non-Englishman. But the early fame may have been his undoing. He produced three good books and then encountered a writer’s block that lasted 17 years. With a selection of 80 poems from a long and turbulent career, a 77-page introduction, and detailed notes on each poem, the volume is a long overdue appreciation of Moraes in his native country. And it is unusual in at least one respect: it enacts a hopeful sign for a literature that doesn’t set much stock by its own history.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

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I know people who read all the hot young novels. And I’ll occasionally buy one or two (although after getting burned by The Corrections, I wait for the paperback). But mostly the past is too full of fiction I haven’t read: fresh green breasts of James, Beckett, Mishima, Woolf remain uncharted, and I’m going to spend my time with The Marriage Plot? 2012 was the year I got around to what proved to be my favorite novel, period. I’d been meaning to read V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas for years — Naipaul was already the author of my favorite opening line: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” (I often say this to myself like a mantra; make of that what you will.) And Naipaul is possessed of a most delightful literary personality. But Mr. Biswas — nothing could have prepared me for the breadth of this book. Everyone in these pages is weak, silly, utterly human. I’m not sure any postwar author has known his own character — inspired by Naipaul’s father — so thoroughly. (Bellow comes close, in Herzog, published a few years after Biswas.) It’s hilarious and sad and all the usual things we say a work of literature is when we mean it seems to contain all of life. Going to buy that gold brooch for you, girl.

Other books that made my year — besides some poetry titles I wrote about for the Chicago Tribune — include John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead; Richard Hughes’s In Hazard; Haddawy’s translation of The Arabian Nights (except the verses — it’s called meter, dude); David Graeber’s Debt (read if you have student loans and want to feel even angrier about them); Fantagraphics’s reprints of Carl Barks’s duck comics; Brian Michael Bendis and Klaus Janson’s Daredevil: End of Days (for those who preferred Frank Miller before he became a right-wing dipshit); George Herbert’s The Temple; and the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

More from A Year in Reading 2012

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

Like what you see? Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.