Another Year in Reading is behind us, and I speak for all of us at The Millions when I sincerely thank everyone who wrote, shared, and read our articles. It’s a bit daunting to let strangers into our private reading worlds, but it’s also quite rewarding.

There is always the temptation to dive into a new book just after finishing another. There are, as Colum McCann says above, just “so many books” we’ve yet to read. However it’s also true that reflection can deepen appreciation: your reading timeline becomes contextualized, and its connections develop like a filmstrip in your mind. Our series, in the end, is all about such reflection.

We also recognize that it’s becoming easier than ever to rely on algorithms and lists for one’s book recommendations – and while there are some treasures to be found through such means, there is nothing quite like the warmth of an actual human being’s testimony to vouchsafe your next reading choice. We hope that these articles have turned you on to new writers – authors of books selected by others, or authors of the articles themselves.

With 72 participants naming 214 books, it’s safe to say this has been our biggest and most high profile Year in Reading yet. Our participants included the current Poet Laureate, a longtime candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, the reigning winners of the IMPAC and Pulitzer Prizes, two authors of books named The New York Times’ 10 Best of 2011, a recent inductee to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and more Pushcart winners than I care to count.

A number of authors wrote their own Year in Reading articles as well as books chosen later on in the series. This honor roll consists of McCann, Jennifer Egan, Daniel Orozco, David Vann, Siddhartha Deb, and Geoff Dyer.

Yet in spite of these credentials – impressive as they are – I thought it would be fun to note some statistics, and to award some further superlatives based upon the articles written for this series. (Note that all research is highly unscientific.)

By the numbers: of the 214 books named, 139 were fiction, 68 were nonfiction, 5 were poetry, and 2 were graphic novels. The average length of the books chosen was 338 pages, and the average publication year was 1994. The oldest book selected was Moby-Dick, the longest was Bleak House, and the shortest was Buckdancer’s Choice. If you’re a fan of our Post-40 Bloomers series, you’ll appreciate the fact that the average age of each book’s author, at the time their book was originally published, was 47.53 years old. Most of the books were from the United States and the UK, but many were from Ireland, Canada, France, the Russian Federation, Hungary, and Germany. Six of the seven continents were represented, and these books were published by presses ranging from the New York Review of Books to New Directions to Fantagraphics to Random House. (I won’t release the name of which house published the highest number of selections because I don’t want war to break out in New York City.)

Some favorites from the series, based on feedback from readers and links, comments, and other stats, included McCann on The Book of Disquiet, Jonathan Safran Foer on The Shallows, Ben Marcus on Nothing, Michael Schaub on The Great Frustration, and Egan on Butterfly’s Child.

Three books tied for the most popular selection this year: Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (selected by Dan Kois, David Bezmozgis, and Adam Ross), Edouard Levé’s Suicide (selected by Scott Esposito, Mark O’Connell, and Dennis Cooper), and Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (selected by Charles Baxter, Kevin Hartnett, and Garth Risk Hallberg). Seven more books tied for second-most popular: Phillip Connors’ Fire Season (selected by Chad Harbach and yours truly), Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (selected by Harbach and Emily Keeler), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (selected by Brooke Hauser and A.N. Devers), Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (selected by Hauser and Rosecrans Baldwin), Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test (selected by Schaub and Chris Baio), Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal (selected by Hauser and Rachel Syme) and Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods (selected by Scott and Garth).

Still I am compelled to award a couple of half-serious superlatives to close this thing out:

The “Gashlycrumb Tinies” Award for Saddest Selection of Books goes to Emma Straub for her tear-soaked article. “Mr. Consistent” is an Award I’d like to bestow upon Brad Listi, who exhausted the Sarah Palin canon only to then go on to exhaust the David Markson one. “Most Indecisive” belongs to Brooke Hauser and her 15 selections, while “Most Topical” goes to Michael Schaub because 90% of his list published in 2011. The Award for Coolest Byline undoubtedly goes to Duff McKagan, but the Award for Coolest Backstory (as well as my unending jealousy) goes to Benjamin Hale. Finally, the Award for Most Valuable Participant goes to you, dear reader, for allowing us to continue our series and for helping it grow with each passing January.

Until next year, happy reading.

All best,
The Millions staff

P.S. If you’re curious as to how we put the series together, please do check out Electric Literature’s interview with our founder, C. Max Magee. The series, the articles, and the site itself would not be possible without him.

Reading is seeking; it doesn’t just happen to us. We move our eyes from word to word, we move our hands to turn the pages. I’ve always treated reading like an all-encompassing quest that will never end, a riddle without an answer. But at its most basic level, books are about want. We desire to know — or at least to consume — what has been put down inside the pages. Reading is the act of satiating your own heart.

I used to read for escape. I grew up in a dusty Southwestern town where the most exciting activity on a Friday night was to cruise down the main drag in your parents’ station wagon, just to see other people your age doing the same thing. I dreamed of cities and steam tunnels and pop bulbs. They happened. So much happened. I am lucky to say that many of the things I used to read about and deeply want — girls running through the Plaza, reporters chain-smoking on a deadline, secret affairs with innominate troubadours, big sumptuous meals gobbled down with an adopted family of misfits — they all happened to me. And then this year rolled around.

This year, I read for stasis. I moved three times, changed jobs twice, had a tremendous stroke of luck that I mainly struggle to believe before I go to sleep, fell out and into love, found mice in too many cupboards. I read many books, but I kept searching for a new Bible, or at least a text that I would find soothing and steady in a period of such turbulence. In September, someone slipped me a copy of The Everlasting Meal by Tamar Adler, and I felt my world slow to a crawl. Adler’s book may not be the “best” book that I read this year, but it was the one that made me feel the most sane. In day-to-day terms, that can’t be underestimated.

Adler is equally a writer and a chef, a kind of kitchen poet from the school of M.F.K. Fisher or Elizabeth David. The Everlasting Meal (subtitle: Cooking with Economy and Grace), is technically a cookbook, but there are few recipes. Instead, Adler leads the reader through a naturalistic look at one’s kitchen: starting with eggs and running through protein, produce, grains, dairy and dry goods, explaining how to wring the most life and flavor out of each ingredient. In the process, she explains how to tie your cooking life into a happy life; to understand that the most simple meals are often crafted by complex and active minds. It takes a lot of patience and stability to create a warm dish of comfort from just a few handfuls of rice, some spices, an old hunk of parmesan cheese, and the tops of radishes. But it’s all you need — in Adler’s world, less is still less. But we don’t need more.

If this is sounding kind of magical or dippy, it is only because I have trouble capturing this book without adding my own syrupy inflection. Adler’s writing is as sparse and economical as her kitchen, and the only time she veers into the mystical is when she speaks about what the vegetables may want out of a dish. (i.e. Beans “like to be soaked.”) She meditates for twelve chapters on how to live, how to eat, how to make something out of nothing. She advocates for saving every recipe no matter how bad it turns out, calling liquid cake “molten or pudding cake,” or scooping it all up into parfait glasses with whip cream. There are no mistakes. And when there truly are blunders, Adler writes, “there is the art of letting go…Being moved to surrender is an act of grace.”

This book is just what I wanted.

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These two books were a blast of double-barreled lady fun.

Karen Russell, who first put a bite on my heart with her astonishing debut short story collection, Saint Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, this year sank her teeth in, with the audaciously imagined debut coming-of-age novel, Swamplandia! (Knopf). Returning to the Everglades and the Bigtree Alligator Wrestling Dynasty family, Russell summons a bizarre yet wholly recognizable world where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the mythical and the mundane are erased, with the ease of a kid swiping a sneakered toe across a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. A world where heroic 12-year-old Ava Bigtree, reeling from the death of her mother (the star of the family’s now-on-the-skids alligator theme park), abandoned by her grief besotted father and her turncoat brother, who has taken a job at the rival theme park The World of Darkness on the mainland, must embark on a solo journey to the Underworld in the hopes of rescuing her older sister Ossie, a libidinous otherworldly girl who has eloped with the ghost of The Dredgeman. As in her earlier works, Russell ponders what is lost when we attempt to tame the wilderness, be it in nature or in ourselves. At what cost do we forfeit magic?

I find reading etiquette books whether they are by Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt, or Helen Gurley Brown, fascinating and very educational. It’s not all, What sort of spoon does one use for aspic? And, What do I do when his wife answers the telephone? I recently re-read Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage, copyright 1945, and feel all the better for it. I find this particular book comforting as it focuses on many areas in which I am lacking and wish dearly to improve. For example letter writing. Never again will I write a gloomy, overly long, or boring letter, or a silly letter that can be used against me in a court of law. And, the art of conversation. Because Emily Post has alerted me to the dangers that lurk in the most casual exchanges, stressing, “None but the insane could feel impelled to clutch at a neighbor’s dress and tear it off. Yet the tactless do the comparably unfit thing time and time again” I’m certain I can, with guidance (and unless I’m sauced) avoid being a “chatterer” and a “tactless blunderer.” I will become skilled in how to deliver “a no as friendly as a yes.” I will learn, finally, that in writing and speaking, “simple Anglo-Saxon is best.” Lessons for a lifetime.

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If you’re ever feeling unsteady, longtime and legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland’s memoir, DV, is as bracing as smelling salts. You should keep a copy in your bag or next to your bed or wherever you manage to read. It’s extravagant, impractical, intimate, and an interest in couture is by no means a prerequisite (the closest I get to fashion is walking past Century 21 on my way to the train). Vreeland’s friend Truman Capote famously dismissed Jack Kerouac’s writing as “typing”; Capote died the year DV was published, so who knows whether he’d have dismissed it — or embraced it — as “talking.” Since she was losing her eyesight, the book was dictated to George Plimpton, and is peppered with such admonitions as “You really should be talking to Joseph, my masseur.” Open to any page and you’ll find over-the-top and quotable gems — she’s just there, and her enthusiasms and excesses are totally beguiling, whether she’s reminiscing about sumo wrestlers, the King of England, or her love of rouge. Strangely, or not so strangely, I see lots of similarities between Vreeland and one of my other favorite autobiographers, Gertrude Stein. Here are some: their openness, their contradictions, their love of gossip, their independence, the inimitability of their voices, and of course their absolute certainty that their own extraordinary visions of and for the world were the right ones.

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I started my first-ever vegetable garden this year at a small cottage my husband and I are fixing up an hour and a half outside New York City. I had no idea what I was doing and the anxiety of inexperience led me to nearly replace my habitual novel and short-story reading with a compost heap of gardening and how-to books. Here’s what I learned: I am on trend. The marketplace is soggy with pretty guides for beginners by green-thumb gurus and back-to-the-land life stylists. And the books are so pretty! I bought and read a lot of these books as if they contained the secret map to finding the secret garden. But, to be honest, I still can’t say I know much about growing food. And though I made some salads, my garden is not aesthetically pleasing. This is just to say, that a lot of these books are heavy on the glossy photographs and inconsistent on advice. I learned from these books that the way you learn to garden is to try and fail at gardening. I was great at Japanese eggplant, not so great with heirloom tomatoes. I smothered the broccoli by planting the cucumber too close, but I grew lovely peppers. Not a single garden book warned me about the aggressive, almost pernicious, nature of the cucumber. I did find one book more straightforward and informative than the rest. Brett L. Markham’s Mini-Gardening: Self-Sufficiency on a ¼ Acre. It’s the book I will look at again next year. It’s more of a basic agriculture book than a plant-this-vegetable-next-to-that-vegetable book. Besides gardening, most of my 2011 reading was research focused. I had my nose buried in Edgar Allan Poe and Poe-related scholarship for a book I’m working on, all the research is stuff that’s been around, except for Mat Johnson’s excellent novel Pym. Pym takes a depressingly hilarious look at race in America by following an African-American scholar who is fixated on Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, on a wild-Poe chase to Antarctica.

I do want to mention one book that had nothing to do with my laughable attempts at agriculture or my Poe studies, and that’s Edmund De Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes. De Waal is a world-famous ceramicist who inherited a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke from his great uncle Iggie. He becomes fixated on uncovering the story behind the delicate wood and ivory carvings and determines to trace their history through his family. His research leads him back several centuries and ends up taking the reader on an introspective, tragic, and ultimately romantic journey through many eras, wars, and the Holocaust. Along the way his family ancestors rub shoulders and make appearances in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in a painting by Renoir, and in the work of other artist intelligentsia from the Belle Époque. It’s a remarkable secret history discovered through De Waal’s love of objects. I was swept away by this book and that just doesn’t happen as often as I’d like it to these days.

While writing this I also realized that 2011 was the rare year for me where I read more non-fiction than fiction. And by rare, I probably mean that it was a unique event in my life. It was unsettling. My favorite novel I read this year was Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. (I know, I know. It came out a while ago, and everyone loves it, and the Pulitzer). I found the book to be breathtaking and also unsettling – particularly Egan’s global warming future forecasting – perhaps this aspect of Goon Squad also encouraged my decision to start growing food. So I guess this year in reading taught me that I need more goon squads and less green thumbs in my life. I’m just no good without a good story.

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When thinking about what I’m going to read next I do leave room for chance, for the unexpected bookstore find or the insistent, raving recommendation. But for the most part I establish a loose plan for the year that dips into unread classics, keeps tabs on new releases, and delves deeper into favorite authors.

This year, in terms of paying homage to the canon, I finally got around to reading some Virginia Woolf. I know, I know, late to the party on this one, but at least I made it. The careening interior monologues of Mrs. Dalloway serve as a prescient forecast of today’s hyperlinked, click-through culture, shadowing characters through a single day, moving in and out of their thoughts as if characters and readers alike are a game of chess being played by Woolf. The story reads as effortlessly as shifting winds but you can’t help but think about how much Woolf worked the text to get it so breezy even though the novel of manners is anything but. Characters whose futures are mired in their pasts unknowingly answer the book’s ultimate question: “What does the brain matter . . . compared with the heart?”

One writer who always lets the heart trump the mind is Frederic Tuten. I consider Van Gogh’s Bad Café a masterwork, so when Self Portraits: Fictions hit the shelves this year I read it immediately. The stories had all been published previously, but presented here as interrelated pieces the characters plait through time and space like smoke. Tuten’s painterly prose hauntingly daubs the many shades of love; in death, in confusion, in forgetting, in passion, in misunderstanding, in lying so we find love’s essence and power, not so much in how it brings people together, but in the residual of intimacy that remains after they have parted.

Lorcan Roche’s The Companion falls into the surprise find category. The fiercely funny and cutting narrator, Trevor, is an outsize Irishman living in New York, working as a caregiver for Ed, who suffers from muscular dystrophy. The story contains a great deal of darkness, but Roche illuminates it with the enduring light of human fragility, which is annealed by doses of despair and humor. Even when Trevor’s first-person take on events leads to distrust, Roche shellacs Ed and his narrator with the honesty of self-deprecation so that the story shines redemption. This book provided me with more out-loud laughs than Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods. The two books are very different, but they both prove that laughter is often as close to the truth as we can get when it comes to skewering big ideas like national identity or humanity’s shortcomings.

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The LA Times called her “The finest British writer alive.” Julian Barnes called her “the best English novelist of her time.” Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) began publishing at the age of fifty-eight and produced nine novels, three biographies, and a book of short stories by the time she died at eighty-three. Her third novel, Offshore, won the Booker Prize in 1979, while her final novel,The Blue Flower, was named Book of the Year by nineteen British newspapers in 1995 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997.

Penelope Fitzgerald’s images enter the reader’s mind with crystalline precision, yet simultaneously, they make you want to re-read what you just read to make sure that what you think happened really happened. Her slim historical novels are the result, one realizes after the fact, of hundreds of hours of research, yet how does she manage to wear her learning so lightly? I first encountered Fitzgerald eleven years ago, thanks to Joan Acocella’s brilliant roundup of her work in The New Yorker. Each novel I read made me want to send the author a fan letter, but I held back, because I felt like I ought to read all of her books before I bothered her. As it happened, she died halfway through my reading jag, and I still regret having been so punctilious.

In the spring of this past year, I curated an eight-author memorial tribute to Penelope Fitzgerald at Manhattan’s KGB Bar. To prepare for the event, I re-read seven of Fitzgerald’s slyly devastating novels. If pressed to name a favorite before re-reading them, I would have said my top three were At Freddie’s, set in an acting school in London in the 1960s, The Beginning of Spring, set in Russia just before the Revolution, and Human Voices, set in the offices of the BBC during World War Two.

This spring, however, I found myself especially drawn to Fitzgerald’s eighth novel, The Gate of Angels, first published in 1990.

The Gate of Angels is a novel that pits science against religion with the lightest of touches, simply by reminding the reader that there are forces, desire among them, larger than our rational selves, which have the power to overturn all our best-laid plans. In this novel, set in Cambridge, 1912, Fred Fairly, the son of a poor country rector, lives in genteel poverty thanks to a Junior Fellowship at Cambridge, where he resides in the tiny College of Angels. To keep his fellowship, not only does Fred have to lecture in physics, not only does he have to serve as steward, treasurer, librarian, and organist for the College of Angels, he also has to abide by the College’s rules, the most exacting of which requires that he never marry. Of course Fred falls madly in love, and worse, with a girl not of the so-called “marriageable classes.” Daisy Saunders is a working-class girl on the edge of destitution, with whom Fred has little in common except, as we discover, his generosity of spirit, which with typical modesty, Fitzgerald characterizes as an inability on both Fred and Daisy’s part, when asked for help, to say no.

Fred’s troubles are twofold. On the one hand, it’s never clear whether he even has a chance with Daisy at all, until you reread and realize that Daisy can’t love a man until she feels sorry for him. On the other hand, Fitzgerald makes Fred choose between his fellowship at Angels and the girl without whom, in his words, he cannot live. If he marries Daisy, he’ll lose his job and his home. However, as Fitzgerald says, “if Daisy wouldn’t have him, he didn’t see that he would be able to go on at all.” Fred is basically ruining his life by pursuing Daisy, but Fitzgerald crafts a plot in which the reader cannot help but cheer him on.

In an interview with Kerry Fried, Fitzgerald referred to The Gate of Angels as the only novel of hers in which she pulled off a happy ending. Just at the moment when you can let yourself dare to hope that things might work out for Fred and Daisy, Fitzgerald stops, leaving you as breathless as the would-be lovers themselves. Beautiful.

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I was given a copy of the British philosopher Gillian Rose’s memoir Love’s Work by a journalist who interviewed me when my novel came out this summer; he said that my book somehow reminded him of hers. This would be an incredibly vainglorious way for me to begin here, and I suppose it will remain so no matter what I say, but I promise you, that’s not what I meant. Because having read Rose’s striking, honest, and tough-as-nails consideration of what it is to be alive among other people, and of what it is to then die, I suspect that that very nice journalist might have been taking the piss. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m very glad to have been given the chance to spend time in the starkness and rigor of Rose’s short, interrogative last work. Rose gathers in personal reminiscences and philosophical preoccupations, memories of the deaths of friends, and realizations about her ethnic and cultural inheritances. She gives comfort a kicking, and shows morbidity up for the easy moping that it is; complex, jarring and vivid, this is no trip into grief-lit. It also contains one of the most perfect descriptions I’ve encountered of a child’s discovery of the written word: “Reading was never just reading: it became the repository of my inner self-relation: the discovery, simultaneous with the suddenly sculpted and composed words, of distance from and deviousness towards myself as well as others.” Or how a death-room “formed a hard crystal of light, exposed to the raucous and merciless spring.” Rose finished Love’s Work by expressing the hope that she might not be deprived, after all, of old age, but she died following the book’s publication in 1995. The hard work of getting to that point is captured unforgettably and movingly within these pages.

And speaking of the debut novelist’s dreary store of self-consciousness, it finds a smart and rollicking antidote in Jonathan Lethem’s new non-fiction collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, which traverses topics from cinema to theory to nudity to cell phones to billboards to Bolaño’s 2666; my favorite pieces, though, were those which brilliantly dissected the various sulks, funks, and paranoias of being a writer who moans about doing writerly things – not least among them writing itself. I’m probably the last person in the world (here we go again) to have read and relished Lethem’s essay “Rushmore Versus Abundance” – a brisk reminder that, yes, there are too many books to fit into our narrow categories, so get on with reading and stop complaining – but I’ll be doing it again.

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“Why do we read?” That was the journal prompt given one day to seniors at the International High School at Prospect Heights, a Brooklyn public school that teaches English to newly arrived immigrants and refugees from around the world. I spent a year at the school reporting my first book, The New Kids. During that time I heard many, many journal prompts, but this one made a lasting impression, in part because of one student’s answer. “We read to survive in the world,” wrote Hasanatu, who had grown up in Sierra Leone during the war, “because when we know how to read, we can have gob.”

Hasanatu had learned how to read only recently, around the same time that she learned how to write. Sometimes she read for fun — she liked Superfudge by Judy Blume — but reading had a more practical purpose, too. She read to learn English, to sharpen her language and communication skills, to propel her forward toward college, and, yes, toward a good job. She also read to find answers to pressing questions. For instance, she wanted to know why it seemed that only African Muslims practice female circumcision? She spent days in the library investigating.

For me, the question “What are you reading” inevitably leads to the question, “Why do we read?” This year, I’ve been reading mostly for entertainment and escape — more like I used to read as a kid. In past years, I’ve found myself reading books on a theme, usually related to whatever I’m working on at the moment. Before writing The New Kids, I read and revisited books about the immigrant/outsider experience: What Is the What and Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman, Outcasts United by Warren St. John, and Call It Sleep by Henry Roth. (I wrote about a few of those books here.)

If I had known about The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Lê Thi Diem Thúy’s slim and elegant novel about a young girl who washes ashore in San Diego after fleeing Vietnam with her father by boat, I would have read it before writing my own book. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t know about it — I was able to read it without taking endless mental notes. I was pleased to discover that the author has a connection to western Massachusetts (where I recently moved with my husband), also home to Tracy Kidder, whose book Home Town gave me a glimpse into the inner workings of Northampton.

Leaving New York City helped rekindle my interest in books about my former home, which I sometimes miss. I loved Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, not just for its memorable characters and pervasive sense of nostalgia, but for Egan’s wonderful inventiveness with language. I also ate up Amy Sohn’s bitchy Prospect Park West — especially the parts where she imagines dialogue for the “character” of Maggie Gyllenhaal, who works at the Park Slope Food Coop.

On the subject of Park Slope, I finally got to read the works of some of my friends from the neighborhood’s own Brooklyn Writers Space. Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal is a cookbook written as a collection of pithy essays, in the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. Bryan Charles’ memoir, There’s a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From, is about his first few years living in New York City, where he worked in a cubicle on the seventieth floor of the World Trade Center up until and on the day of 9/11. Michael Chabon described the book as “a sneakily disturbing, disarmingly profound, casually devastating memoir, taut and adept, that cracked me up even at its saddest moments.” I think he nailed it.

Speaking of Chabon, I finally read Wonder Boys, which has one of the best last lines of any book that I can remember. I also read Emma Donoghue’s Room, which ruined a recent family weekend vacation (I wouldn’t talk to anyone until I finished), and Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, another creepy book. This one is a young-adult novel — featuring some beautifully haunting vintage photos — about an abandoned orphanage filled with some very weird kids.

Last but not least, I revisited a few old favorites, including Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, the first western I ever read, and Black Hole, the first graphic novel I ever read. The former is an epic adventure about a couple of aging Texas cowboys who embark on a perilous journey to settle amid the wilderness of Montana. The latter is a grotesque modern fable about a bunch of teenagers in 1970s Seattle, where a sexually transmitted “bug” is causing some horrific mutations among the locals.

Two titles you wouldn’t find side-by-side on most bookshelves, but I see a connection. As Hasanatu said, we read to survive in the world, but sometimes we just like reading about survival.

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Several writers I have long admired impressed me anew with their latest books — among them Kate Bernheimer, Peter S. Beagle, Goncalo Tavares, Cesar Aira, and Karen Russell — but let me concentrate on two authors whose names I had never heard before this year:

First is the Israeli writer Alex Epstein, two of whose collections were recently translated into English by the poet Becka Mara McKay and published by Clockroot Press: Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time. If you took the short forms and odd structural techniques of Lydia Davis and wedded them to the fantastic impulses of Ray Bradbury, you would get something like these books, which together contain some two hundred strange, pliant, elliptical, yet surprisingly tender treatments of angels, rain, lullabies, minotaurs, moons, zen masters, literature, and time travel. A glimpse at the titles should be enough to tell you whether they are the kind of stories you would enjoy: “On the Mourning Customs of Elephants,” “The Number of Steps on the Moon,” “An Instruction Manual for a Rented Time Machine,” “The Angel Who Photographed God.”

Second is the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz, two of whose novels were recently published by Dalkey Archive Press, both of them fantasies of the kind that upend rules so fundamental you might have forgotten they were rules at all. The Other City is about a man who discovers a book written in an enigmatic foreign script and soon finds an other-world of lost souls, talking animals, and shadowy doorways seeping through the structures of his city. The Golden Age is about a visitor to a small Atlantic island where the people yield themselves up to the forces of flux, so that every feature of their lives — their families, their language, their religion — is constantly turning into something else. Ajvaz’s sentences are filled with unexpected slues and inversions, and you sense that he could try writing a work of suburban domestic realism, and it would still brim with uncanny meanings, oceans of the bizarre and the mysterious expressing their way through the dishes and the wallpaper, the throw pillows and the neckties.

More from A Year in Reading 2011

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

The good stuff: The Millions’ Notable articles

The motherlode: The Millions’ Books and Reviews

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