We read to survive in the world, but sometimes we just like reading about survival.

Let me concentrate on two authors whose names I had never heard before this year.

Imagine Ibsen’s Peer Gynt rewritten four-handedly by a bisexual Joyce and a mystical Musil, and you’re about halfway there.

Lately I seem to find it impossible to spend more than half an hour at a time reading anything, and as a result I realize that I’ve succumbed to what I call the slug syndrome.

Fridjonsson claims that in his travels he has seen the universe, which according to him, “is made of poetry.” Baldur, meanwhile, kills the fox, consumes its heart, and wears its fur.

By the end it’s almost impossible not to feel deficient for being anything but a poet/lesbian, and specifically anyone but Eileen Myles.

To read NOX is like unwinding an ancient scroll, or following a frieze around the porch of a temple, or tracing a history twisting down a column, or walking through a house in Pompeii...

Emotional without even a touch of sentimentality, the piece perfectly captures the questions, assumptions, and mysteries that arise from combing through the material past of a loved one.

Behold: a museum of my failures, an atlas of incompletion, a tour of the ruins of a future that never came. I call it "Reviews I Did Not Write This Year."

Following on months of transition and many sleepless newborn nights, Murakami’s rare, strange story gave me back my human shape.

There’s a body in the first chapter, but the real story here isn’t the crime; it’s the extent to which we’re willing to lie to ourselves, to ignore the obvious, in pursuit of happiness or companionship or love.

I felt utterly rabbit-punched. It was the only book I’ve ever read that betrayed me in such a way — like finding that your cousin’s hilarious web video was directed by Adam McKay.

Here was the reading experience I was looking for! I couldn’t wait to get back to it. I read it over breakfast, over lunch. I voluntarily took the bus to work (the bus!), just so I’d have extra time to read. It was the book that reminded me what a pleasure a great book can be.

The days are short and few. Stay up late with John Cheever. Contemplate your corruption with cheer. Be dignified tomorrow.

To me, this is a sign of a great book: It not only nests in your memory, but weaves itself into your life, giving you language for something you already knew, and just didn’t know you knew.

The writing is so crisp and clear that each sentence left me hankering for the next. More than that, and this is rare in biography, the book left me fond of the subject. I once cheered on a bus when Hemingway shot himself on page 998.

Yan’s style here is maximalistic, headlong, sloppy to be sure, but bursting with life; or rather, lives -- human and otherwise.

Early in the year I tried -- no kidding -- to read everything ever written by and about Sarah Palin. I had it in my head that I was going to write a bitterly funny book about modern politics. The research process, initially undertaken with great enthusiasm, soon turned grim. I lasted about a month before surrendering. It was like the literary equivalent of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me.