My Year of Reading: Best Books of 2012

I tried to whittle the list down to a Perfect Ten.  It was like I was Meryl Streep at the gates of the concentration camp being forced to choose between my favorite children.  I just couldn't do it.

Then I tried to make it a fiction-only list.  That would mean losing some worthy books like Dust to Dust and The Liberator.  I wasn't about to drop them from the list.

And then I made myself go through the list again with determined resolve: eliminate those books which I really,...