The Globe and Mail

The most important book of the year is Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature. If Pinker's thesis – that violence is actually decreasing over time – is correct, then we have much to be. optimistic about, despite the millions of people who have been killed in preventable genocides over the past century. A cynic might say that this reduction in violence reflects the horrors of our past rather than the virtues of our present. But if the reduction represents a permanent trend, then we may be looking toward an even more peaceful future.

Alan M. Dershowitz is a U.S. lawyer, jurist and political commentator, and Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University. He is the author most recently of The Trials of Zion.

Pretty, a short-story collection by Greg Kearney (Exile Editions) is a full-out hoot, with just the right hit of darkness and slightly off-kilter details that add absurdity to the hilarity. Within the first few pages I was laughing hard, and rereading passages aloud to prolong my delight. Kearney has a killer ear for dialogue – his forlorn, kooky characters speak in a realistic but slightly mannered way that’s pure pleasure to read.

Jessica Westhead is the author of the novel Pulpy & Midge and the story collection And Also Sharks.

If we are not currently living in a supremely enlightened time, especially with regard to our collective proclivity toward violence, I want to know why, and what we plan to do about it. As Stephen Pinker argues in The Better Angels of Our Nature, there is extremely strong evidence (800 pages worth) to suggest that, thanks to improvements in literacy, travel, government and technology, we are a more empathetic, increasingly reasonable, less brutal world. While atrocious wars and acts of violence are a daily reality for many, Pinker chooses to celebrate our statistically better chance of not dying a violent death today than in the decades, centuries and millennia past. As I call for the end of the use of child soldiers and the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect by all nations, I invite readers to pick up this optimistic book, count their blessings and take action to help those still mired in the scourge of violence.

Roméo Dallaire is a Canadian senator, retired general and author of Shake Hands with the Devil.

Affliction of all kinds abounds in the work of Russell Banks (not least in an earlier novel. in fact titled Affliction), but in Lost Memory of Skin, he brings together two uniquely burdened individuals, neither the kind of character you ordinarily go out of your way to explore. We know them only as the Kid and the Professor, the Kid being a young registered sex offender, the Professor being a very large man whose professional life centres on the academic investigation of homelessness, but whose personal life centres on a very large refrigerator. He is extraordinarily obese, yet ambulatory, though he has learned from experience to avoid certain situations, such as sitting on bar stools. What is really rather eerie is how Banks manages to conjure empathy for both characters, even though both occupy what might gently be termed societal zones of minimal appeal. But truly, that's the beauty of Banks's work; through the sheer seduction of his prose, his imagined detail, he manages to lure you into unfamiliar realms, where you cannot help but learn to see your own world (and, incidentally, iguanas) in a manner markedly different than when you first opened the book, and isn't that really the highest goal any writer can achieve?

Erik Larson’s most recent book is the best-seller In the Garden of Beasts.

For me, it’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, by Jeanette Winterson. I have admired Winterson since her debut, but after Sexing the Cherry, have never, with her, entered that trance-like state that makes reading a miracle. Now, again, in this poetic memoir about – among other things – tracing her birth mother, Winterson makes the pages sing. I found this a moving, artfully constructed piece of writing that sustains tension until the last sentence.

Sara Wheeler’s most recent book is The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle.

Most of the books I read this year came via suggestions from friends whose taste I admire, or were follow-ups from authors whose books had mesmerized me. I had loved Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I liked it so much, I not only read it again, I searched out an earlier book by Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety. Its depiction of the three principal revolutionary figures of the French revolution -- Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins – is more discursive and philosophical than Wolf Hall, yet it nevertheless is almost as engrossing a study of character by a master imaginer. Her Danton is dangerously and magnificently alive, and unforgettable.

Like many readers I lapped up Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin. I particularly appreciated his talent for placing the reader in a time and place without extraneous and subjective commentary, but when I tried to find his The Devil in the White City, every store in Toronto had run out. A nice salesman, sensing my disappointment, led me to Parisians by Graham Robb, one of the best potpourris of focused narrative I have ever read. If you love Paris, this is a wonder of a book.

Finally, a dear friend said to me: “Why don’t you be the very last person in Canada to read Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin? You’ll thank me when you’ve finished.” And I do thank him. It is by light years the best post-9/11 novel from America (via a transplanted Irishman), as luminous, engrossing and ultimately redemptive a novel as you will find these days.

John Fraser is master of Massey College at the University of Toronto.

Charles Foran’s Mordecai: The Life & Times, because it illuminates the life of a great and complex Canadian and a great and complex love.

Albert Schultz is artistic director of the Soulpepper Theatre Company.

This year, literary discovery came, for me, in the form of Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, a deceptively meandering first-person narrative about a Nigerian psychiatry resident in New York. The bonhomous flâneur who strolls Manhattan from top to bottom, reveals, in the course of his walking meditations, both more about the city and about himself than we – or indeed he – could possibly anticipate. Cole writes beautifully; his protagonist is unique; and his novel, utterly thrilling.

A very different book, but equally consuming, is Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table – as vibrant and delicious an evocation of childhood adventure as Peter Pan, but with a good measure more wisdom, and the tenderness of hindsight. In the course of his 1954 ship’s crossing from Colombo to London, the young Michael, nicknamed Mynah, encounters more extravagant strangeness and more passion than do many of us in a lifetime.

Claire Messud’s most recent novel is The Emperor’s Children.

I must have been channelling Sarah Bakewell's excellent biography of a great and original French thinker, How To Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions and One Attempt at an Answer when I wrote my own book, The Conscious Catwoman Explains Life On Earth. Sarah Bakewell is the real thing.

Julie Newmar was Catwoman on the original Batman TV series.

By this time next year, I will have finished my stint as chairman of the Man Booker Prize judges - and I hope I will have a sure and exhaustively researched choice for my Globe and Mail pick of 2012. This year, in a last engagement with brevity, I am choosing Alice Oswald's poem, Memorial, praised too by other TLS contributors in our own Book of the Year feature. Oswald delves deep into the history of literature, imagining the earliest fragments of the Iliad before Homer made his epic of the wrath of Achilles and European narrative began.

Peter Stothard is editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He blogs at timescolumns.typepad.com/stothard/

Published in the late 18th century, Samuel Johnson's and James Boswell's two books about their joint trip through the Scottish Highlands and Islands (Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, respectively) have been cleverly edited into a single volume – To the Hebrides: Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands and James Boswell's Journal of a Tour by Boswell, Johnson and Ronald Black – that switches the narrative from one to the other as the expedition goes on. Their shifting view of the same events is often hilarious. The story should be of particular interest to the many Canadians with Scots ancestry (as it is to this Welshman, who has none) and, best of all, is a reminder of English as She Should be Writ, but Alas No Longer Is.

A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941-1945 is a vivid and often horrifying account of the experiences of a Jewish writer and journalist during the German occupation of the Soviet Union, and of its defeat. It reminds us much of the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front and how much the world owes to the Russians; but is also a vivid insight into the dark side of the Soviet State, and into the persistence of anti-Semitism there and in Eastern Europe even after the crushing of the Nazis.

Steve Jones is a leading British geneticist. His most recent book is Darwin’s Island.

When I sat down to think of my favourite books of 2011, I realized that it has been a year of non-fiction. As an avid consumer of fiction, the realization almost scared me. I asked myself why couldn’t I name at least a handful of novels I had read from the fantastic 2011 roster? What happened between Half-Blood Blues and The Sense of an Ending? This was probably the closest I’ve come to having a panic attack. But I skipped out on fiction and fell in love with two works of nonfiction that read like novels.

Say Her Name, Francisco Goldman’s memoir about losing his young wife. Aura Estrada, in a freak swimming accident in Mexico, moved me deeply. It’s not only beautifully written, but an incredible portrait of a marriage and the tragedy that eventually pulls it apart. Goldman takes the reader from Brooklyn to Mexico City, and back and forth in time from the moment he and Aura met to the day of her death at 30. I knew the power of this book when I started talking about it constantly, sharing reviews via social media and giving copies to friends.

The second work is Claire Tomalin’s superb Charles Dickens: A Life. Written in time for Dickens’ 2012 bicentenary, the book immerses the reader in 19th-century London, including beautifully drawn parallels between Dickens’s own life (his father’s time in Marshalsea debtor’s prison) and those of his characters (Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, for example).

Devyani Saltzman is the author of Shooting Water and curator of literary programming at Toronto’s Luminato festival.

Michael Ondaatje has written some of the most inimitable works in the English language; The Cat's Table yet again dignifies literature in every important way possible. This novel is a completely original orchestration of a coming-of-age story, memoir, maritime adventure as powerful as Conrad or Stevenson. The lyricism of the prose is astonishing. The narrator's journey from Sri Lanka to England is brought to readers with the vivid immediacy of a dusted-off album of photographs in mint condition. Born in Austria in l926, Ingeborg Bachman was one of post-war Germany's most vital novelists, poets, playwrights and memoirists (Max Frisch writes about their love affair in his splendid novel Montauk). Her War Diary is a collection of sketches about the last months of the Second World War and the first months of the British occupation of Austria. It also includes letters from Jack Hamesh, a Jew who had originally fled Vienna for England in l938; these letters, about literature and life, are beautiful, intense, haunting. Among other things, this is a book about the formative years of an extraordinary writer.

Howard Norman’s most recent novel is What Is Left the Daughter.

Okay, so this might sound weird because my fave book of 2011 is by my pal and ex-boyfriend, plus I'm a character in it. Still, fact is, it's my favourite. Paying for It – a graphic novel by Chester Brown – is a daring, courageous and gorgeous account of his adventures in the sex industry, paying for sex. It's an awkward modern man's search for love and connection. It makes some cringe, it angers puritans and the politically correct. It challenges preconceptions and offers a new perspective on romance. An honest and revealing work, heartbreaking and hilarious, entertaining and useful.

Sook-Yin Lee is a musician, filmmaker and actress.

Published by Nova Scotia’s Gaspereau Press, John Leroux’s Glorious Light: The Stained Glass of Fredericton ought to be a Winter Solstice gift. The lavish treatment of the subject makes the book a triumph of light, perfect for this season, where daylight has dwindled and the weather can seem relentlessly dreary.

If you think that a book about stained-glass art in a provincial capital cannot be – ahem – enlightening, think again. An architect and art historian, Leroux is passionate about the treasures that he has found like an Antiques Roadshow appraiser – and he is full of facts that add lustre to the stunning glass images he uncovers.

His prose is fine, but his photographs of “hand-painted windows” and “symphonies in stained glass” are breathtakingly sublime. The book is ashimmer with lovingly snapped, full-colour pictures that prove – again and again – that Canadians do not, in fact, love gloom.

George Elliott Clarke’s latest book is Red, a collection of poetry.

I’d been meaning to read Edouard Levé’s Suicide since coming across Zadie Smith’s intelligent review in Harper’s in May, but I didn’t get around to it, fittingly, until the end of the year. Levé was a Parisian writer and photographer who killed himself in 2007, 10 days after submitting the manuscript of Suicide. As Smith explains, Levé was an artist obsessed with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance – the idea that meaning does not inhere in the written word or event, but is constructed through difference, delay and deferral. So his suicide would come to seem like a premeditated final chapter, retroactively cementing the meaning of the whole book, and transforming it from a work of fiction into a “public suicide note.”

What I found fascinating about the novel was precisely the way it resisted this interpretation. Suicide is built on lacuna (not a single character bears so much as a first name) and yet, for me, it was full of the kind of desperate, beautiful and honest detail that seems to bear an immanent and almost childlike meaning. In fact, the sadness of the book is not that meaning is forever relegated to an outside system of reference, but that meaning can exist only in process. Just as Suicide’s second-person narrator tells us: “Your life was less sad than your suicide might suggest,” the novel goads us to get over the tyranny of its ending, of all endings.

Another standout was Johanna Skibsrud’s This Will Be Difficult to Explain. What I love about Skibrud’s writing is her focus on how we think as opposed to what we think – a shift from psychology to cognition that I hadn’t realized could be so deftly articulated and that feels very new to me.

Martha Schabas’s first novel, Various Positions, was published this year.

Some years ago, Chinese essayist Liao Yiwu published The Corpse Walker, a series of interviews with men and women whose aspirations, downfalls and reversals of fortune would not be out of place in the fictions of Dickens, Dostoevsky or Hrabal. The Corpse Walker is a masterpiece, reconstructing and distilling the stories of individuals – an Abbott, a Composer, a Tiananmen Father, among so many others – whose lives, together, create a textured and unforgettable history of contemporary China. Liao's empathy and humour, and his great, listening soul, have created a literature of the highest calibre. My other loved books from this year are the Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom's story collection, The Foxes Come at Night, a visionary and beautiful work, and Barbara Demick's Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea.

Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter was published this year.

My granddaughter was born at the very end of 2010 and her arrival affected my 2011 reading habits to a not insignificant extent. When I wasn’t poring over books such as the very informative What To Expect in the First Year, I was rushing joyfully into town to buy something along the lines of Dorothy Kunhardt’s classic Pat the Bunny.

After a few months I found I wanted something to help me understand the wonderful and fully focused place to which this birth had brought me, and it was about this time that I read celebrated anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. A gifted writer as well as a primatologist, Hrdy argues that social co-operation in our hunting and gathering ancestors led to the emotionally mature Homo sapiens. This was particularly manifested by the roles played by allo mothers – older siblings, fathers, cousins, non-kin, and most important to me, grandmothers – in raising an infant. Hrdy helped me see how I fit into the new family dynamic, and explained, as well, why I so fiercely wanted to do so.

At the same time, and for similar reasons, two other books became important to me. Once the baby was born, I sent my daughter Marni Jackson’s moving and humorous exploration of motherhood, The Mother Zone, and ordered her more recent and equally splendid empty-nest memoir, Home Free, for myself. Jackson’s books not only clarified what my daughter and I were experiencing in our separate houses, but the quality of the writing affirmed, as well, the importance of a beautifully constructed sentence in conveying an idea.

Jane Urquhart’s most recent novel is Sanctuary Line.

As a Cape Bretoner, I hope people don’t see these as homer picks, but my favourite books this year were Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist and David Adams Richards’s Incidents in the Life of Markus Paul. In addition to being one of the funniest books I’ve read in some time, Coady’s novel has narrative depth and complexity that rewards close and repeated reading. She has blossomed into a real star. As for Richards, I wonder how many Canadians appreciate his talent. For me, he is our Faulkner. Incidents consolidates that status.

Gerald Butts is president and CEO of WWF-Canada.

The book I’ve been riveted by is Frances Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order. I’ve just finished making a TV series on the European Enlightenment, during which China was seen as an ideal civilization run by highly efficient mandarins chosen on merit – a system dating back two and a half millennia. This is where Fukuyama starts his searching book on the evolution of the three key ingredients for a successful state: a strong central government, rule of law and accountability. From China, the first modern state, he charts how India, Egypt, Britain, the Islamic and Ottoman Empires, and France each made their own way forward.

It is a courageous book: Fukuyama recants somewhat his famous thesis in The End of History and the Last Man, that Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government. With America degenerating into possible paralysis and dysfunction, he can see progress is not always in one direction. This is the first of a projected two volumes; the second will explore post-industrial political development. With its economy surging ahead, China still awaits the rule of law and accountability, a challenge for the author and for China. As Fukuyama says, the Danes with their “ideal democracy” don’t know how they got there.

Shuyun Sun is a London, UK-based writer and film-maker.

The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, by Iain McGilchrist, is a dazzling masterpiece, hugely ambitious and the most comprehensive, profound book ever written on brain laterality, which examines how our two brain hemispheres differ, relate to each other, and the huge implications of this discovery. We have two brain hemispheres, each capable of functioning independently. Each has a different point of view about the world. The right hemisphere – long thought of as “non-dominant” – is actually the Master, perceiving the world more directly, holistically and in context; the left is its Emissary, meant to serve the Master by developing more focused attention, when called for, and creating maps of the world. McGilchrist shows, through a brilliantly rich survey of the Western world, how in different eras, the arts, sciences, philosophy and even psychological health flourish when the balance between left and right is maintained. But our brains are plastic, and today, the plastic left hemisphere has become too dominant, inhibiting the right, and thinks itself the Master (this is not simply an anthropomorophism; the left hemisphere does not see its limitations, and confuses the maps it makes for the world it maps). Our art, aesthetics, philosophy, technologies, even our legal systems and bureaucracies show these stifling effects, and new kinds of mental illnesses have emerged. One puts down this beautifully written, profound, philosophically sophisticated book thinking psychiatrist and former Oxford English professor McGilchrist might just be one of the most learned people in Europe.

Norman Doidge is the author of The Brain That Changes Itself.

My favourite book of the year was Frances Itani's Requiem. I read it while in Japan for four months. It was a beautiful, slow, meandering read that explored the past of Japanese Canadians in a particularly resonant way. It's a painful story that deals with parental abandonment – and yet, it is an oddly hopeful tale at the same time. It was ignored by the major prizes, but it found its ideal reader in me, I suppose. I hope it gets a wider readership in the future.

Sally Ito’s most recent poetry collection is Alert to Glory. She lives in Winnipeg.

The only thing I didn’t like about Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad was the title, which suggests a violent thriller rather than the wonderfully original, funny, touching, eloquent, and constantly surprising book it is – a series of tales about people in the music business who turn out to be connected in unexpected and intriguing ways. It’s a book which becomes more and more captivating the deeper you get into it.

Raymond Tallis’s Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity, in contrast, contains exactly what it says on the tin: an incisive, lucid and witty polemic against the reductive materialism of fashionable scientific accounts of consciousness (Dennett, Dawkins etc.) – not from a religious point of view (the usual opposing stance) but by a man who describes himself as an atheist humanist, and is highly qualified in medicine and neuroscience. Tallis also shows impressive knowledge and understanding of literature; he seems to be a modern Renaissance man.

David Lodge’s most recent novel is A Man of Parts, about H.G. Wells.

To understand why Israelis and Palestinians see the worst in each other, one has to go back a century, cutting away the mythology and narrative that frustrates hope for reconciliation today. To do so, there is no better option than to immerse oneself in two highly readable books: The Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer and The British in Palestine by Bernard Wasserstein. Both authors are serious academics who slice through rhetoric, exposing British duplicity in the dying days of Empire, when fading imperial powers made decisions with little understanding of the dynamics that governed the lives of others. One nevertheless has to be impressed with Zionist diplomacy and commitment to a prosperous Jewish state which imperial London sponsored, if saddened by Palestinian inability to organize and respond effectively. On Zionist commitment, Schneer is brilliant. Wasserstein relates beautifully the conundrum the British soon realized they had spawned, unable to create the two-state solution we continue to struggle with today.

Michael Bell is Paul Martin Sr. Scholar in International Diplomacy at the University of Windsor and former Canadian ambassador to Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

For me, the deeply shining gem of 2011 is Olive Senior’s Dancing Lessons. Senior, a veteran Jamaican-Canadian poet and short-story writer, and Commonwealth Prize winner, sets her first novel in an old folks' home in Kingston, Jamaica, where her heroine, nameless till the last page, sits brooding over her rural past, trying to keep a record of it all in a journal for her absent children. A piece of music strays in from another occupant’s room and triggers a convulsion of memory and emotion, catalyst to a late bloom, and to the resurfacing of a story that has been meandering within for years, unseen, like a subterranean river.

As a novel, it is compelling, its heroine unforgettable. In breathtakingly pristine prose, Senior reveals the beauty and foibles of her landscape and its characters, maverick and contradictory. With intuitive intimacy, she deftly evokes the mysteries and magic, the curiously uncorrupted mythology of rural Jamaica. Through its vivid characters pulse the tensions of two economic Jamaicas that to a large extent mirror its history of white colonialism and black slavery. Senior evokes the conflicting truths that, at face value, are deeply patriarchal and chauvinist. But she burrows beneath to lovingly reveal the island’s deeper matriarchy that is its enduring strength. Like Jamaica itself, Senior’s heroine, released by music, finds a voice to tell the story of her stoic and stubborn survival. A treasure. A simply wonderful read.

Rachel Manley’s most recent book is Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter’s Story.

It was such a strong year for Canadian authors, my inclination is to want to shout from the rooftops a list of Cancon books you need to read.

Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers is a gem. It's worthy of the multiple accolades it received at various fancy awards dinners in 2011 (even if the book’s cast of losers and cheats might not gain entry to any swishy galas themselves).

His deadpan homage to classic Westerns is a gratifying marriage of humour and melancholy – along with blood, booze and amour. His fellow Giller Prize short-listee David Bezmozgis also put out one of the best works of the year, methinks. The Free World is an utterly compelling meditation on family, immigration and loss. Is there any question that Bezmozgis is among the world's great young writers?

And yet, the work of fiction that most moved me was a comparatively quiet book from British writer Anne Enright. The Forgotten Waltz is a beautifully written tale of romance, emotion and infidelity. I was consumed by its images and the universal questions Enright explores – albeit with a gentle touch and a wry wit. This is a work of fiction that allows us to explore an intimate human connection from a female perspective – without heavy-handed morality. It's the details, the turns of phrase and the textures of the affair it details, rather than the broader themes, that continue to resonate.

Finally, and entirely because this dude probably needs my help to get the word out, I mention Stephen King's 11/22/63. There was no more enjoyable page-turner for me this year. From the beginning, we take comfort in the safety that the journey is in the hands of a master. Our role is to melt into it, absorbed in this character-driven adventure into American mythology. King has complained in the past that, despite his massive success, he's not gotten the recognition he might deserve from literary elites. This thriller is surely as good as storytelling gets.

Jian Ghomeshi is the host of Q with Jian Ghomeshi, a national cultural affairs program on CBC Radio One & CBC-TV.

My favourite read was The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. It’s just the kind of non-fiction I love – a book that begins with a deceptively tiny idea. Skloot introduces us to HeLa, a line of human cells commonly used in laboratory research. HeLa is also short for Henrietta Lacks, an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in a charity ward of Johns Hopkins hospital in 1951. Lacks unwittingly donated the original tissue culture following a biopsy. Before HeLa, scientists tried in vain to grow human tissue in vitro. Henrietta’s cells contained a unique enzyme that allowed them to proliferate in test tubes, seemingly without ever growing old. The scientific repercussions have been astonishing. Millions of tons of HeLa cells are cultivated in Petri dishes all over the world. They’ve been shared, sold, and scientifically tested in myriad ways. There is scarcely a medical breakthrough or application that doesn’t owe its existence, at least in part, to HeLa, including cancer treatments, pharmaceuticals and vaccines.

Skloot uncovers the remarkable human side, the untold story of Henrietta’s life. The great irony of her legacy is that the Lacks children have never seen any recognition or financial benefit from their mother’s contribution to science. Some don’t have health insurance. The book, despite its microscopic subject matter, covers broad themes, including socioeconomic inequalities, race, bioethics and mortality. Who owns living cells once they have left the body? And in Henrietta’s case, where does life end? It’s great science writing (and a mystery of sorts) that fits a fascinating and overlooked piece of American history.

Charlotte Gill’s Eating Dirt has been short-listed for the B.C. National Book Prize for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Former Washington Post staff writer William Powers provided not only my Book of the Year, but my Idea of the Year. His debut, Hamlet’s Blackberry, brings new life to a somewhat mouldering truth: that the indisputable gains of every bright new technology are accompanied by important losses. Powers deconstructs the “conundrum of connectedness” in the digital age, arguing that its opposite – disconnectedness – is inherently valuable, one of the keys to human happiness and even something Socrates would have recommended. But instead of hammering us over the head with what we’ve already heard a thousand times, Powers illustrates his thesis with his very own family. Turning his home into a social science laboratory, Powers convinces his wife and young son to commit to a weekly internet Sabbath, 48 hours of living – egads! – completely unplugged. What results is a funny, friendly and fascinating rumination by a confessed tech-lover that seems to prove, beyond a shadow, that in order to benefit most from new technologies we need to use them less.

Andrew Westoll’s The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary has been short-listed for the B.C. national Book Prize for Canadian Non-Fiction.

Of all the hundreds of crime novels and thrillers I read during 2011, the one that sticks most firmly in my mind is Don Winslow's Savages. This is a very short novel, at times even sketchy, and yet it is unforgettable. Full of Winslow's familiar wicked wit, it tells of two laid-back, charitably inclined drug dealers and their shared girlfriend, O, whose small-scale operation becomes a target for some much more violent, much greedier, more organized criminals. One of the novel's themes is peculiarly suited to a year in which so many financial nastinesses have been exposed: a large and ruthless organization cannot see an effective, personally run, small business without wanting to take it over and risk destroying the very aspects that made it work.

Natasha Cooper is the author of several acclaimed mystery series. She lives in London, UK.

My favourite book this year is one that I just finished: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney. With the stress of the holidays, this book is especially timely, because it sheds fascinating new light on self-control, a virtue that for most of us is hard to maintain in all spheres of our lives. Baumeister, a renowned psychologist, and Tierney, a science reporter, convincingly argue that self-control is a key to a successful life, but also that too many simultaneous demands on our willpower deplete our energy. As they point out, we only have a finite amount of ability to resist temptations, whether it be eating too much, drinking too much, smoking or losing our cool with our loved ones. Thus, they say: “Focus on one project at a time. If you set more than one self-improvement goal, you may succeed for a while by drawing on reserves to power through, but that just leaves you more depleted.”

This is by no means a frivolous, self-help book. It is based on extensive scientific research, yet is highly readable. And worth at least 10 therapy sessions. The bottom line: We should always strive to lead healthy lives and make ourselves better people, but we need to recognize our limitations. The book advises strongly against New Years’ resolutions. So on the first of January, instead of sitting down and composing my list, I will relax and enjoy a Bloody Mary.

Amy Knight is an independent scholar, living outside New York City. Her most recent book is How the Cold War Began: The Igor Gouzenko Affair and the Hunt For Soviet Spies.

Teju Cole’s Open City is a novel without a plot (though there is a twist toward the end), a meandering narrative that explores the complex geography of one immigrant’s life through his walks across New York City. The protagonist, Julius, a Nigerian-German doctor completing a psychiatry fellowship, comes across as cosmopolitan, urbane and bookish, but also somewhat of a poser, prone to pretentious references. He engages with the world around him but remains separate from it. Solitude is a constant theme.

I enjoyed Cole’s crisp prose, especially his riveting vignettes of the metropolis, its inhabitants and even the rarely seen stars above. He brings into focus the scuffles of a world of dwindling national boundaries, and reveals identity as a volatile blend of experience, selective memory and make-believe. Cole, through Julius, covers a lot of ground – rom Manhattan’s layered history to solemn meditations on life, death and exile – and does so with exceptional skill.

Ray Jayawardhana is Canada Research Chair in observational astrophysics at the University of Toronto, and author of Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System.

First, I must give a nod to this year's Scotiabank Giller Prize short list, which was the strongest in years and altogether provided me with a great reading experience. But my favourite book is Haruki Murakami's massive, compelling and unsettling 1Q84, which blends the stories of a freelance writer, hired to rewrite a young girl's manuscript, and a female assassin who kills only abusive men, commissioned to do away with the leader of a cult – a ridiculously inadequate summary of a book as wide-ranging, complex and detailed as Murakami's, but there you go;.

H.J. Kirchhoff is The Globe and Mail's deputy Books editor.

This year in non-fiction, I greatly admired Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts, a thrillingly disquieting, novelistic account of the arrival in Germany in 1933 of U.S. ambassador William Dodd and his family, especially his daughter Martha, for some time beguiled by Nazi “supermen.” It’s a chilling look at one man’s dawning perception of a metastasizing evil. Christopher Hitchen’s Arguably is an often superb anthology of the late controversialist’s essays, and easily as notable for its literary acumen as its political combativeness. I was charmed by Faulks on Fiction, a survey by novelist Sebastian Faulks of the English novel through consideration of its great character, such as Robinson Crusoe, Emma Woodhouse, Sherlock Holmes, Becky Sharp and Jeeves. It is frequently incisive, thoughtful and provoking. I greatly enjoyed Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton’s debut collection of off-beat strips, Hark! A Vagrant – witty, informed meldings of literature and history with a very modern sensibility.

In fiction, I was most impressed by Jennifer Egan’s 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad, a tour de force about a swirling set of characters that combines postmodern innovation with deep characterization. Leah Hager Cohen’s The Grief of Others is an acutely observed, beautifully written family tale, and Patrick DeWitt’s The Sisters Brothers is a sustained exercise in a True Grit/Deadwood revisionist western, with a memorable narrator.

Martin Levin is Books editor of the Globe and Mail.