Either my criteria for a recommended book are getting much easier to meet, or I had a really good year in reading. (Looking at the list below, I think my standards are getting easier.) 90 books total; here are my favorites:
Fiction
- Declare, Tim Powers: an engrossing thriller that weaves the Cold War with a supernatural battle to control djinns and other entities.
- The Bottoms, Joe R. Lansdale: A mystery with horror elements, narrated by a 10-year-old and set in 1934 Texas; when the body of a young black woman is found, was she murdered by the legendary Goat Man who haunts a local bridge?
- The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross: Takes the technothriller genre and marries it with the Lovecraftian universe of alternate dimensions and alien menaces.
- The Final Solution: A Story of Detection, Michael Chabon: A lonely German refugee boy has his parrot stolen, attracting the interest of a retired detective whose solitary life now largely consists of keeping bees. Chabon's Holmes is in his 80s and has become a stately ruin, fitting into this poignant short novel.
- Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years: The Adventures of the Great Detective in India and Tibet, Jamyang Norbu: a respectful pastiche fleshing out Holmes's adventures in Tibet.
- The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime: Con Artists, Burglars, Rogues, and Scoundrels From the Time of Sherlock Holmes: A great collection of detective fiction about criminals and rogues, written from the 1890s to the 1920s.
- Tom's Midnight Garden, Philippa Pearce: wistful and affectionate YA novel, in which the lonely Tom discovers that when the clock strikes thirteen, the back door leads to a beautiful garden that isn't there during the day.
- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks: Inspired by Studs Terkel's oral histories, a novel written as a series of interviews taken long after a plague of virus-created zombies.
Non-fiction
- Degunking Your Home, Jodi Ballew: A guide to eliminating clutter from your home, with lots of suggestions, tips, and little padding.
- The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong, Matthew Stewart: A skeptical look at the history of 20th-century business management theories.
- Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life, John Adams: the US's most respected living composer survey his life and career.
- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandries, Neil deGrasse Tyson: a collection of essays on astronomy and physics.
- The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell: tackles deep questions of US history with a light touch through exploring the Pilgrims.
- Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, Nick Reding: examines Oelwein, Iowa's struggles with methamphetamine and the resulting social stresses.
- Columbine, Dave Cullen: a comprehensive book that assesses the killings and aims to dispel commonly held myths about them.
- The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective, Kate Summerscale: a page-turning historical mystery that's also an examination of the Victorian fascination with detectives.
- Dogs and Demons: Tales From the Dark Side of Japan, Alex Kerr: argues that Japan is a society in decline, belying Western notions of it as a high-tech powerhouse.
- The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder, Daniel Stashower: combines a biography of Poe with an account of the Mary Rogers case; Poe turned the case into a story to present his own solution.
- Going Broke: Why Americans Can't Hold on to Their Money, Stuart Vyse: Examines the steady increase in debt and decrease in savings by American households since the 1970s, and tries to diagnose the causes.