My year’s best lists are different from those you’ll find most places in that I see no reason to distinguish between books published in the year at issue and books published earlier than that. Most readers are more like me, I think: they concentrate on what sounds good, regardless of when it was published, rather than on what is new. I try to read widely and well, and that means I’m usually reading classics even while I’m reading books that have not yet been published. I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again: so many books, so little time!

I missed my usual post for 2010, and so decided to include those books in this post, especially because the two years pose a considerable contrast. In 2011, I started working a second part-time job, and my legal work quadrupled. That’s not as bad as it sounds, as I’d been working part-time from 2007 through 2010; I’m now up to about half-time, and sometimes more than that, with 2012 looking likely to double the current load to just about full-time when I’m not traveling. It’s going to be a challenge, but I think I can meet it, and the income means (a) more books and (b) travel, including to places with excellent bookstores. However, working harder and longer means fewer books read. In 2010, I read 106 books. In 2011, that figure dropped to 61. Quite a difference.

It was also in 2011 that I started reviewing for Fantasy Literature. I love working with that group of people, some of the most informed individuals about science fiction, fantasy and horror that you can find. Even better, they’re a great group of people, kind, interesting, funny, smart. I’m lucky I fell into this situation. My major contribution to the group, apart from my reviews, has been my commitment to reviewing magazines. I wrote 31 Magazine Monday columns in 2011, which means I read 31 (actually, more) magazines. That takes some time away from reading novels, anthologies and collections; in fact, if you count magazines as “books,” my reading seems to be about the same as last year, even as I did more writing.

We also had a major move in 2011. When my husband retired from teaching at Santa Clara University, we moved from the San Francisco Bay area to the Sacramento area for access to more affordable housing and more friends of long standing. It was quite a task to box up our library of some 15,000 volumes. My husband did virtually all the packing and unpacking as I continued to do legal work, but the move was definitely disruptive, despite the enjoyable outcome. We have lots more room in our new digs, and have already purchased at least six new bookcases, all of which were immediately filled to overflow. Funny thing: this all happened even as I grew more comfortable with my Kindle, which now holds over 300 volumes.

The year turned out differently from what I was predicting as I made my resolutions at the beginning of last year. I’m hesitant to make any resolutions this year, as life seems to be changing from one minute to the next these days. I made three resolutions: (1) to write every morning for about an hour before I begin any legal work, barring emergencies – so far book reviews and the like, as I have quite a backlog; (2) to become more efficient with my time, hitting deadlines and lowering my anxiety levels, which are presently through the roof; and (3) returning to exercising and eating more healthily, with a greater emphasis on vegetables than on meat. Both those healthy changes disappeared with the disruption of our routine with the mid-year move, and we haven’t gotten back to them yet. It’s time.

With that said, here are my favorite books from 2010 and 2011.

My favorite book from the past two years was Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald (reviewed here). It is a work of tremendous imagination and depth. McDonald paints a picture of a future world in which India is at the forefront of innovation and technology – and what technology! The human ability to tinker with genetics is especially important to this collection of linked short stories. Like all excellent science fiction, it takes current trends (such as the ability to choose the gender of one’s child) and expands upon them, exploring their consequences. It’s a fascinating book of great depth. It gets my highest recommendation.

Another book that I keep thinking about is Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Dressler is an entrepreneur, a businessman, who uses his imagination to create ever more innovative hotels. You can’t help but wish the hotels Dressler invents existed in the real world, to visit yourself; they seem to combine Disneyland with all the elegance of the Waldorf Astoria. Dressler’s personal life never seems to match his work life in interest; it is, in fact, fairly disastrous, as he chooses to marry the wrong one of two sisters. His rise is amazing, and his fall seems to be as gradual as a dandelion seed floating to earth, gentle but ultimately landing at the bottom all the same. It’s a fascinating character study.

Laird Barron’s Occultation (reviewed here) is a horror collection that contains some of the most frightening tales I’ve ever read. Some of them, like “Strappado,” continue to haunt me. Barron writes primarily of the ancient monstrosities that live hidden away in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the counterparts to H.P. Lovecraft’s New England horrors – except that Barron is a better writer. He has a novel coming out in 2012 called The Croning, and I’m as eager to read it as I’ve ever been to read anything. Barron is enormously gifted.

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (reviewed here) is fourth on my best of the best list. It is the story of a man who is charged with writing the introduction to a book of poetry, and of his procrastination before getting down to the task. As is true with many writers, a lot of interesting things take place during the protagonist’s writer’s block. It’s almost like taking a great class in poetry, as Baker has his anthologist talk about rhythm and rhyme and how to read a poem. I enjoyed every word of this book.

I discovered several wonderful urban fantasy series, a subgenre I had more or less disdained before hitting upon these examples of them. Kat Richardson’s Greywalker series, set in the Pacific Northwest, have a strong, independent female protagonist who finds after a near-death experience that she can see the Grey, a sort of electrical psychic field that allows her to affect the physical world as well as occasionally visit the past. It’s a great resource for a private detective. I read the entire series in order, and three of them made the “best” list: Greywalker (reviewed here), Vanished (reviewed here) and Labyrinth (reviewed here).

Another excellent urban fantasy series is Seanan McGuire’s October Daye books. October – Toby – Daye is also essentially a private investigator, but to the world of Faerie: she a knight to one of the royal houses, and solves problems for her liege lord. She is a changeling, that is, part human, and therefore has to struggle with her magic, which makes her a more compelling character. Things occasionally go very wrong for Toby; for instance, she spends more than a decade as a fish when a bad guy transforms her. Her struggles make this series fascinating, as the books don’t follow the usual conventions of either mysteries or fantasy. A number of the books in the series made my “best” list: Rosemary and Rue, the first in the series (reviewed here); An Artificial Night; Late Eclipses; and One Salt Sea.

My favorite urban fantasy series, though, is M.L.N. Hanover’s Black Sun’s Daughter, featuring Jayne Heller. Jayne is in her early 20s with no knowledge of who or what she is, though she begins learning when her beloved uncle dies and leaves his entire estate to her. Jayne hadn’t known that her uncle was ridiculously wealthy, and certainly didn’t know that he was a demon hunter, a profession she inherits every bit as much as she inherits homes in virtually every big city in the world. The most notable thing about this series is that Jayne faces a bigger challenge in every book, and that every book sees her character develop significantly. I can hardly wait for the next book, in which Jayne will face the most challenging hurdle of all: dealing with her family. There are four books in the series so far, and every single one made my “best” list in the year of their publication: Unclean Spirits (reviewed here); Darker Angels (reviewed here); Vicious Grace (reviewed here); and Killing Rites (reviewed here).

My magazine reviewing has made it clear that it was a terrific couple of years for short fiction, but anthologies and collections made it even clearer. Daniel Abraham’s Leviathan Wept and Other Stories, one of the lovely books produced by Golden Gryphon Press, was among the best. No two Abraham stories share the same theme or even style, but every story is well worth reading. “Flat Diane” and “The Cambist and Lord Iron” are especially good.

Kevin Wilson combines Kafka, Chabon and the literature of the fantastic to turn out stories of weird beauty in Tunneling to the Center of the Earth (reviewed here). The stories are set in such places as a factory where Scrabble tiles are sorted, a museum of detritus, and the place where sounds are added to toys (like Chatty Cathy’s voice). Though Wilson’s stories tend to appear in literary journals, they’d be equally at home in the pages of a science fiction and fantasy magazine.

I loved Kelly Eskridge’s Dangerous Space (reviewed here). Eskridge’s subject is creativity in all its forms, interwoven with love. I especially enjoyed the title story, which is about making music, sex and love, and how they all work together. “Stradivarius” is also exceptional, being about a society in which those who play instruments must do so according to a standard performance, and must not create new music, and the toll these strictures take on those who are creative. It’s an excellent collection that has not received the attention it should.

Steven Millhauser’s collection of three novellas, Little Kingdoms (reviewed here), confirms him as one of my personal finds of the 21st century. In his best pieces, Millhauser writes about the world of work, what we do to make a living. Millhauser doesn’t write about doctors and lawyers, as most authors who write about this part of life seem to do, but about entrepreneurs, filmmakers, comic strip artists. “The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne” is such a story, and it is easily the best of the three novellas here, with luminous writing about ordinary days.

I’m trying to circle back and read some of the progenitors of the fantasy genre. Thus, Shirley Jackson is high on my list, and I enjoyed We Have Always Lived in the Castle. This short novel was allegedly based on Jackson’s own experience living as an outcast in a small New England town. It is a creepy, strange novel about a young woman who simply isn’t – well, right. There is no overtly fantastical element, but the strange atmosphere makes the book feel haunted.

Two years ago, I was in a reading group with an amazing collection of women in Palo Alto, California. We read some wonderful books, including two that made my “best” list: The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey, and The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels. The former is about two young women who share a house in London, told in four sections from four different viewpoints, each subtly linked to a literary figure (John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens). It’s a sad book, written with grace and style. The Winter Vault is fascinating in its depiction of a marriage seemingly built on water, from the creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway to the saving of Abu Simbel when it was about to be flooded due to the building of the Aswan Dam in Egypt. Anne Michaels is a poet before she is a novelist, and the prose in this book is lovely.

My reading has shifted more and more toward the fantastic in all its guises, but every now and then a mystery still sneaks in, and a read a couple that were especially noteworthy in the last couple of years. John Hart’s The Last Child (reviewed here) won the Edgar Award in 2010. It’s the story of a boy who who loses his twin sister, and can’t adapt to the loss – and what happens a year after his sister vanishes. The Serialist, a first novel by David Gordon (reviewed here), was nominated for an Edgar in the best first novel category, and is about a writer who has been selected by a Death Row inmate to tell his story before he gets the needle. The inmate manages to manipulate the writer into meeting some of the women who have been writing him love letters, an odd phenomenon beautifully exploited by Gordon to produce a highly original mystery. Duane Swierczynski’s Fun and Games (reviewed here) is one of the wildest rides you can take on the thriller roller coaster – an odd premise carried to tremendous extremes, all written in prose that glues the book to your hands. It definitely lives up to its title.

I don’t read a lot of nonfiction, and when I do, it’s usually related to my interest in fantasy, as was the case with Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy, his take on what fantasy is all about from his perspective as the creator of Elric. It is must reading for any scholar of the fantastic. Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter: A Memoir (reviewed here) captivated me with its description of life as an editor in post-war London, days when women weren’t supposed to have careers. Athill writes in a matter-of-fact tone about her encounters will all manner of authors, but perhaps the most fascinating part of the book is Athill’s own unflinching look at her failings. One can’t help but feel that she’s at least a little hard on herself, given what she accomplished despite the odds being stacked against her.

I often enjoy young adult fantasy, mostly, I think, because I have nephews who enjoy reading nearly as much as I do. It’s sort of cool to swap book recommendations with a 12-year-old. This year, nephew James led me to Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. I liked the first book, titled, naturally enough, The Hunger Games (reviewed here) best of the three. It depicts a strong, self-reliant female protagonist in a dystopia, and it’s really a pleasure to read about a teenage girl who thinks for herself, works hard, and isn’t wrapped up in romance when survival is what’s at stake. On my own, I discovered Cassandra Clare’s quartet beginning with City of Bones (reviewed here), which doesn’t have the raw power of Collins’s work but which is highly enjoyable nonetheless. Elizabeth Hand’s Illyria is a different sort of young adult novella, telling the tale of a couple of teenagers and their love of theater and the disapproval of their families. While all of the books I’m discussing here are for adults as well as for teens, especially the Hand.

Either I am becoming more critical or I’ve simply not read as many good books in the SF/F/H genres as in past years, but my list of “best” books in these categories, apart from those books listed as the very best above, is somewhat limited for 2011 and 2012. I enjoyed K.J. Parker’s Purple and Black (reviewed here), a novella about a prince who is trying to avert a war while keeping his throne. Parker is a master (mistress? No one knows) at military fantasy, and every new book is an event.

Kevin Brockmeier’s The Illumination (reviewed here) is a strange and interesting novel about what happens to the world when pain becomes visible, shining forth from one’s body. Women in high heels have glowing feet, while those with arthritis have hands of light. I deeply admire Brockmeier’s work, and am surprised that this novel didn’t appear on any other “best of the year” lists; I thought it poetically written and imaginatively told.

The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell (reviewed here) is a zombie novel of a different sort. One wonders how different these characters would be if their world were not a post-apocalyptic one in which one must guard against zombies at every turn, and especially how different the protagonist – Temple, a 15-year-old girl – would be. Temple believes in miracles, because she sees them all the time, like the beautiful fish that swim around her feet at the novel’s opening. Bell is a first time novelist, and I’m looking forward to what he comes up with next.

A zombie novel to end all zombie novels, though, is the final novel on this list. Mira Grant’s Feed, the first of the Newsflesh trilogy (reviewed here), is the only zombie novel that ever had me in tears of sorrow – sobbing, in fact. I rarely become so attached to a fictional character as I did to George (actually Georgia, but no one calls her that), the narrator of this book. She is strong, courageous, practical, canny – everything I’d like to be, with a talent for journalism to boot. Mira Grant is a pen name for Seanan McGuire, whose October Daye novels I praised above. Obviously, this woman can write.

That’s 32 books out of a total of 167 read (20 from 2010, 12 from 2011) that I feel I can recommend to you as really good books – about 19%. It’s interesting that this seems to coincide with the famous Sturgeon’s Law that holds that 80% of everything is crap. While I wouldn’t relegate the rest of my reading to the trash heap in such a way, I am resolved to read more books, and more good books, in 2012. Here’s to a year full of pages filled with joy!