Doesn’t matter when they were published, but you read 'em and loved 'em in the last calendar year.
I’ll get the ball rolling now, and post my list later. A little busy here at the moment.
Thanks for the thread, EH! Hope you get your quota of message board time in today. 
In looking at my Goodreads list, I see I didn’t rate anything five stars this year. I don’t like to give books the highest rating unless they like, changed my life, man! So four stars only means I enjoyed them all to pieces. In no particular order:
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
Cold Days by Jim Butcher, Dresden Files series
The Prophet by Michael Koryta
The Big Book of Ghost Stories edited by Otto Penzler
The Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant
Wool by Hugh Howey
Cold in July and Edge of Dark Water both by Joe R. Lansdale
Lightspeed: Year One, edited by John Joseph Adams
Honorable mention to Flashman and the Dragon, part of a four-star series which I think we are all already reading or have read!
Beany Malone by Lenora Mattingly Weber, if you like that sweet nostalgia sort of thing.
The Chicken Pox Papers, by Susan Terris, a rediscovered childhood favorite.
Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary “Jacky” Faber, Ship’s Boy by L. A. Meyer. This was an audiobook, wondrously read by Katherine Kellgren.
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Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
2.*** Darkness at Noon*** by Arthur Koestler - ***The Nine Tailors ***by Dorothy Sayers
- ***The Daughter of Time ***by Josephine Tey
- ***Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
6. The Age of Innocence ***by Edith Wharton - ***The 39 Steps ***by John Buchan
- ***The Old Wives’ Tale ***by Arnold Bennett
- The Woman in White by Willkie Collins
- ***Scoop ***by Evelyn Waugh
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The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Making of History’s Greatest Map - Toby Lester
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Bridge of Birds - Barry Hughart
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The Last Hero - Terry Pratchett
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**Harpo Speaks **- Harpo Marx & Rowland Barber
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**The Universe in a Nutshell **- Stephen Hawking
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A Plague on Both Your Houses - Susanna Gregory
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**Dodger **- Terry Pratchett
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The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance - Paul Walker (Brunelleschi’s Dome is a MUCH better book, but this was a good intro to the time period)
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Cloud of Sparrows - Takashi Matsuoka
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**Blacklist **- Sara Paretsky
Hard to cull 10 out of 77 books read! Although I must admit finding 10 I would NEVER read again would be easy:D
This has been a slow year for books for me. I got a kindle this year, but overwhelmed by choice, and not wanting to commit to a long book that will take ages to get through so I can read something else, I read nothing. It doesn’t help that I get distracted by the internet.
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Gone series
I read what’s been published so far of a series by an author I loved as a child - or well, he’s the wife of the “author”, but ghost-wrote a lot of the books. The series I read this year was Gone, and it’s by Michael Grant, who is married to K.A. Applegate, the author of the Animorphs series. So it’s “young adult” fiction, but by an author I was excited to read something new by. It was also pretty fun on its own merits. Nothing groundbreaking or award worthy, and has flaws, but enjoyable. -
Magister trilogy
I owned the first book in The Magister Trilogy before reading the full series this year, but never got around to it. The series is about a woman who is essentially a sociopath, and by virtue of this, is able to steal power from other peoples’ lifespans to use herself, killing them in the process. Definitely a villain protagonist, and the series gets novelty points for there being pretty much no “good guys”. Not even shades of grey guys. All the major protagonists and antagonists are equally evil. -
Jennifer Government
Jennifer Government is a book by a guy who made a quite neat online game called “NationStates”. It’s about an objectivist twenty minutes into the future America where capitalism is king. The government is nothing but another corporation and people can choose to buy into their services, or not. The book deals with corporate espionage, up to and including a coalition of corporations like Nike, IBM and Coca-cola all declaring war on what little laws remain, and the government. -
The Night Circus
The Night Circus is a book I read because I’d often seen it referred to as being similar to my favourite book (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, if you’re interested). It wasn’t similar at all in my opinion, but it was enjoyable enough. It had a unique, almost onomatopoeic writing style: it dealt with a timeless, almost mystical and mysterious circus (it makes sense in context), and the prose definitely sets the mood all the way through. -
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Another future-America pseudo-philosophical style book about a post-scarcity and immortal society where money has become obsolete and wealth is measured in the respect of your peers, in a literal currency called “whuffie”. It was okay for what it was. A bit preachy and seemed like its point was to talk about Cory’s ideal utopian society rather than telling a story.
And… I can’t actually think of anything else I read for the first time this year. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but mostly I re-read stuff this year and anxiously waited for it to be 2013, which is when a lot of sequels to series I’ve been enjoying are due to be released.
EDIT: labelled and numbered, though they’re in no particular order.
I read other books, but these were the only five that stood out:
- Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn
- The Passage of Power (Years of Lyndon Johnson) - Robert Caro
- The Presidents Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity - Nancy Gibbs
- Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking - Susan Cain
- Manhunt: The Ten Year Search for bin Laden - Peter L. Bergen
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***Longitude ***by Dava Sobel
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***Consciousness Explained ***by Daniel Dennett
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How God Changes Your Brain by Andrew Newberg
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The Dress Lodger by Sheri Holman
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Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens
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The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
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Albert Einstein - A Biography by Albrecht Folsing
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding
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The Reader by Bernard Schlink
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A Country of Vast Designs (basically, Polk’s presidency) by Robert Merry
My favorite books this year:
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Silently and Very Fast by Catherryne M. Valente ** my favorite of the year **
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Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold
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Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold
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Among Others by Jo Walton
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Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
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Ship of Destiny by Robin Hobb
7.Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh
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Moon Called by Patricia Briggs
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Woolby Hugh Howey (still reading the sequels)
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Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It by Gary Taubes
I’m just going to post my two favorite of the year.
2: This Book is Full of Spiders. This is the sequel to John Dies at the End by one of the Cracked.com writers. I enjoyed the first one quite a bit and the second was even better. It was much more focused and he was better able to play with some of the concepts he introduced in the first.
1: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian This book was part of my assigned reading for my Children’s Lit class. I wasn’t going to read it but my internet was down one night and I got bored. I’m so very glad I did, as I found it amazing and finished it that night. I’m applying to graduate school, as are a lot of my friends, and they, top students at a world class university, are still feeling a lot of the issues that the protagonist in the book feel. Are they betraying their family and friends by potentially moving across the country? Are they betraying themselves? Their parents work hard to give them opportunities and yet don’t want their children to take them if it means leaving the area.
Trapped by Marc Aronson
Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
Bossypants by Tina Fey
Life Itself: A Memoir by Roger Ebert
A World on Fire by Amanda Foreman
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson
No Easy Day by Mark Owen
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Secrets of Professional Tournament Poker by Jonathan Little
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey - part mystery, part history (her other Alan Grant books are good too)
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Slow Horses* by Mick Herron - British spy spoof, witty and ironic
11/22/63 by Stephen King - a trip… back to the 60’s
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Bruno, Chief of Police* by Martin Walker - the subject matter is dark, the detective is cuddly, the small village in France is charming, plus Walker can write
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro - beautifully written story about a butler’s regrets
Still Life by Louise Penny - mystery series set in rural Quebec with quirky characters
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The Bell Jar* by Sylvia Plath - a revelation
A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson - hard to put down history of science
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton - tragic and dark
Unbroken by Lauren Hillenbrand - harrowing true story of survival set in the Pacific in WWII
Great thread idea! It looks like I read a lot of stinkers this year, but I did manage to find ten I liked:
Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
Heroic Measures: A Novel, by Jill Ciment
11/22/63, by Stephen King
Winter’s Bone, by Danial Woodrell
Reamde, by Neal Stephenson
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
Poetry of the American West, by Alison Hawthorne Deming
The Atrocity Book, by Joan Colby
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
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American Gods by Neil Gaiman
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Alien Emergencies: A Sector General Omnibus by James White
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The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
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The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
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Blackbringer by Laini Taylor
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General Practice: A Sector General Omnibus by James White
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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
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Archangel by Sharon Shinn
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Right Ho, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse
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The Tell-Tale Brain by V. S. Ramachandran
The first six on this list are the ones I rated five stars, 7-10 are the best of the ones I gave four stars.
- 11/22/63 by Stephen King
- The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
…and the rest in no particular order:
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope
The Virginians by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Newcomes by William Makepeace Thackeray
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
Bossypants by Tina Fey
It might look like I’m a big fan of Anthony Trollope, but note that I read twelve of his books this year and only three made the top ten list. Also note that I read Three Men in a Boat this year as well, but it didn’t make the cut.
• Main Street, by Sinclair Lewis. This was a re-read. It’s my favorite book of all time.
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer.
• The “Little House on the Prairie” series by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I re-read these in preparation for reading Wendy McClure’s “The Wilder Life.” It was fun to revisit them as an adult.
• Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell. This was another re-read.
• The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.
• Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith.
• Twisted Tree, by Kent Meyers.
• A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord
• Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. And yet another re-read.
• The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie, by Wendy McClure.
I liked a lot of the titles already mentioned, especially The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie (I was really laughing out loud at some parts of this, and I’m not usually a “laugh out loud” reader) and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, I love Sherman Alexie. I don’t think Gone Girl was one of the BEST books I read this year, but it was probably the biggest page-turner.
My top ten for 2012:
Kraken by China Mieville
Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein
Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America by David Reynolds
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson
The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains by owen Wister
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery by D.T. Max (and a recommendation I got from the SDMB)
A Dance With Dragons by George R.R. Martin
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
I’m at work so don’t have time to put down ten (or even think through the choices), but I do know my top five for now:
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HHhH (Laurent Binet) - an account of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich who, evidently, was known as ‘Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich’ in German (‘Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich’ in English), hence the HHhH title. The only work of history in which I’m aware the author keeps confessing to the reader sentiments to the effect of “I’m not really sure this is the way it happened, but it would be appropriately tragic”.
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Destiny of the Republic (Candice Millard) - many things: a heart-wrenching biogrpahy of James Garfield, a chronicle of US politics circa 1880, a scathing look at “Medicine” of the era. Outstanding in every way.
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The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America (Timothy Egan) - live and learn; I had no idea about this HUGE forest fire nor was I aware what an anachronism Teddy Roosevelt was. He would fit in well with the Green Party today.
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To End All Wars (Adam Hochschild) - WWI as experienced by the minority who opposed it. Remarkable stuff. All of it new to me.
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Agent Zigzag (Ben MacIntyre) - Ostensibly true, the story of a truly remarkable double-agent (Zigzag) with nerves and balls of steel. He did as much damage to the Germans as radar and Ultra!
Just added to my TBR pile.
Good move. You won’t be disappointed.
Mine, too!