We asked some of our contributors for their favorite books they read this year. (Most listed new books, but a few picked older favorites or ones that will come out in the new year.)

I was riveted by Martin Amis’s “The Zone of Interest,” with its daring projection into the mind and “heart” of a character (Paul Doll, the commandant of a Nazi concentration camp) who, like Nabokov’s Kinbote, is a tour de force of crazed self-delusion. I just wish the whole book was in Doll’s voice, with his eruptions of unintentional humor, swathes of bathetic self-pity, and moments of blasé horror: he may have, at one point, killed a small girl prisoner who reaches for his hand, but it’s typical of Amis’s artfully elliptical method that I can’t be sure; I kept wincingly rereading the passage, as if through my fingers, trying to figure out what happened but not wanting to. It felt like a fitting way to spy on historical events that are impossible to look at but that must, nevertheless, always be kept in sight.

**“The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses,” **by Kevin Birmingham, is an engrossing non-fiction account of how Joyce wrote “Ulysses” and how he managed, against near-impossible odds, to get it published. While the book stirs fury against the moralistic government forces arrayed against Joyce’s avant-garde masterpiece, Birmingham’s book also gives rise to uneasy intimations of the invidious forces of self-censorship at work today, forces that arise from publishers’ commercial worries, political correctness, and the hegemony of the campus creative-writing crowd. Reading about Joyce’s courageous battle makes one wonder: Where is today’s dangerous book—our “Ulysses,” “Lolita,” or “Portnoy’s Complaint”?

I guess I was in the mood for anti-heroes this year, because the other novel I can’t stop thinking about is Edith Wharton’s pitiless “The Custom of the Country” and its amazing central character, Undine Spragg. Tracing the ever-upward trajectory of this conscience-free, acquisitive, vain, incurious, and ambitious Midwestern beauty, “Custom,” although published a hundred and one years ago, feels entirely appropriate to the present moment: an anatomy of the kind of blind greed and self-involvement (devoid of all self-knowledge) paraded every night on the more popular of TV’s reality shows. One difference is that, despite everything, Wharton somehow makes us root for, if not exactly like, the unsinkable, unthinkable Undine.

—John Colapinto

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I’ve never been a member of a book club, but last winter I felt I was, when I and just about every writer I know were reading and talking about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle.” I read the first three volumes in quick succession, largely while crisscrossing England by train while on book tour in March, and the damp scenes outside my window resonated perfectly with the melancholy of the recollected life upon the page. I was thrilled by the way Knausgaard dared to explore the absolutely mundane, while also being unembarrassed about considering the utterly transcendent. While the books are often extremely funny, they are also an exemplary argument for the value of taking oneself, and one’s life, seriously, and I could not be happier that there are still three more volumes to go. I was captivated in a different way by Zia Haider Rahman’s “In the Light of What We Know,” which I’ve been urging on friends since reading it last summer. A novel that is concerned with friendship, geopolitics, math, and science, it’s talky and intellectual, while also unfolding a riveting drama: a deeply satisfying book, all the more impressive for being Rahman’s first. Finally, two books I read this year that aren’t yet published in the U.S., but will be soon: “Outline,” a novel by Rachel Cusk, and “H is for Hawk,” a memoir by Helen Macdonald. In their very different ways, Cusk and Macdonald both admirably resist succumbing to the very British disease of self-deprecation, while also skirting any temptation to present an easily likeable literary persona. I predict that members of my imaginary book club will take up both books with great excitement, and I can’t wait to discuss them.

—Rebecca Mead

The two photo books that moved me most this year were both explorations of absence. “Evidence” (Schilt Publishing), by Diana Matar, is a heartwrenching essay on the artist’s search for her father-in-law, who was abducted by Qaddafi. Rochester, New York, in the wake of Kodak’s decline, is the subject of the poetic, elliptical “Memory City” (Radius Books), by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb.

Glenn Kurtz discovered a family film made by his grandfather in 1938. It includes brief footage of a crowd of Jewish adults and children in a Polish village: a glimpse into a world that would soon be almost totally wiped out. But, as Kurtz shows in “Three Minutes In Poland” (FSG), what little was saved miraculously becomes a guide back into what was lost.

And Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen” (Graywolf Press) was simply the keenest and most necessary of poetry books this year: the right words in the right order, yes, but also a shot in the arm of the body politic.

—Teju Cole

While driving around New England on Thanksgiving weekend, I heard “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the car radio and happily remembered the pleasure, this summer, of reading Bob Stanley’s “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé,” which memorably described the song’s opening sound as “a cascade of Pepsi bubbles.” This year, there were only a few new books I proselytized about: Elena Ferrante’s “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay” was one, and “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” was another. (I wrote about it more fully here.) Stanley’s writing amuses and appeals; it’s like pop music on the page. The Everly Brothers “looked the very image of Southern hoodlums” but “had the voices of harmonizing bluebirds.” The skiffle revolution began “when British teens realized that they could make it onto the radio by mastering a broomstick and a kazoo.” Stanley makes well-known bands seem new again and tells stories we haven’t heard—one anecdote contains the line “The pub was closed, but when the villagers saw there was a Beatle at the door they opened it up.” Early this year, I eagerly started reading a long-anticipated book about a band I adore, wanting to learn everything I could, only to discover that the writing jumped around. I abandoned it, disgruntled and sad. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” is the opposite—Stanley’s writing invites you in and teaches you new things, entertaining you as you rock the night away.

—Sarah Larson

I’ve been living in Rome for the past few months, so this year I disproportionately read books by Italians. Two I’d recommend that, I think, are not already on everyone’s list are “To Each His Own,” by Leonardo Sciascia, and “Confessions of an Italian,” by Ippolito Nievo. Sciascia’s book, from 1966, is a darkly elegant tale of corruption, betrayal, and futility. Nievo’s, written in 1858, is a sprawling story of love, valor, and the Risorgimento. Neither is new, but the first complete version of Nievo’s book in English was published just this year, in a wonderful translation by Frederika Randall.