So there’s no reason that a list of the year’s best books ought to be more difficult to compile than a list of the year’s best theatrical productions or internet memes. There are more books out there than ever, after all, what with the increase in digital and print-on-demand varieties. Yet it was a bit like pulling teeth to get more than a couple of suggestions out of the likely suspects this year. If our contributors are anything like I am, it’s not because they aren’t reading, but because they may be a bit behind. For instance, I’m currently deeply engrossed in a fantastic book that happens to hail from the year 2010—The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Fortunately for us, books, unlike theatrical productions and bacon, have no expiration date, which means the tomes we plan to read often pile up faster than we can attend to them. The year 2011 brought with it numerous books worth adding to the pile, however, and here is our list of 10. (Andrea Appleton)

1 Joan Didion, Blue Nights (Knopf) Blue Nights is ostensibly a memoir about the death of Joan Didion’s daughter. If it sounds like this could be horribly sentimental, you don’t know Didion. In fact, the rhythm, the obsessive return, the understatement—in short, the style—is as beautiful and brutal as anything she has written. “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children,” she writes. And yet, when Didion writes about the death of her daughter it is clear that she is also writing about her own mortality. We’re lucky to get such a report from one of our greatest writers. (Baynard Woods)

2 Ali Smith, There But for The(Pantheon) At a dinner party a guy walks into a room—and never leaves. This could be the setup to a conventionally silly joke, but in the unconventional mind of British novelist Ali Smith it becomes the banal event off of which a series of interlocking character pieces combine to create this ingeniously organized and shrewdly pleasurable novel. The guy is Miles, the dinner party is a friend of a friend’s, the book’s four sections come from the point of view of different guests whose lives have in some way crossed that of Miles, and the sheer reading joy comes from Smith’s smart and nuanced touch with observation and language. (Bret McCabe)

3 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King(Little, Brown, and Co.) Subtitled “An Unfinished Novel,” The Pale King is at split ends in at least two senses: David Foster Wallace took his life prior to molding the book into finished form, and his narratives pointedly resisted coherent linearity. Like 1997’s Gravity’s-Rainbow-for-Gen-X future-fic absurdity Infinite Jest, King seems to explode wildly and brilliantly in all directions. Unlike Jest—a meditation on chemical dependency, competitive tennis, and theoretical avant garde cinema—King busies itself with the granularity of tedium; it is what might best be described as an archeology of boredom. Competing buttoned-up perspectives shift, shimmy, and flicker in and around early 1980s Internal Revenue Service examination centers like spreading flames, strewn with digressive footnotes, exhaustingly dry IRS mythology, and the kind of soaring prose that’s as emotionally searing as it is deftly satiric. (Raymond Cummings)

4 Lawrence Weschler, Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative (Counterpoint) “We long to lose ourselves in stories—that’s who we are,” Lawrence Weschler writes. He makes it easy for us to get lost in his new collection of nonfiction, Uncanny Valley, which offers his trademark blend of erudition and gee-whiz wonder. The title of the book comes from an essay about the attempt to create a realistic human face with CGI—but in Weschler’s hands it becomes a breezy and yet profound theological study about what it means to be human. His profiles of film editor and sound designer Walter Murch and twin artists Trevor and Ryan Oakes are nothing short of mind-blowing. (BW)

5 Michael Kimball, Us (Tyrant) Michael Kimball’s novel, though simple in style, will yank on the heartstrings of even the most stoic of readers. An elderly man watches as his wife’s health slowly declines; they both know she’s dying and they do whatever they can to stave off the inevitable. Years later, their grandson looks back on their relationship and explores his own marriage and mortality. Us bravely portrays an aspect of life that many of us ignore. We’re all familiar with the classic boy-meets-girl scenario, but what would happen if the tale kept going? Kimball takes the reader to the end of the love story—the real end—and shows just how crushing it can be. (Erin Gleeson)

6 Errol Morris, Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (Penguin) Errol Morris is known for documentary films like The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and, most recently, Tabloid. Morris had always wanted to write, but suffered from chronic writer’s block until The New York Times asked him to do a blog. Blog is an understatement: The beautiful and obsessive essays use transcripts, maps, diagrams and Morris’ own ruminations and travels to investigate how we process “truth” in photographs. You’d never think you could care so much about the position of cannonballs in a photo from the Crimean War, but when you read this collection of essays, trust us, you will. (BW)