Better Late Than Never
Going Bovine, Libba Bray
Death Masks, Jim Butcher
The Chalk Circle Man, Fred Vargas
Makers, Cory Doctorow
Brisingr, Christopher Paolini
Manhood for Amateurs, Michael Chabon
The Magicians, Lev Grossman
Seeking Whom he may Devour, Fred Vargas
Julie and Julia, Julie Powell
The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
How to Sew a Button, Erin Bried
This I Believe, Ed: Jay Allison, Dan Gediman
The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver
Wash This Blood Clean from my Hands, Fred Vargas
Opening Up, Tristan Taormino
Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman
I am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced, Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui
Blood Rites, Jim Butcher
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Seth Grahame Smith
Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, Melissa Milgram
The Big Necessity: the Unmentionable World of Human Waste and why it Matters, Rose George
This Nights Foul Work, Fred Vargas
On Becoming a Doctor, Tania Heller MD
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi
Dead Beat, Jim Butcher
A Devil to Play, Jasper Rees
Y: The Last Man, Brian Vaughan
Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman
Don't Sleep, There are Snakes, Daniel Everett
The Spare Room, Helen Garner
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
Tokyo Vice, Jake Adelstein
Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi
Emiko Superstar, Mariko Tamaki and Steve Rolston
Flight, Sherman Alexi
Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis
Resistence: book 1, Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis
Moresukine, Dirk Schwieger
The Eternal Smile, Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim
Tonoharu, Lars Martinson
The Passage, Justin Cronin
Proven Guilty, Jim Butcher
Packing for Mars, Mary Roach
Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal
War is Boring, David Axe and Matt Bors
i know i am, but what are you? Samantha Bee
Smile, Raina Telgemeier
The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet, Myrlin Hermes
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Little Bee, Chris Cleave
Behemoth, Scott Westerfeld
White Night, Jim Butcher
The Three Evangelists, Fred Vargas
Koko be Good, Jen Wang
The Girl who Played with Fire, Stieg Larsson
Small Favors, Jim Butcher
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale
Incendiary, Chris Cleave
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
Looking back it was a really good year for reading!
Of the non-fiction I would most recommend Packing for Mars, followed closely by The Big Necessity and Still Life.
The fiction is a little harder to narrow down.
The Magicians is a story about a magical school, but much more gritty and haunting than what you see in the YA that spawned the genre.
Fred Vargas brings a fabulous new protagonist to the world of detective stories. I can't wait for more of her work to make the leap into English.
Flight gave me shivers.
I ended up yelling at Bitter Seeds because I didn't know that it is just the start of a series. And the next book isn't out yet! And I want more!!!
I'm also anxiously awaiting the next book in Scott Westerfeld's new series.
Those are just the frontrunners, there are a lot of others on the list that I have found myself recommending. (Shades of Milk and Honey, The Lacuna, The Passage, The Windup Girl, A Devil to Play, the Jim Butcher books.)