Our theme is the year in criticism, and there's plenty to talk about, but first I have to express my astonishment over what we didn't see this year: I can't recall any memoir being exposed as partly or wholly fictional!

I know! It's very disappointing. There was a while there when it seemed like every time you opened a newspaper there was a new one. There was the girl in L.A. who said she grew up in a gang when she really went to a prep school, and the lady who fled the Nazis and went running with the wolves. I've decided that the phony memoir is my favorite genre.

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Stewart, a journalist specializing in war and organized crime, first heard about Ciudad Blanco -- the White City, a magnificent ruin rumored to be buried deep in the jungles of the Mosquitia region of Honduras -- while reporting on the booming Honduran drug trade in 2008. An American ex-soldier who had been involved in training the Nicaraguan contras told him about the legend while describing Mosquitia as the "shittiest, buggiest shithole jungle in the world." Stewart was soon obsessed, and in a few months, he was on a plane for Central America.

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Previously, the only audiobook versions of most of Waugh's celebrated novels -- from "Vile Bodies" to the colonial parody "Set Out More Flags" -- were so severely abridged that they made no sense at all. (An exception was Jeremy Irons' recording of Waugh's most popular book, "Brideshead Revisited.") This was ridiculous; the new unabridged audiobook version of "Scoop" -- just released with 12 other Waugh titles to coincide with handsome new print editions from Little, Brown -- is less than seven hours long, substantially shorter than most other audio titles. There's not a lot of fat in Waugh's fiction, and cutting any of it is a crime against the reader.

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Esterly is that uncommon thing, a visual artist who can coax as much beauty from words as he can from his primary medium. The medium is wood, specifically limewood, a "charismatic" material noted for its creamy pallor and, among woodcarvers, for its "crisp and firm" texture and reticent grain. The great master of limewood carving was a 17th-century Dutch-born Englishman named Grinling Gibbons. His works adorn several London churches and stately homes, among them Hampton Court Palace, a royal residence in Richmond upon Thames.

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All of which is to say that we critics don't read these lists the way you do -- not, that is, unless you also compulsively check them against your own personal pantheon and then curse yourself for not skipping sleep for a week to make time to read the new Robert Caro. These days, most readers mulling over which book to pick up next regard year-end lists the way they regard book reviews themselves: It takes several persuasive recommendations before they'll give a book a shot. Everyone feels they have less time for reading than ever before, so they want to be as confident as possible about the books they spend it on.

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This hefty book is organized around a seemingly simple, stark question: How do parents and children form relationships when profound differences divide them? The answer contains a universe of emotions and ideas -- be prepared to have your fundamental notions of self, family and society turned inside out and upside down. Solomon ("The Noonday Demon"), a gay man, was clearly drawn to the mystery of filial love by his own painful childhood experience, but he ran wide with the idea. He has recorded the parents of deaf, autistic, mentally disabled, dwarfed, schizophrenic and transgender children describing their lives and histories, as well as the parents of children conceived by rape or who have committed serious crimes. What he learns, however, applies to everyone, and Solomon's approach -- patient, careful, evenhanded but not detached, as well as infinitely compassionate and understanding -- is a revelation. This is that very rare book that offers equal parts intellectual challenge and emotional catharsis, and without a doubt it has the power to change the way you view the world.

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This hefty book is organized around a seemingly simple, stark question: How do parents and children form relationships when profound differences divide them? The answer contains a universe of emotions and ideas -- be prepared to have your fundamental notions of self, family and society turned inside out and upside down. Solomon ("The Noonday Demon"), a gay man, was clearly drawn to the mystery of filial love by his own painful childhood experience, but he ran wide with the idea. He has recorded the parents of deaf, autistic, mentally disabled, dwarfed, schizophrenic and transgender children describing their lives and histories, as well as the parents of children conceived by rape or who have committed serious crimes. What he learns, however, applies to everyone, and Solomon's approach -- patient, careful, evenhanded but not detached, as well as infinitely compassionate and understanding -- is a revelation. This is that very rare book that offers equal parts intellectual challenge and emotional catharsis, and without a doubt it has the power to change the way you view the world.

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Hodgman's very funny compendiums of bogus facts and advice would seem to present a particular challenge for audiobook adapters; the books are full of charts, tables and sidebars, along with amusing uses of typography and illustrations. A daily countdown of events culminating in the Dec. 21 climax of Ragnarok appears inside a little box on each printed page of "That Is All." The solution: Create a distinct recorded version, using the book as a rough guide. This, perhaps, explains why the audiobook was released this fall, a full year after the print edition. Without a doubt, the true Hodgmaniac will want to own both.

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Felix Gilman's two vaguely steampunkish novels, "The Half-Made World" and the just-published "The Rise of Ransom City," come closer than many previous efforts to nailing America's conflicted collective unconscious. The setting is not, of course, called America (any more than Middle-earth is called England). Nevertheless, it's instantly recognizable as a version of the Wild West, a frontier land with towns named Clementine, Gibson or Jasper City, sandwiched between the distant, civilized East and, to the West, a region known only as the Rim. Way out West, as Harry Ransom, the narrator of "The Rise of Ransom City," explains it, are "territories where the future was still open, where laws were still unsettled -- I mean not least what they call the laws of nature, which as everyone knows are different on the Rim."

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Gottlieb's storied career as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster and Alfred A. Knopf, as well as a five-year stint as editor in chief of the New Yorker, has provided him with plenty of firsthand experience in the foibles of literary greats. (He discovered and edited Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" and has edited the work of such authors as John Cheever, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Caro, Barbara Tuchman and Bill Clinton.) Late in life, he launched a second career as a writer, contributing long critical essays to the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, as well as penning biographies of Sarah Bernhardt and George Balanchine. Deciding that the lives of the Dickens children merited further investigation, he followed his usual method of absorbing all available writings on the topic. An irresistibly readable new book, "Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens," is the result.

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Perhaps it's just that the necklace — a gradated strand of perfectly matched pink pearls — lacked a catchy name, or a curse? Nevertheless, this was a significant piece of jewelry. In the early 20th century, before the advent of cultured pearls and when the gems could only be found in one out of hundreds of wild oysters, the necklace was fabulously precious, worth "twice the price of the Hope Diamond" according to Crosby. The New York Times dubbed it "the Mona Lisa of pearls," an odd coincidence since Leonardo da Vinci's painting was also stolen around the same time. The pinching of the pearl necklace -- the property of one Max Mayer, a British jeweler -- did constitute front page news. But Joseph Grizzard, the legendary "King of the Fences" who masterminded the theft, never told his side of the story, so there's been no definitive firsthand account of the caper to move the story along.

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Asked by the Telegraph newspaper to explain why Eliot and Hardy have fallen out of favor with the public, John Bowen, a professor of 19th-century literature, suggested that readers increasingly prefer "more optimistic and comic novels, with happy endings." A staffer of the agency that conducted the survey noted that libraries always see an upsurge in loans of books by authors whose work has been dramatized on film or television. (Elizabeth Gaskell got one of the biggest boosts during the two-decade span, thanks to a popular BBC adaptation of her novella "Cranford.")

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The action mostly takes place stateside, with the title character and his fellow members of the so-called "Bravo squad" making a victory lap through several U.S. cities sometime in the mid-2000s. The soldiers have executed a heroic action in the vicinity of Fox News cameras, and they've been embraced as "real-life American heroes" by the nation. It's Thanksgiving by the time their tour delivers them to a football game in Dallas, the throbbing epicenter of red-blooded, know-nothing, gimcrack patriotism, and 19-year-old Billy has already learned to zone out when people start shaking his hand and talking about "our freedoms." Like the rest of the Bravos, he just wants to meet a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, or better yet, Destiny's Child, who will also be performing on the field at halftime.

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A desire to avoid this tedious (but by no means flagging) genre might keep some readers from Lauren Slater's new book, a linked collection of autobiographical essays about the relationship between people and animals. Two signals that this one is something different: the title, "The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals," which (rightly) suggests that Slater will be getting at some of the more difficult and ambiguous aspects of America's pet fixation, and Slater's track record. She has published six books, all but one of them nonfiction, and in each one she excavates the prickliest roots of subjects such as anti-depressants, pregnancy, psychological experiments, mental illness and the unreliability of the memoir form itself. "Okay, girls," says a drill-sergeant-like riding instructor at a camp she attended as a girl, "Slater has one of her typical profound and provocative questions." Yes she does; she always does.

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Nonfiction: "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity" by Katherine Boo
Fiction: "The Round House" by Louise Erdrich
Young People's Literature: "Goblin Secrets" by William Alexander
Poetry: "Bewilderment" by David Ferry

The New York Times reported earlier this week that the annual NBA dinner, "once-dowdy," is becoming more "glamorous." This is not strictly true. The ceremony has been held at the glittering Cipriani restaurant in downtown Manhattan for several years now, and has featured red-carpet photo ops and celebrity emcees (such as Steve Martin), for much of that time. Authors and their outfits, however, will never be the stuff of tabloid coverage, and what really matters in the renovation of the NBAs are the prizes' shortlists and the winners.

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If we have learned anything from the past decade of book-world scandals — whether over plagiarism, fabrication, Internet sock puppetry or simple inaccuracy — it's that what seems like an obvious ethical violation to some observers will strike others as no big deal. Biography, a genre that can scale the heights or wallow in the gutter, is a particularly delicate enterprise. There's no official — or even quasi-official — biographer's code of ethics, and members of the profession are contemplating changing that. While informed readers are unlikely to confuse the likes of Broadwell with the the authors of definitive, years-in-the-making, doorstop "lives," the biographical profession is at least slightly besmirched by the scandal. "When Jayson Blair did his nonsense, it reflected badly on all journalists," said acclaimed biographer David Nasaw, "and this will reflect on all biographers."

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