And here’s a selection of non-fiction that Phoenix reviewers liked this year, also in alphabetical order by author.

1. Looking Back, by Russell Baker (New York Review Books) and Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures, by John Leonard (The New Press). In these collections of essays, two of our best cultural critics bring more history, irony, passion, and good old-fashioned liberal humanism to their readings than any number of TV pundits and fast-talking heads (and Leonard is a TV pundit!).

2. My Sky Blue Trades: Growing Up Counter in a Contrary Time, by Sven Birkerts. Literary critic Birkerts goes back to his formative years and writes the non-fiction account of the failed novel that might have been. His shaping experience was growing up as a first-generation Latvian-American in an upper-class Detroit suburb and hating what he perceived as his outsider status. The subject of that doomed first novel was an unhappy love affair. My Sky Blue Trades is a decidedly non-juicy memoir - no violence, no incest - but Birkerts has spared us yet another tediously artful first fiction and instead given us something graceful, engaging, and lightly melancholic, a fairly ordinary life told with an agreeable combination of the naturally rendered and the poetically heightened.

3. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes, by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan Books). In these essays, the New Yorker staff writer and Mass General surgical resident rearranges preconceived notions of medical science with riveting on-the-ground descriptions of what it’s like to treat patients in today’s byzantine health-care system. Whether he’s tracing the medical history of pain or recalling his first, fumbling efforts to master a routine procedure, Gawande keeps returning to a simple paradox: the human body is both highly predictable and completely unfathomable.

4. Black Livingstone: A True Tale of Adventure in the Nineteenth Century Congo, by Pagan Kennedy (Viking). Novelist and ’zine editor Pagan Kennedy turns her hand to the story of William Henry Sheppard, a black Presbyterian missionary who found a Shangri-la in the heart of the African Congo before Belgium’s King Leopold unleashed genocidal tribal warfare. At the heart of Sheppard’s life is a very American tale of self-invention: "You went to Africa to escape your last name, your poverty, or your color - to make yourself into a myth."

5. Can Love Last? The Fate of Romance over Time, by Stephen A. Mitchell (W.W. Norton). Blame it on the loosening of family bonds, feminism, what have you - boomers and their successors tend to assume the best about romantic pairings, and when utopia fails, many either bail or live in sad, stoically resigned romanceless partnerships. Mitchell (who died in 2000) draws on his work as a clinical psychotherapist, teacher, and theorist to make a convincing, philosophical, and practical argument about how love can last if the principals are willing to forgo utopia in favor of acknowledging the often tense battles of aggression that real love entails.

6. The Writer and the World, by V.S. Naipaul (Alfred A. Knopf). This collection of 20 essays from the past 40 years goes beyond what the author knows - that the world is lacking in substance and is full of deceit and illusion - to individual discoveries, whether on the poor and neglected island of Mauritius or at the moneyed rituals of the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas. As regular readers of Naipaul could predict, he’s readily exasperated, and the insights sometimes read like a series of insults. But as the book progresses, its high dudgeon is often tempered by irony and poetic passages of compassion.

7. Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings, by Ben Ratliff (Time Books). What compels interest in this book by New York Times critic Ratliff are not the usual High Fidelity arguments over inclusions and omissions but the historical awareness, the descriptive power, and the narrative pith in each of its 800-word essays. We’ve found no one now writing about jazz who has a better sense of where the music is - or where it’s going. Even as he’s provoking arguments in your head, Ratliff will send you hunting for recordings you’ve never heard or music you thought you knew.

8. The Future of the Past, by Alexander Stille (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). It’s not just the disappearance every year of thousands of species but the disappearance of the past itself that Stille laments. This New Yorker writer traveled the world, visiting hot spots of decay (Italy, Egypt, China, the South Pacific), and he finds not merely monuments but entire traditions, oral histories, and languages swallowed in the maw of modern life. Examining each situation in all its complexity (preservation often clashes with the immediate needs of survival), Stille suggests that our greatest asset may not be electron microscopes or carbon dating systems but something as simple and anachronistic as a book.

9. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades, by John Suiter (Counterpoint). Attacking the Beat generation aslant, photographer and writer Suiter comes up with something that most recent studies of the Beat poets don’t - original research and a fresh perspective. Forsaking Beat’s urban geographies, Suiter takes to the Zen-like solitude and fierce natural world that these poets sought in their summers as fire watches in the American West. Beautifully published, with photographs Suiter both took and assembled, it’s the one Beat book of the year worth owning - and reading.

10. Edison’s Eye: A Magical History of the Quest for Mechanical Life, by Gaby Wood (Alfred A. Knopf). In her "prehistory" of artificial intelligence, Wood explores such devices as the 17th-century Automation Chess Player, an 18th-century mechanical duck that ate, digested, and excreted food, and the title character, Thomas A. Edison’s talking female doll. The actual mechanics aren’t so important to her, however - she’s interested in the way these devices allowed audiences to "tempt fate and fear with the idea that machines could be like humans." In imaginative and understated prose, Wood locates each invention in the context of then-contemporary assumptions about what it meant to be human and shows how each foreboding of mechanical life threatened those assumptions.