Year-End Book Recommendations: 2012

Happy New Year, all! I hope you had a great night last night. Here are the best books I read in 2012--in chronological order, since I couldn't begin to rank them by quality. Well, except for the last one, which was probably the best I've read in a long, long time.
 
I put off posting this list for several days, because I started reading Lindsey Barraclough's Long Lankin and suspected it might earn a place here if I finished it in time. As it turned out, I didn't even get halfway through before the end of the year, but expect to see Long Lankin on the 2013 list if it keeps going as well as it started.

Note: When I say that these were "the best books I read," I mean that they're the reading experiences I enjoyed the most. Different books on this list serve different purposes, and I try to keep that in mind when I read. That's why Suzanne Collins is next to Dostoevsky. : ) 

Drumroll, please:

RTW #115: Best Book of January

(Mandatory plug: Check out my new short story!)

Two posts in one day? Surely the world is turning on its head. It's Road Trip Wednesday, though, and I actually have something to say about today's prompt, which is: "What is the best book you read in January?"

There's not much of a choice: I only finished three books in January. One was a romance novel, which was okay but only just. One was Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, a very informative book that I definitely recommend. The third was Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men. Not surprisingly, the third one won hands-down.