Off the top of my head, my favorite reads this year:

Flight Behavior, Barbara Kingsolver
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides (been out for 10 years, but I just discovered it this year)
The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes (lovely little novel about memory)
Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, John Barry (nobody does this kind of thing better than Barry. This one rivals his Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. HIGHLY recommended, both of 'em.)

• Monitor: The Story of the Legendary Civil War Ironclad - James T. deKay
• Rottweiler Rescue: a Dianne Brennan Mystery - Ellen O'Connell
• The Lies of Sarah Palin - Geoffrey Dunn
• Morgue Drawer Four - Jutta Profijt
• The Grand Tour: Around the World with the Queen of Mystery - Agatha Christie
• Narrowboat Dreams: A Journey North by England's Waterways - Steve Haywood
• Shuffling Along A Ditch - Ian Birks
• Michael Toliver Lives - Armistead Maupin
• Mary Ann in Autumn - Armistead Maupin
• Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson
• Team of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin
• The Vast Fields of Ordinary - Nick Burd
• Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution - Linda Hirshman
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (again)
• The Widow of the South - Robert Hicks (again)
• Last Train To Paradise- Les Standiford
• A Little Death in Dixie - Lisa Turner
• At Bertram's Hotel - Agatha Christie
• Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase - Russel Bonds
• Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil - John Berendt (again)
• The Rottweiler: Centuries of Service - Linda Michels
• The Sins of Scripture - Bishop Shelby Spong

I'm hooked on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series.

The Lies of Sarah Palin is humorous in many places but it's horrifying to think of her being a 72 year old's heartbeat away from the presidency. I'm on the verge of finishing it now and I can almost hear that fingernails-on-chalkboard voice as she delivers those hate filled 'word salads'.

Just bought the two sequels to Morgue Drawer Four but haven't started them. In the first book a punk steals an expensive Mercedes, finds a body in the trunk, is himself soon murdered, then discovers his spirit can communicate with the ME performing his autopsy. It's a page turner.

My friend Ian sent me some video of narrowboats on the Avon and Kennet Canal that goes through his village. Shuffling Along A Ditch and Narrowboat Dreams satisfied my urge to do such a dumb thing.

In Rottweiler Rescue, Dianne Brennan is delivering a big male rescue Rottie to his new home when she discovers the new owner has been murdered in his kitchen. The trail of the culprit leads to the world of show Rottweiler trainers.

A critic described The Vast Fields of Ordinary as heartbreaking. Dade is a gay high school student who is in love with Pablo, the most popular jock in the class. Pablo is ostensibly a straight homophobe who abuses Dade in public but wants him in private. No good can come of it.

Tennessee Crossroads did a piece on The Widow of the South a couple of years ago. This is a wonderful, haunting read.

I give my son a book for Christmas every year, and this year it's Inman Majors' "Love's Winning Plays."
I started reading it Sunday night and couldn't put it down. I finished it at 4 a.m. It's unputdown-able. Fun, thigh-slappingly funny and full of sly references to the football program at Big State U, an unnamed SEC school. It's also a scathing send-up of boosters, administrators and sportswriters and it is hi-frikking-larious.
Coach Majors told me earlier this year that he'd autograph it for me, and I'm going to call him tomorrow. Cannot wait to discuss this book with him. Coach's late brother Joe is Inman's dad. Joe was the most influential lobbyist in Nashville when I was there, and we got to be great buddies, so I feel a bit of connection to this book.
My son Joey's going to love this book, and you will, too. It's Inman's least serious book, but he's really demonstrated some Dan Jenkins'-like chops

You really need to order and read Griftopia.

My only recommendation is Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash... mesmerized me and energized some inner belief thought processes!!
(link...)

Oh wait... I also read Life of Pi before it was hip (and a movie)... also quite engaging.

Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1
Karl Marx, Early Writings
Maynard Solomon, Beethoven
John Houseman, Front and Center
Kenneth Silverman, John Cage: Begin Again
Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival
Michael Sorkin, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (again)
Robin D.G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

One of my favorite books this year was "Grant's Final Victory" by
Charles Bracelen Flood. It's the story of Ulysses Grant's race against death, literally.

Shorn of his personal wealth by a 19th Century Bernie Madoff, Grant learned that he had esophogeal cancer -- a death sentence in those days. His friend Mark Twain encouraged him to write his memoirs as a way of making some quick money, and he proceeded to write as though his life depended on it.

The finished product is considered the finest of its genre by aficionados of military memoirs, and he got it done just days before he died. The public display of grief at his funeral, which was attended by his old comrades-in arms (even those who went with the Confederacy) rivaled that seen at Lincoln's.

The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant is available free at Project Gutenberg. I downloaded a copy some time ago but have yet to read it.

I just noticed as I was preparing this comment that PG now has links whereby ebook files can be sent directly to the user's Dropbox. How clever!

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and solidarity. this was the twentieth anniversary of the first time I read it. Still very affected by it.

Wow. Thanks, Kenny. I've been skimming through the memoirs, and in the conclusion found a couple of lines that are, at least to me, extremely moving.

"I feel that we are on the eve of a new era, when there is to be great harmony between the Federal and Confederate. I cannot stay to be a living witness to the correctness of this prophecy; but I feel it within me that it is to be so. The universally kind feeling expressed for me at a time when it was supposed that each day would prove my last, seemed to me the beginning of the answer to "Let us have peace."

Thanks for the shout-out, Randy. Here's a handful of titles from my own 2012 list:

Peter Hessler, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory”
C.S. Forester, “Commodore Hornblower”
Steve Coll, “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power”
Ross Douthat, “Bad Religion: How we became a nation of heretics”

My favorite read this year has been Take The Cannoli: Stories From The New World by Sarah Vowell. I know it's over 10 years old, but I was just introduced to it this year.

since you listed some older crime stuff, i wanted to mention that i dug deep into Raymond Chandler this summer and was most impressed. i had read most of his novels, but decided to read them chronologically, leading up to The Long Goodbye which i had not read before - and it is truly a magnum opus of American crime and culture and a savage critique of capitalism.

also, enjoyed Neal Stephenson's "Reamde", which was fine stuff, linking computer games, 'ransom software' and global crime syndicates and much more. really like all his books, especially "Snowcrash".

I love the older crime stuff. I have nine books by Raymond Chandler and five by Dashiell Hammett, even eight of the Charlie Chan series by Earl Derr Biggers.

And we got yer Poirot, too.

Just got an email from Amazon.

The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, destined to be one of your favorite books too, is on sale right now for $2.99.

I bought another book this afternoon, A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead.

In January, 1943, a train left Paris with 227 women who were accused of being members of the French Resistance. They were bound for the death camps. Ms. Moorehead interviewed survivors and family members in 2008 to write the book. I'm only 3% into it but it's promising - especially at today's price of only $2.99.

Gracie could tell you that you will love the book since you love dogs.

I happened across a blurb on Moxley's Blue Streak about J Majors and his wife dancing to Die Fliedermaus at an Opera Guild function, and it made me think of Coach Woody from Loves Winning Plays. He loved opera and country music, drank too much at times and was prone to speak his mind.
And that Pigskin Cavalcade sounds exactly like the Big Orange Caravan, where as I recall, Coach Majors got himself into hot water by speaking a bit too frankly to some boosters that fateful year.
I'm thinking there's a lot of Inman's Uncle John in Coach Woody.