As 2012 draws to a close, we thought we would take a moment to examine the scuffles, controversies, and feisty debates that have helped keep Page-Turner’s daily book-news roundups interesting over the past year. Some of these conflicts show what happens when carelessness leads to comedy; others grow out of a deeper sense of anxiety about the state of literary culture; in several instances, Page-Turner even entered the fray. In any case, they are proof that the literary world still loves a good fight, which we take as a sign of ruddy good health: http://nyr.kr/VrQUKG

James Wood recommends his books of the year: http://nyr.kr/WkKJXA

An end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers that I didn’t get to this year. So in addition to re-recommending some of the fiction I reviewed in the last twelve months (namely, Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies,” Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Edward St. Aubyn’s “At Last,” and Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”), I want to mention two books of fiction that I wish I had written about…

Andrew Boynton on the Best Moments in Dance, 2012: http://nyr.kr/XAerXz

 This year, I experienced moments that took my breath away, or made me smile, or simply made me feel lucky to be in the theatre… 

Photograph by Stephanie Berger.

Another year, another set of climate records. Here, Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the top ten signs you are living in a warming world, 2012 edition: http://nyr.kr/ZdDsOw

Photograph by Peter van Agtmael/Magnum.

 Click-through for a look back at 20 of the most striking images of our home planet as seen from orbit in 2012: http://nyr.kr/UosuxW, images courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory,

(Source: newyorker.com)

This year’s Ten Best List might be called “Lahr’s Last Huzzah.” When I began as Senior Critic, in 1992, the second show I reviewed was Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing,” in Chicago. Odets seemed to me a woefully overlooked major writer. Over the decades, I’ve also reviewed Odets’s “Flowering Peach,” “The Country Girl,” and written a Critic at Large about him. The last show of my twenty-year New Yorker joyride was Odets’s “Golden Boy”—Lincoln Center’s masterly production which indisputably puts Odets in the pantheon of great twentieth-century playwrights. In a good theatregoing year, you’re lucky to get one production of such exhilarating high quality; this year, I got two—the second being Mike Nichols’s inspired revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” They share first place…

Click-through for John Lahr on the top 10 plays of 2012: http://nyr.kr/SiLv9F

We asked some of our contributors— including David Grann, Thomas Beller, Teju Cole, Maile Meloy, Ann Beattie, and more— for their favorite books from 2012. (In the interests of eclecticism, they could list up to three.) Here’s what they said: http://nyr.kr/XWZEef

Looking back on 2012, there were dramatic moments, to be sure: the vindication of Obamacare; the electoral triumph of the forty-seven per cent; the rise and fall of Gangnam style. But just as defining, I’d argue, were the year’s countless half-starts and baby steps. By that, I mean the national conversations that began but were left unfinished (guns, gay marriage); the legislative seeds that got planted, then deferred (immigration reform, filibuster limits); and the collective sins that got confessed and forgiven, then crudely repeated (all things Chris Brown). 

What follows are a few of the year’s more notable almosts, not-quites, and nearly-there’s…

Click-through to read Sarah Stillman on this year’s notable nearly-theres: http://nyr.kr/UCpnDD