I've read so many truly wonderful books this year that have earned their place on the list, but there are just as many I haven't had time to read in the piles by my bed and desk.
My time-management skills have let me down.
Top of my list are the writers who just can't write a bad book.
Barbara Kingsolver has written her first novel in nine years - The Lacuna, and it's every bit as good, if not better, than her Poisonwood Bible or her Bean Trees.
The dialogue is crisp and witty, and the way she weaves her fiction in and out of fact is quite, quite brilliant.
William Boyd is hopeless at bad writing as well, and his Ordinary Thunderstorms is a cracker.
Adam Kindred is in London for an important job interview. A chance encounter with a stranger tips his life into hideous chaos. Boyd reminds us how the tiniest things can change our lives forever.
My copy is still warm from my hands as I knew it would make this list and I just had to keep reading.
The first half of the book is funny and smart, while second half of the book shocks and disturbs.
Chris Cleave has to go on this honours board of only writing great books.
Incendiary and The Other Hand are tense and terrific (in both senses of the word).
Apart from their great writing skills in common, all these authors have fascinating, superbusy, productive lives.
If you look up their blogs, you will see what I mean.
This year has thrown up a whole raft of books about zoos and wars and saving the lives of animals and people.
The Zookeeper's War by Australian Stephen Conte is a novel about saving the animals in the Berlin Zoo, while the Zookeeper's Wife is the true World War 2 story of the brave zookeepers who sheltered hundreds of people in the Warsaw zoo.
Conservationist Laurence Anthony wrote Babylon's Ark about his superhuman efforts to save the Baghdad Zoo after the Iraq war.
He left his African elephant sanctuary and was in the only civilian vehicle crossing into Iraq as everyone else was fleeing.
The scale of the rescue mission was so huge and daunting and dangerous that it seems impossible anyone could ever have imagined it possible.
Christina Lamb came to the Wanaka Arts Festival and gripped us all with her lectures on being a war correspondent in every hideous war zone in the world.
Well known for her Afghan adventure Sewing Circles in Herat, her latest book Small Wars Permitting opens our eyes to the realities of living in a war zone.
There's something shocking about realising that people in war zones are people like us - they have families, read books, play sport, live and love and laugh.
They aren't some alien species, just people getting on with their lives while the conflict tries to interfere.
And while some people are trying to live their lives avoiding danger, other people love the adrenaline rush of putting themselves in frightening situations.
New Zealander Cam McLeay owns a river rafting business in Uganda.
He was part of a team who set off to find the new source of the Nile.
Ascend the Nile is a compilation of their journal entries and photographs about the trip, and is also a memorial to their friend who was killed in an ambush when he came to help them.
It's thrilling, funny, tragic and moving - the perfect present for any tricky, not-keen-on-reading males, especially the teenage type.
Another great exploring book is The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow.
Alexander MacKinnon stumbled across a tiny dinghy when he was teaching at a posh school in the UK.
He didn't have much planned for the holidays so he took the little dinghy sailing on the River Severn.
His new-found passion for a life afloat saw him take his mighty craft all the way to Romania.
A ridiculous story beautifully told.
The greatest explorers' tales these days seem to be in the last unknown territory on earth - the human brain.
The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge is the bestseller, with stories of people who have managed to rewire their brains and thinking processes and overcome problems that should have been insurmountable.
The Mindful Brain is by Daniel Siegel, another brain specialist who has studied the way our brains can work to develop wellbeing and happiness.
My favourite is The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine.
Like these other brain books, she has taken complex neurosurgical too-hard-for-the average-reader information and turned it into a totally absorbing story of how male and female brains differ and why.
Fascinating and fabulous.
Good writers can do wonderful things with difficult subjects - maths is not a favourite subject for many people, but books like The Housekeeper and The Professor by Yoko Ogawa make it exciting.
This slow and elegant novel manages to make maths into something that everyone can understand and enjoy.
In quite a different way, The Number Devil by Hans Magnus Enzensberger wakes your brain up to maths in an even simpler way.
This book is a story for young adults but a lot of old adults are sneaking into it and enjoying the discovery that you don't need to be a genius to understand maths.
I've loved a lot of books about genius men, and the associated problems of their brilliance, not least their inability to stay faithful.
My favourite three are all historical fiction and show Frank Lloyd Wright, T. S. Eliot and Charles Dickens in all their philandering glory.
Loving Frank by Nancy Horam, A Lost Life by Steven Carroll and The Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold will open your eyes about these great men and their not-so-great personal lives.
The year wouldn't have been the same without The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery's delightful novel about a prickly little Parisian concierge, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by now dead Mary Ann Shaffer - a fictional series of letters to and from the residents of Guernsey while they were under German occupation in World War 2.
The books I should have read, but didn't, included Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel, this year's Booker Prize winner.
Its lack of punctuation makes it hard to get into, but everyone is saying it is worth the effort.
And I won't relax until I've read Philippa Gregory's latest novel The White Queen.
If you've never read Piano Shop on the Left Bank by T. E. Carhart, or A Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht, hurry and do so - they are two wonderful books about music, and I have three more that I am told are their equals - Perri Knize's Grand Obsession, about a woman who falls in love with a grand piano, Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons memoir, and Eric Siblin's The Cello Suites, a magical mystery tour which reveals the secrets behind J. S. Bach's 300-year-old works.
I think my 2010 resolution will have to be to spend far less time tidying.
- Miranda Spary
