Although it sometimes seems like everyone on the bus is squinting at a cellphone, BlackBerry, or PSP, old-fashioned reading is still very much alive. Here are 20 brilliant examples of dead-tree technology, all of which our critics happily plowed through and then pushed on friends over the course of the year.

Brian Lynch

The Dark Side
(By Jane Mayer. Doubleday, $32)
Mayer, a New Yorker staff writer, gives a fast-paced yet detailed account of how a clique of Bush administration officials convinced themselves that kidnapping and torture were essential weapons in the “war on terror”. Of course, they didn’t have to convince the public, because they didn’t tell the public. A concise manual on how not to run a democracy.

The Man Game
(By Lee Henderson. Viking Canada, $32)
An ambitious, playfully surreal vision from the Vancouver author, set in the muddy streets and looming forests of our city’s early days. The bizarre sporting event at the novel’s centre is a cross between vaudeville and pro wrestling, but with lumberjacks as contestants. Nude lumberjacks.

Cockroach
(By Rawi Hage. Anansi, $29.95)
The Beirut-born novelist follows up his first-rate 2006 debut, De Niro’s Game, with a lean phantasm of a book about the lives of Arab and Persian immigrants on the frozen streets of Montreal, Hage’s adopted hometown. An ode to being penniless and alone, delivered by a bitter, insectlike narrator who wears his dark sense of humour like an armoured shell.

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
(By Kate Summerscale. Raincoast, $28.95)
An 1860 murder in an English country house summoned the most celebrated member of Scotland Yard’s newly created squad of detectives. It also gripped the imaginations of people across the nation for decades, including authors like Wilkie Collins and Arthur Conan Doyle. Summerscale, a prizewinning English historian and biographer, evokes the daily life and social psyche of an era, and shows how a single event launched an entire genre of fiction.

Human Smoke
(By Nicholson Baker. Simon & Schuster, $34.99)
The offbeat American novelist and essayist stirred up plenty of controversy with this infuriating but gripping history of the run-up to the Second World War. Built entirely of excerpts from memoirs, speeches, and newspaper articles written at the time, the collage-like chronology suggests an argument for pacifism that seems unrealistic in light of the Nazi threat. But there’s no denying how powerfully it reminds us that the tactic of bombing urban targets from the air—a practice now so routine—was only a few decades ago considered the height of barbarism.

Patty Jones

The Three of Us
(By Julia Blackburn. Pantheon, $30)
Okay, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy famously wrote. Luckily, some unhappy families make beautifully demented memoir fodder. Blackburn’s exquisitely clear-eyed chronicle makes the reader frankly glad that the British writer had an alcoholic poet father and a narcissistic, sex-obsessed painter for a mother.

What Was Lost
(By Catherine O’Flynn. Anchor Canada, $22)
The working-class adults have become uncomfortably numb in O’Flynn’s eerily suspenseful first novel. Only a guilelessly witty child-detective and a brain-spooking tragedy can rouse these poor sods in gritty Birmingham, England. The reader, however, is a perfectly rapt hostage to the end.

Atmospheric Disturbances
(By Rivka Galchen. HarperCollins, $29.95)
Who knew that Doppler radar and doppelgí¤ngers together could be so strangely entertaining? Reading Galchen’s hilariously off-kilter, meteorologically enhanced debut novel about a Manhattan psychiatrist who believes his wife has been replaced by an impostor is like sharing a giddy yet soulful acid trip with Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon.

Netherland
(By Joseph O’Neill. Pantheon, $27.95)
Netherland reads like the seductive dream you might have if you were a traumatized Dutchman ditched in post–9/11 Manhattan by your British wife and child. You’d enter a nether New York populated by the sweetly deranged residents of the Chelsea Hotel and an ebullient band of immigrant cricketers. You’d wake up no longer you.

Dangerous Laughter
(By Steven Millhauser. Knopf, $28)
The Pulitzer Prize winner drops bizarro-world stories to keep you crouched in your basement, reading like a compulsive, literate monkey. Speaking of compulsions: from the creepy teen “laugh parties” of the title tale to the Plexiglassed humans of “The Dome”, the naivest games eventually acquire darker taints in Millhauser’s universes.

Charlie Smith

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
(By Gabor Maté. Knopf Canada, $34.95)
It’s time to give Maté, a Vancouver physician, the Order of Canada for this erudite and sensitive book about the lives of Downtown Eastside intravenous-drug users, the neurobiology of addiction, and the folly of the war on drugs. It’s compulsively readable and packed with new scientific discoveries about addiction. If you know the parent or sibling of an addict—or the prime minister, for that matter—please give them this book for Christmas.

Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy
(By Michael T. Klare. Metropolitan Books, $29)
Klare, a columnist with The Nation, takes readers on a journey around the world to show how competition for energy resources has destabilized international relations and raised the risk of wars. There’s a way out of this mess, he writes, if world leaders absorb the lessons from arms-control talks of the 1970s and 1980s.

Rogue Economics: Capitalism’s New Reality
(By Loretta Napoleoni. Seven Stories Press, $27.50)
The diminished power of nation-states has spawned a malignant form of capitalism. With stunning originality, Napoleoni demonstrates how corporations are sowing the seeds of their own demise in a world full of hooligans and counterfeiters. Rogue Economics predicts a massive redistribution of wealth, which will victimize millions in western democracies.

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
(By Andrew Nikiforuk. Greystone Books, $20)
The Alberta tar sands are a cesspool of pollution. Nikiforuk’s elegantly written book delivers all the gory details about toxic lakes, heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and the fiction of reclamation. Tar Sands also reveals how Canada’s new status as a petrostate has jeopardized its democracy. His 12 steps to energy sanity should be required reading for every citizen.

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS
(By Elizabeth Pisani. Viking Canada, $35)
Pisani, an epidemiologist, exposes how world leaders have missed the mark in combating HIV/AIDS by refusing to pay attention to how the virus is transmitted. The Wisdom of Whores is a riotously clever look at bureaucratic game-playing. Despite the book’s humour, it made me furious as I realized why a reluctance to talk about sex has led to millions of deaths.

Alexander Varty

The Surface of Meaning
(By Robert Bringhurst. CCSP Press, $59.95)
Poet and bibliomane Bringhurst’s study of books and book design is a gorgeous object, surveying the evolution of the Canadian page from an 1878 Ojibwa dictionary to the present. And while Bringhurst provides an erudite introduction to typographical arcana, he’s no snob: chapbooks, children’s books, beer guides, and francophone graphic novels are all featured here.

Through Black Spruce
(By Joseph Boyden. Viking Canada, $34)
I gave Through Black Spruce a somewhat lukewarm review when it first appeared, and in hindsight I probably downplayed how much I enjoyed reading Boyden’s follow-up to his magnificent Three Day Road. His second novel isn’t perfect in pacing or characterization, but it fully deserved its Giller Prize win.

The Hakawati
(By Rabih Alameddine. Bond Street Books, $32.95)
A truly fantastical novel, toggling between Lebanese strife, American indolence, and the hallucinatory legends of the Arabian past. A hakawati, by the way, is a Middle Eastern storyteller, and the Jordanian-born Alameddine’s third novel proves that this traditional art form is alive and thriving in the 21st century.

Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China
(By Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Random House Canada, $70)
It’s hard to imagine that such a luxurious coffee-table opus could have a green agenda, but the underlying message behind all of Alford and Duguid’s culinary travelogues is that it’s possible to eat well by eating local—whether you’re in rural Yunnan or deepest Burnaby.

Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life
(By John Adams. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, $28.50)
If Adams hadn’t been obsessed with sound, he could easily have been a fine journalist. What’s especially interesting is that this American composer’s path to maturity coincided with the artistic ferment of the 1960s and ’70s, and his “I was there” account includes intimate glimpses of sonic revolutionaries such as John Cage and Lou Harrison.