They sweep from graphic novels to frontier foodie-ism, from timeless talents reexamined to new breakout authors, from spooky religious investigations to spookier studies of why good looks mean great salaries. You may not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a year of books by how much ground it covers. The year 2011 covered a lot, as our top 10 list illustrates.


Habibi


Craig Thompson $35 (Pantheon)


Part fairy tale, part romance, part scripture, part Alhambra, this nearly 700-page adventure elevates the graphic novel to lofty new heights. Even if its storyline about a boy and girl who meet as slaves in the mythical Middle Eastern land of Wanatolia before fleeing together and bonding for life is sometimes elusive – fanning out like the serpentine desert riveras it depicts – Thompson’s artwork is epic. His lush, sinuous images of lead characters Zam and Dodola – fleeing, embracing, being sexually traumatized, and even upchucking in this timeless realm of harems, motorcycles, and toxic sludge – are set against hypnotic waves of Arabic script. A four-time Harvey Award winner, two-time Eisner Award winner, and two-time Ignatz Award winner, Thompson weaves elements of the Koran and the Christian Bible into a masterpiece six years in the making. 


Momofuku Milk Bar


Christina Tosi $35 (Clarkson Potter)


What do kimchee, butter, blue cheese, chocolate chips and Fruity Pebbles-infused milk have in common? They’re all used in popular offerings at Milk Bar, the dessert arm of David Chang’s trendy Momofuku restaurant group. Raised in a sweet-toothed Virginia family, Tosi grew up to be “the girl who always brought cookies or a pie or a cake. Always.” After being discovered by Chang – who admits in the foreword to having once believed that “baking was for wusses” – Tosi developed a daring repertoire that brings hipster irony to childhood guilty pleasures. The results are so gross, they’re good: Beet-lime ganache. Saltine panna cotta. Graham-cracker frosting. Chocolaty pretzel-topped candy-bar pie costs over $5 per slice at the Milk Bar; this lavishly illustrated, wittily instructive volume shows how to make that sweet magic at home for much less. 


Van Gogh: The Life


Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith $40 (Random House)


The Pulitzer Prize-winning authors whose book about Jackson Pollock inspired the Academy Award-winning 2000 biopic leap back into art history with this sensitive opus about a painfully shy but blazingly brilliant oddball who never lived to see the fame, fortune, or affection he spent his short life craving. At nearly 1,000 pages, this book brings Van Gogh and what the authors call his “fanatic heart” vividly to life, from a childhood spent disappointing his disciplinarian mother to his later years as a misunderstood visionary. This volume also invites explosive controversy with a detailed appendix theorizing that Van Gogh’s death was not suicide but the final volley in a fatal pas-de-deux with the artist’s longtime tormentor: a teenaged bully who wore a cowboy costume, called himself Buffalo Bill and “rarely went anywhere without his .380 caliber peashooter.”


The Dovekeepers


Alice Hoffman $27.99 (Scribner)


Reading Hoffman is like being given a glass of water and realizing upon the first sip that you had unwittingly been about to die of thirst. Based on the Roman siege of Masada in 70 C.E. and narrated by a quartet of strange, sagely women, The Dovekeepers often reads as strikingly as the ancient liturgies its characters so frequently invoke. “My girlhood disappeared in the desert,” the crimson-haired daughter of an assassin announces as the book begins. “The person I’d once been vanished as I wrapped myself in white when the dust rose into clouds… Now our house was the house of the desert, black at night, brutally white at noon.” For the next 503 pages – through war, slaughter, passion and prayer – the lyricism just won’t let up. Not that you want it to. Hoffman has authored over two dozen novels, and this one – which took her five years to research and write – could well be her best to date. 


The Hypnotist


Lars Kepler, translated by Marlaine Delargy $27 (Farrar Straus Giroux)


This hefty pseudonymous tour-de-force by a Swedish literary couple – a No. 1 bestseller in France, Holland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark and Sweden – boasts rich descriptions, engaging dialogue and characters real enough to leap off its pages, stab wounds and all. The story starts in a hospital room, where a gravely injured 15-year-old boy has been hypnotized by a talented (but tormented) detective and asked to describe the crime in which his mother was knifed to death and his 5-year-old sister sliced in half. “Like fire,” the wounded boy stammers. “Just like fire.” From there, the story sweeps across Sweden like a blood-, snow – and psychosis-streaked storm, set ironically against the twinkling jollity of Christmastime. Whatever it is about Carlsberg, the midnight sun and/or proximity to the Arctic Circle that sparks great mysteries, let’s keep it on tap. 


My Two Worlds


Sergio Chejfec, translated by Margaret B. Carson $12.95 (Open Letter)


Yes, it’s a slender book about a walk in the park, but don’t be fooled by its modest mien. This obviously autobiographical account of an obscure Argentine academic’s day spent strolling the urban green space of an unnamed Brazilian town is a transcendent, casually poetic philosophical treasure. As Chejfec wanders, he wonders. Circling the park’s fountains, strolling its shaded paths, “I go looking for things that can’t be found, are basically invisible, or don’t exist.” Watching strangers gives him the almost holy opportunity “to glimpse the net weight of a normal life” and examine “the skein of a person’s acts, whether unnoticed, essential or absurd, which range from the unconfessable to the naïve.” In a world transformed by – and at – superhuman speed, this book is a living artifact, whispering to those who will still listen that the true meaning of life almost certainly lies in long walks. 


Prophet’s Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints


Sam Brower $27 (Bloomsbury)


This is the true-crime book behind one of the decade’s most shocking revelations: that a polygamist Mormon sect was operating on U.S. soil, headed by a man who was on the FBI’s Ten Most-Wanted List for sex crimes and for arranging marriages between adult men and underage girls. A Utah private investigator who is also a Mormon, Brower worked for many years helping people who had left LDS. This eminently readable first-person account details Brower’s pursuit of “prophet” Warren Jeffs, who was sentenced in August to life in prison. When cops used a battering ram to enter Warren’s compound, Brower writes, “the men of the church collapsed like marionettes whose strings had been cut. Some dropped to their knees in disbelief, others fell prone and scrabbled in the dirt, and still others stood sobbing like children with their faces buried in their hands.” 


Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People Are More Successful


Daniel Hamermesh $24.95 (Princeton University Press)


The news is in about how our appearance affects how others treat us – and it isn’t pretty. Based on scientific research, this fascinating work of social commentary asks: How much is hotness worth? Hamermesh calculates that “ugly” women (who score 1 and 2 on a 1-to-5-point attractiveness scale) earn 4 percent less than average-looking women (who score 3). “Beautiful” women (who score 4 and 5) earn 8 percent more than average-looking women and 12 percent more than ugly ones. The best-looking men earn 4 percent more than average-looking men; “ugly” men earn a daunting 13 percent less than average-looking males, and a staggering 17 percent less than the best-looking males. “I have shown,” Hamermesh notes, “that bad looks can generate an earnings disadvantage of perhaps $140,000 over a lifetime.” Thus, he speculates, unbeautiful people might just constitute a protected social class. 


Vertical Motion


Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping $13.95 (Open Letter)


If China not-so-secretly owns the United States of America these days, and if the U.S. dollar is now so worthless that you can’t afford an actual trip to the Middle Kingdom, visit China virtually in this collection of addictively otherworldly short stories by a Hunan-born author who – like her wildly successful East Bay-based compatriot Yiyun Li – grew up amidst the ravages of the Cultural Revolution. Xue’s stories are dreamscapes in which things occur in authentically gritty settings that ply the outermost limits of the possible. A plant blooms underground. A cat muses about its owner. A girl follows a stranger onto the grounds of a hospital where gigantic roses grow over the alleged burial sites of discarded babies. A crone spins breathtakingly beautiful yet preternaturally flavorless cotton candy. These are images that creep into your dreams. 


The World History of Animation


Stephen Cavalier $39.95 (University of California Press)


In 1941 – the same year that Disney Studios released both Fantasia and Dumbo – China released Tie Shan Gong Zhu, an animated blockbuster based on the classic Buddhist saga Journey to the West. In 1968 – the same year that an American company released How the Grinch Stole Christmas – Russia released Zhil-byl Kozyavin, about a soulless bureaucrat; Japan released Kaitei Shonen Marin, about a genetically modified boy who can live underwater; and Vietnam released Ngo Manh Lan, a propaganda short about a kitten who fights off an army of invading rats. Arranged chronologically and illustrated lavishly, this educational and endlessly entertaining coffee-table tome traces the art from 1872 to 2010. “Audiences don’t care about what technique or technology is involved,” Cavalier concedes. “They just want to see a good story, well told.”