That instinct to chronicle the best of the year has lasted for over a century in Europe and the United States, but unless they're compiled with care and attention from the first month onwards, tread with caution. Most end-of-the-year lists are inescapably weighted towards the books that came out in the last quarter of the year. Our memories are short-term, and few except for professional librarians and critics will remember the books that stirred them back in January 2013.
My index cards tell me that George Saunders' funny and assured collection of short stories, Tenth of December, was at the top of my January list; and so was The Fabulous Feminist, Zubaan's "greatest hits" compilation for Suniti Namjoshi, but I would never have remembered on my own. What the index cards and reading diaries do is to create a retaining wall against forgetfulness.
Mine tell me, for instance, that 2013 was a great year for translations of books from various Indian languages into English. Among the best of the year: scholar Vasudha Dalmia's unobtrusive translation of Krishna Sobti's The Music of Solitude, Jerry Pinto's lightly fluent rendering of Sachin Kundalkar's Cobalt Blue, where Marathi words swim easily among the English.
Laura Brueck lets the rough weave of Ajay Navaria's stories show through in Unclaimed Terrain; in Crowfall, Shanta Gokhale proves that sometimes authors are their own best translators, in her powerful novel about art controversies, the unleashed violence of the "protectors" of morality and more. Arunava Sinha, uber-translator, closed the year with his take on Buddhadev Bose's Golap Keno Kalo, rescuing the title from the mildly pedantic "Why the Rose is Black" to the more striking Black Rose.
The end of the year is also a good time to honour those who have died, and 2013 took its usual tax, from Seamus Heaney and Rajendra Yadav to Elmore Leonard and Doris Lessing. Heaney's poems, like Szymborska's or Agha Shahid Ali's, are too much part of the warp and weft of a reading life for him to be mourned so much as honoured. But there were small reminders of what was really important in the writing lives of some of the authors who exited stage left this year.
The Rajasthani writer Vijaydan Detha and the Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki died within weeks of each other. Their lives were a reminder of the value of being rooted, as both were in different ways, in the soil of home. Vijaydan Detha, or Bijji, chose the life of his village, Borunda, over the temptations of a wider world; in one of his old interviews, he spoke of how his libraries were the memories and stories told by the women of the village. His best work intertwined myth and the spoken word; just as he turned his back on the city, he eschewed Hindi, preferring to write in the language he heard around him, the dialects of Rajasthan.
The year closed with tributes to Doris Lessing; the world had changed so much in the nine decades that she had lived. Her early work, on Africa and race, hasn't dated well; what has survived is the sharp-eyed gaze that she turned on gender, her keen and sometimes dark, if affectionate, take on humanity. In one of her later novels of ideas, the world was divided into Clefts and Squirts, male Monsters and sometimes monstrous Shes. I have no great liking for Lessing's science fiction, which has none of the craft and appeal of The Golden Notebook, but this parable stayed uncomfortably alive in my mind, and in the minds of others.
Ursula K Le Guin and others disliked the parable, on the grounds that Lessing appeared to believe that gender was an inescapable trap for both sexes. But it was typical of Lessing's legacy: in her last years as a writer, we were still arguing, ferociously, over the bristly, uncomfortable ideas she left behind.
The sadness many of us felt when we heard that the film critic Roger Ebert had died was almost personal; he stood for so much that was important to my generation of book critics. His film reviews were a window to a wider world at a time when DVDs weren't as readily available, before it was possible to see the best of world cinema on the internet or television.
But more than that, and more even than the grace with which he lived through cancer's depradations, it was the values that shone through his reviews that I will miss: he brought honesty, kindness and integrity to every one of his pieces of criticism. Reading him was like listening to a good friend with a warm heart and a clear intelligence; there are few like him left.