I read newspapers, magazines, works of nonfiction, but my true love is fiction. In these three novels, the characters and situations were so alive to me I didn’t want their stories to end: Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” Chad Harbaugh’s “The Art of Fielding,” and Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot.”

Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” was another favorite. Enchanted, I am reading slowly Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cat’s Table.”

A play, a retrospective and a biography brought me the lives of three artists and their creative process. Each left me astonished. There was Mark Rothko in John Logan’s “Red” at the Goodman Theatre, the Willem de Kooning retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (through January 9), Patricia Alber’s biography “Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter.”

Art and books combine in the work of two friends, both photographers.

Haunting me are the lush, eery photographs of American children, teens, couples and families in Lydia Panas’ first monograph, “The Mark of Abel.” www.lydiapanas.com/book. Chester Alamo’s “The Globe” captures the beauty, color and passion of fans at a Chicago bar that offers live telecasts of European soccer. www.amazon.com/Globe-Chester-Alamo-Costello/dp/0615339417/ref=cm_cr_pr_pb_t

I continue to be awed by my sons’ achievements in photography http://www.masondent.com/ and sports journalism http://supercursed.blogspot.com/, by my niece’s comic art and humor. http://comics.lucyknisley.com/2011/10/scaredcited-page-2/

Memorable movies this year include the smart, sexy remake of “Jane Eyre,” the plotless but mesmerizing “Tree of Life,” the hilariously foul “Bridesmaids. The one film I many never get out of my head: Pedro Almodovar’s “The Skin I Live In.” Beautiful, bizarre, shocking.

One stage play held me in its grip: “The God of Carnage,” 70 minutes of ensemble acting at its best, at the Goodman Theatre. I admired “An Iliad” at Court Theatre (through December 14) even though we had terrible seats.

I am always thinking about my next meal, so it’s worth remembering some of the places that nourished me.

In Montreal (L’Entrecote St. Jean) and New York (Le Relais de Venise) I savored prix-fixe steak-only dinners that transported me to Paris.

In Chicago this year I’ve been dazzled by the farm-to-table offerings at Nightwood, Perennial Virant, and Blackbird. The fish tacos at GT Fish & Oyster. Anything at The Purple Pig. The limited but daring menu at Morso; also, its fabulous Wolfsbane cocktail. The seasonal tartines at Floriole, the frisee salad at Gemini Bistro, the exquisite service at Pelago. The ultra-thin pizza at Three Aces and a cocktail so beautiful I had to photograph it.

Finally, a welcome addition to my Lincoln Park neighborhood: City Grounds coffee bar, a clean well lighted place.

Thanks for reading. Best wishes for the New Year.

When we first meet Michael Beard he’s 53 and fat, a Nobel-prize winning physicist riding the high-fee, high-calorie lecture circuit. His (fifth!) marriage is in shambles and his public comments about women’s intellect has made him a reviled household name. Even a boondoggle to a polar region, to witness global warming, turns sour: Beard mangles the skin of his penis when it freezes to his zipper.

And he keeps getting fatter.

Why read on? I fell for the lunacy of Beard’s situation. He’s a snob. It’s great fun seeing him brought to his knees by wives, lovers, thinkers, artists, outdoorsmen, doctors, business associates, scientists and the young daughter he most certainly did not agree to father.

Charmed by a serial adulterer? I was. Beard pines for his wife, nursing himself with excess wine and late night television, listening to Patrice dress for her lover and leave the house. ”No woman had ever looked or sounded so desirable as the wife he suddenly could not have.”

Same with his misadventures in the polar region. Always the last to arrive, in ill-fitting outerwear and cracked goggles, the one who can’t find the “start” button on his ski-doo: Beard tugged at my heartstrings.

I even bought into his complicity in framing Patrice’s lover for a murder.

Not so much his theft of a dead colleague’s research, which he’ll use to create an energy source that could save the planet. Couldn’t he share credit?

Of course not: Beard is liar, thief, cheater, glutton. Beard is the Military/Industrial Complex: brilliant but uncaring, consuming, destroying, polluting.

And he keeps getting fatter.

“As he listened to Parks enumerate his possible futures, he decided not to mention his recent acquisition of a classic symptom, the occasional sensation of tightness around his chest. It would only make him appear even more foolish and doomed. Nor could he admit that he did not have it in him to eat and drink less, that exercise was a fantasy. He could not command his body to do it, he had no will for it. He would rather die than take up jogging or prance to funky music in a church hall with other tracksuited deadbeats.”

McEwan is one of our finest living authors, smart and accessible. His blockbuster “Atonement,” and smaller works such as “Saturday” and “On Chesil Beach” are skillfully told, but serious, even grave.

“Solar” is playful, outrageous. McEwan tells it with great calm, one nutty situation rolling into another. It’s a delicious situation: a man who won’t save himself may hold the key — which he stole! — to saving the planet.

A very funny, uncomfortable read. (My friend Libby hated it.)

In its simplest form, this is the story of an Israeli woman who gathers up her son’s father and takes him hiking and camping the length of the country. During their journey, Ora describes to Avram the adult son, now serving in the Israeli army, he has never met.

Heartbreaking? I wish.

Their son’s name is Ofer. We learn about his birth, his feeding at the breast, his first steps, his early shift to vegetarianism, his …blah blah blah. Worse, we learn first about the family Ora and Ilan made, with baby Adam.

Babies are fascinating: to their parents. Reading this, I felt like I was stuck on a long car ride with a chatty mom bragging about her precocious kids.

Why keep reading? To find out if Ofer survives, if Avram rejoins the living, if Ora and Avram reunite.

Too, I was hopeful the hike would offer some comedy. Ora is a middle-aged, twice abandoned housewife, unnerved by her son’s presence in the army. Avram is an out-of-shape pill popper who has given up on life. What are these two doing in the woods?

The hike is the frame for the story, which reads like a hodgepodge of memories. llan abandoning Ora and newborn Adam. Avram’s tortured body returned by the Egyptians. Avram loves Ora, who pines for Ilan, who’s disinterested. Ora is Avram’s girlfriend, fucking Ilan. Ora is Ilan’s wife, fucking Avram. Ew.

I expected to be chilled by their everyday life. After all, Israel is perpetually at war and their parents are Hitler’s survivors. Grossman shows us Ora and Ilan standing over their newborn wondering if they’ve created another warrior for the state. Ora’s mother tearing at her flesh, hating herself for not being taken by Hitler. Ofer telling his mother to leave Israel if he is killed.

Themes raised, left unexplored.

Like a needle stuck in an LP, over and over and over we’re trapped within the the same triangle: Ora and Ilan and Avram, and the children they created.

Anyone want my copy? No backs.

Paul Auster’s “Sunset Park” grabbed me from its first sentence. “For almost a year now, he has been taking photographs of abandoned things.”

He is Miles Heller, an Ivy League drop-out working foreclosures in Florida, inspecting abandoned homes for banks. He finds himself cataloguing, via photographs, the things people have left behind: lipstick, rifles, tennis racquets, flat-screen televisions. Unlike his coworkers, Miles doesn’t steal.

A native New Yorker, he’s been in Florida long enough to regard the sun as an unrelenting curse instead of a warm blessing. Reading “The Great Gatsby” in the park one day he spots a pretty girl reading the same book. They fall in love. But there’s a problem: she’s 17, a high school senior. An orphan, her three sisters demand pricey abandoned goods in exchange for their not-of-age sister. When Miles refuses, thugs beat him up, sending him back to New York, where he’ll wait the six months for Pilar to turn 18.

Kind, smart, decent, loving: why did Miles drop out of school? Why did he flee his parents’ comfortable Greenwich Village home seven years ago? Those answers are heartbreaking.

In New York, Miles moves in with high school friend Bing Nathan, who’s house squatting in Sunset Park, a tired Brooklyn neighborhood.

We get to know Bing and his two women roommates intimately. Ditto Miles’ estranged father, stepmother and mother — their disappointments and desires, their frustrations and triumphs. I didn’t want to leave any of them.

Indeed, my only complaint is this book’s abbreviated length. Auster tells when he could show: Pilar’s visit to New York, Ellen’s charming reunion with her teen-age love, Bing’s seduction of Alice’s boyfriend.

Like Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” this is a story of contemporary America and its families, how they fall apart and come back together. A magnificent read.

I choked on my coffee. “You mean, the literature of the Holocaust. Hitler, the Nazis. The ultimate bad guys.”

Alex agreed, then told me all about a Danish girl sent by her grandmother to deliver a message hidden inside a picnic basket, through Nazi lines! A young girl! Outwitting the soldiers!

Which made me think: do we need even one more book, movie, play, opera about the Holocaust?

Yes. Simon Mawer’s “The Glass Room”, a 2009 finalist for the Man Booker Prize, is a magnificent addition to the canon.

Though its focus is a glass house — a fictional stand in for the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, designed by Mies Van der Rhoe — Mawer gives us the story of its owners, Viktor and Liesel Landauer. They marry, honeymoon, build and furnish the glass house, create a family, flirt, cheat, and with the Nazis bearing down, abandon the spectacular house, fleeing Czechoslovakia for the U.S., via Cuba. (Viktor is a Jew.)

The house is glass and steel, with a luminous onyx wall, open and airy, a completed work of art. But its inhabitants grow and change in surprising ways. The Landauers are fabulous, and flawed. They’re fully alive. Indeed, the story suffers when the action moves away from the Landauers, back to the glass house, where it is used as a genetic research center by the Nazis, and later, under Soviet rule, a gymnasium for children weakened by polio.

“The Glass Room” is leisurely told, spanning six decades. We see Vienna, as well as the mid-size metropolis where the glass house is situated, change from sophisticated, glittery cities into dreary, worn places. Minor characters age, suffer, change. A socialite prostitutes herself to a Nazi officer, to survive and to curry favor for her Jewish husband. A chore boy thrives under the multiple occupations, running a black market from the garage beside the glass house.

The book’s ending, also at the glass house, is strained, not believable.

The great pleasure of this book is watching a marriage survive misunderstandings, boredom, infidelity, exile. It is a lovely, lively, full-bodied read. Even with Nazis.

Two I read this summer set me up to believe that its main character, and narrator, was seeking to repair a significant love (a wife, a daughter). Each starts with a similar premise — I need to get her back — then widens in the telling, providing a much different, and far richer story than its initial pages suggest.

In Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, narrator Hans is a Dutch energy analyst living in post 9-11 New York. His wife leaves him, taking their young son to her native England. Though he (implausibly) wins his family back in the end, they’re not his true love. Cricket, and the immigrant who brings Hans back to the game, are his chief interest.

Without the game’s green fields and international players, Hans is the walking dead. Indeed, when a woman picks him up at an art gallery, she expects to be whipped by his belt. He obliges.

Cricket is Hans’ lifeblood. With Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant, Hans seeks out places to build a cricket stadium in New York. When Hans finally bats in a winning style, the one he cares for most is witness: “Chuck had seen it happen…had prompted it.”

The writing is lush, but the story — about alienation — is cold.

In Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles gives us Bennie Ford, the narrator understandably upset by captivity at O’Hare Airport, where his N.Y. to L.A. flight is grounded. Bennie is trying to get to his daughter’s wedding; he last saw her as an infant.

The letter is the book: Bennie’s howling screed to the airline contains the story of his sorry-ass alcohol-soaked life. He fails everyone except — his mother! The book’s sweetest passages give us their story.

Bennie is the only child of a Polish immigrant and a Southern schizophrenic in New Orleans. More than once his mother takes off with him, driving for days until the car breaks down; father drives out to fetch them.

Their relationship continues into his adult life; his mother, speechless from a stroke, lives with Bennie in New York’s Greenwich Village. She’s spoon fed, and communicates — furiously, hilariously — via post it notes.

The title is slight; this story has heft.

Why do we reread? I get frustrated by the poverty of newer books. Character? Plot? Language? A book I’ve enjoyed in the past has hit all three.

I just reread Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes.” I’ve read it so many times its cover has come loose and its pages are divided into five uneven parts. Still, I worried: I hadn’t read “A Fan’s Notes” in 20 years. Would I like the character, again? He’s a drunk.

“A Fan’s Notes” is an autobiographical novel. Frederick Exley is a likable, good looking, intelligent young man who refuses the American dream as he pursues it. When he beds the most American girl of all, a Midwest beauty named Bunny Sue, he can’t get it up. Enjoy “Mad Men”? He’s the shiny apple who gets canned for flipping off a client or starting a barroom brawl.

No friendship or relation is worth more than a drink.

It’s a train-wreck of a life. L.A., Miami, the West, New York in all its parts. Chicago is his Onhava: “In the summer we sat around gallon thermoses of vodka and tonic, as tribesmen around the beneficent fire, taking the sun on the most exhilarating city lake front in the world…behind us rose the dizzying turrets of Chicago’s skyline, pale and iridescent facades rising into the azure heavens, buildings all constructed, it seemed, for nothing save the pleasure of our eyes.”

He’s most often found on his mother’s davenport. More than once he’s institutionalized, electroshocked. He fails as a teacher, he flunks selling aluminum siding. The girl with roan hair takes him for drives; they marry. He fails her, too.

This read I was amazed by his junkie-like behavior in search of alcohol. But I never quit him; even at bottom, Exley finds a kind of wisdom, and humor.

It’s worth reading “A Fan’s Notes” again, and again. It’s dense, episodic, hilarious, horrifying. It’s also beautifully written, in loops: you could start at its end and find the same rich story.

The book is “Some Prefer Nettles”, by Junichiro Tanizaki, Vintage International, $13.95, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.

I loved it. The book brings an old world to life, the story is thoughtful and unpredictable. Best of all: it made me think.

Written and set in the late 1920’s, the story is a confessional: its author offered his wife to a friend, who accepted. He didn’t dislike her; she didn’t interest him sexually.

Or does she? When the story opens, husband Kaname catches the scent of his wife’s perfume, the care and attention she takes with her dress, the feeling of her hand against his neck as she helps him dress. He professes a steadfast belief in their “modern marriage”, but it bothers him that Misako sees her lover more often and for many days in a row.

As the story unfolds, it’s clear that no woman can fulfill him: Kaname is attracted — and repelled — by every woman. The prostitute he frequents is too modern, his father in-law’s young mistress is luscious but schooled in Old World arts and manners.

Kaname and his travels are the bulk of the story, but my heart went out to Misako. If her father finds out about her affair, he could disown her. When she leaves, she’ll lose her son. And if she waits too long to leave, her lover’s family could decide her unworthy of their son.

She is the property of men.

When her father learns of the affair, the couple finally act. They go to Kyoto to meet with him, even though Misako protests. After all, her fate is to be decided by her father and her husband. Once there, her father takes her to dinner; Kaname is left with the mistress.

The ending is so provocative, it took me several re-readings and days to figure it out. Too, it sent me to the translator’s notes. There he writes that Tanizaki is purposely vague. “Do not try to be too clear; leave gaps in the meaning.”

In between: I read.

I read small books and big books, fiction and nonfiction, old books and those newly published. I read for hours at a time. If it’s hot, I strip down to my swim suit. surface dive into the black water, take a few strokes, float …and go straight back to my chair and my open book.

I guess that’s nothing to a ten year old. To me, it’s bliss. To read a “big” book without interruption, in the sun, beside a clear water lake.

Recently, these have been my favorite “big” reads, all consumed on that dock:

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow, Vintage, $18.95. Sounds forbidding — and is, at 832 pages — but this is one of the most intimate biographies you’ll ever read. I learned more about U.S. business than from any text. Sounds dry? It’s not. A big life, a grand read.

• The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright, Vintage, $17. Want to know how Al Qaeda began? I did. Wright is a gifted storyteller, and his research astonishes. I even read the endnotes. A friend tried to read this going to and from work on the bus. Impossible. It is a complex read, and we know the ending. This one deserves your full attention.

• A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle, Penguin, $15. A few pages into this epic, Greitja Morse stopped by the dock. “Ohhh,” she said knowingly, as though speaking of a former lover. “Doyle is so hard to give up.” Henry Smart comes of age, and plays a part, in the Irish Rebellion. A rollicking read. Doyle’s masterpiece.

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, Riverhead Trade, $14. My then 18 year-old-son read this in a single day on the dock, then slammed it down: “This should be taught in every U.S. high school.” A 21st century must-read, about Dominicans in the U.S. and back home. End is perfect, brutal, heart wrenching.

“The Elegance of the Hedgehog” is one of those books. A 2007 prize-winner in France, it took me a few chapters to figure out the reason for its wide appeal. (By Muriel Barbery, translated from the French by Alison Anderson, Europa Books, $15.) A brief, unsigned review in The New Yorker led me to it.

Set in a luxury apartment building in the posh 7th arrondissement of Paris, the story is told in alternating chapters by Paloma, a precocious 12-year-old, and by the concierge, Renee, a frumpy lump of a woman who hides her intellect.

Why do we care about these two? Paloma is figuring out how to endure the inequities of this world; Renee needs a way in.

Playing the part of a typical concierge, Renee keeps a t.v. blaring by the door, and settles into a back room listening to Mahler, reading Tolstoy, spoiling her fat cat Leo.

It is Paloma who describes Renee as having the elegance of a hedgehog: “covered in quills…fiercely solitary.”

Paloma is a marvelous character. She pretends to be a typical child, but she’s not: she feels and thinks too deeply about all things, and so can’t see the point of living beyond 13. “The world is no place for princesses,” she declares. Among her complaints: her family’s disdain for the plight of African immigrants in Paris. Her suicide, she reasons, “will refresh their pea-brain memories.”

The arrival of a cultured Japanese businessman to the building changes them both. Renee sheds her self-made shell. (I nearly stood and cheered when she leaves the building to have her hair styled — and the source of her borrowed frocks is hilarious.)

For Paloma, M. Ozu is an adult she can admire. “I have met someone who seeks out others and who sees beyond.”

The ending is abrupt, and bittersweet. When I look at this book on my shelf, I want to crawl back into it.