I held off mentioning it when you asked for reader's top picks because it had already been picked by several of your leading authors but that's because it is a completely amazing book and so if you're asking which book I enjoyed most this year then it would have to be Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill. It's a distilled work of wonderful insight, humour and heartbreak with some of the finest writing I have read in this or any year. A portrait of a disintegrating marriage and a mirror held up to just about any reader I would have thought, such is its humanity. I cannot recommend highly enough.

The question made me review my list of 71 books read so far this year and the one which stuck in my mind is Sylvain Tesson's CONSOLATIONS OF THE FOREST. I found a pristine copy at my local recycling centre's on the shelves where people can leave items for others to take. This is one of the few books which I know I will re-read though whether I will read it as many times as my all-time favorite, Laurie Lee's AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING (read 5 times so far in my lovely reading life) remains to be seen.

Interesting for introverted me to reflect that they both concern individuals who traveled alone to places outside their own country and discovered deep joy in the simplest experiences that life has to offer.

I read an extraordinary book that I stumbled upon by chance - "Andersonville" by the American writer MacKinlay Kantor. It's a novel based in and around the notorious prison camp for Union prisoners set up by the Confederacy in Georgia in 1864.

The book was 25 years in the making, was published in 1955 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Yet I suspect it is largely unknown outside the USA due to the subject matter.

I knew a little of the prison beforehand but nothing that prepared me for the sheer cruelty and horror I read of in this book. It almost beggars belief that this crime against humanity wasn't inflicted by one nation on another people through bigotry or racial ideology but was purely Americans visiting it on their fellow countrymen.

It's a big book, understated and beautifully written with a great deal of skill particularly in the way the author constructs detailed back stories for the protagonists. It's a crime it's not better known. I heartily recommend it but not just to those with an interest in the American Civil War. It's become something of a cliché to say so, but if ever a novel exposes man's inhumanity to man this is it

My favorite this year was a reread, after many years, of Camus' L'Etranger. I read most of his writings over the year but L'Etranger is his masterpiece.

The book that most surprised me was 1984, also a reread from decades before, but I found it to have an amazing horrifying deep structure that was even more horrigying that its manifest content.

Kafka's Trial and Hammett's Maltese Falcon (more rereads) were strong contenders for first place.

All of the above I read for the Guardian's Reading Group.

In nonfiction I am reading slowly the Philip K Dick Exegesis, and find it fascinating the way his fiction and spiritual beliefs intertwine with his life experiences.

This year has provided me with a rich mixture of good and bad reads, with too many books needing editing or rewriting to make them sharper and, hopefully, more readable. I say that in all humility as I know from experience just how difficult it is to get the idea of a novel into novel form. I intend to try harder next year.

So here are a few of my favourite reads of the year.

Colin Thubron Shadow of the Silk Road. This was surely the journey of a lifetime, tracing the almost mythical Silk Road along its route from China to the Mediterranean Sea. Thubron has the knack of bringing the past into the present, and of being the best of travel companions as well. I immediately rushed to our library and removed whatever other Thubron books I could find for a New Years binge.

Marion Coutts The Iceberg This is an often harrowing account of how the artist Marion Coutts and her husband Tom Lubbock the art historian and critic dealt with the diagnosis of his brain tumour and the battle with it which he sadly lost. The couple had only recently married and had a baby son of 18 months. Having been widowed myself I do not know how Coutts managed to write such a wonderful book so soon after losing her husband. Lubbock's tumour was sited in the area of the brain that deals with language, a cruel blow for a writer but, unbelievably, by dint of sheer bloody mindedness he managed to keep writing for two years after his diagnosis. This is probably my book of the year and I commend it to anyone.

Jane Gardam Old Filth Trilogy I love sequences of books that slowly unravel the stories their protagonists have been hiding. I loved all three books. Filth stands for Failed in London Try HongKong and the books deal with two men who follow each other from London after the war to the far East and how their relationship unfolds. I love these books, and will read them again.

Elizabeth Strout Olive Kitteridge; A novel in stories. This was another book that unfolded across stories. I think that of all the novels I read this year this might have been the one that felt as though it had been written for "grown ups." The stories, thirteen of them, are linked by the figure of Olive and they deal with different people who she meets. Short story form relies on a sudden realisation of what the author meant to tell and a novel is a lengthier less tidy narrative. Strout uses the shock of the short story form to punctuate the narrative form. I enjoyed this book so much that I read twice. I frequently read books twice, once to enjoy and turn the pages and the second time to see how the author manages her material.

I also enjoyed Stoner by John Williams, and a wonderful collection of poems by Ruth Fainlight.
Amongst other books I read are Granta collections, of which I have several, and they are read and reread almost compulsively and I collect them whenever I see them, usually in charity shops.

I've read some right old rubbish this year.

One of my favourite things was the book length poem, Gabriel, by Edward Hirsch. Moved me more than any of the fiction I've had in my paws in 2014.

The one I enjoyed the most had been sitting on my shelf for years intimidating me with its serious look and pages of lengthy, serious-looking prose poetry.

So I decided to participate in a read along in January and read and wrote about a couple of chapters at a time and absolutely loved it!

How could I have ignored Eugene Onegin for so long and what made me think it inaccessible?

Alexander Pushkin's book length comic poem entertained, caused indignation, surprise, had me reading about Vasily Zhukovsky's Svetlana, translating a little French and wanting to read more of the great Russian poet.

Oh, "which book", as in "only one book"? Although a fair number of the titles I read proved disappointing, there were several books I was glad to welcome in my life this year.

2014 was the year I (finally!) read Zadie Smith, and started off with White Teeth, which left me wide-eyed and in awe of her tremendous talent (at least for the first 300 pages). I had the pleasure to attend one of her readings this past summer and when I walked up to her to have my cherished battered copy of White Teeth signed, I told her, sheepishly, that I thought she was more impressive than a rock star... um, yes.

My other favourites were also a series of firsts, for me or for their author...
I feel compelled to mention Catherine Lacey's debut novel Nobody is Ever Missing, a whirlwind around a depressed young woman stuck in her own mind, The Faraway Nearby by Rebecca Solnit, a stunning collection of essays tightly bound to the author's personal experiences, Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a very slim novel in which every sentence punches you right in the gut, Carol Shields' Larry's Party, a portrait so lifelike I felt as if I had always known the character, and I am China by Xiaolu Guo, a enthralling novel of love, art and freedom in the twenty years that followed the Tiananmen events. I read it in one sitting and couldn't think about anything else for a few days afterwards. I however have a hard time accepting it was overlooked by virtually every year-end lists, although her interview in these pages makes for good reading for anyone interested.

Not quite done with 2014 as I'm trying to cram a dozen books in my suitcase for the holidays, but hopefully 2015 won't disappoint...

The book I enjoyed the most this year was A Song Flung Up To Heaven, by Maya Angelou. Having read the previous five books in her autobiography collection at intervals over the past 4 years at university, I decided to save the last one for the summer at the end of it all. Reading about her life, travels and challenges was comforting, and she became a powerful icon in my mind of a strong woman at a time when I needed inspiration.

When she died in the spring I came to the realisation that I would never be able to meet the woman who had collected all of these observations and experiences and put them on a page for a reader from a different country, generation and background to relate to. I wouldn't be able to go through my battered copies of the books, and the pages that I had folded over to come back to later with questions for Ms Angelou. I wouldn't be able to send her a letter to add to her piles of mail telling her that the strength she presented in her books and as a writer had inspired me throughout an age of transition in my life.

I saved the final book for the opportune moment. That moment presented itself when I went to New York this Autumn. Reading about Maya Angelou's America was all the more poignant when I was sitting in a cafe in Harlem looking out onto the street where street vendors were selling pictures of her, accompanied by words that she had said or written.

She wrote about her experiences when Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were assassinated. She described the Watts riots of 1965 where the African American community in Watts, California, reacted to reports of police brutality against two black brothers. I was reminded of the images that she described when we saw the outrage against the police gain more pace this year following the situation in Ferguson and the protests around America and the deaths of a number of young African American men at the hands of police officers.

This book tells a real story of life half a century ago, but it remains ever relevant in the world we are living in today. When I read the final pages I felt incredibly sad that I had reached the end of what for me was a literary journey that had given me so much to feel and reflect on, but I closed the book thinking, thank goodness this woman was around, to document her life and the wider backdrop of the world at this time, so that people of my generation don't forget.

Didn't read too much new fiction this year, but here are my top reads of the year, in alphabetical order:

Saadat Hasan Manto - Bombay Stories

A brilliant selection of the great Urdu short story-writer's work, published as a Vintage Classic this year. Bawdy, bloody, occasionally erotic tales of the pre-Partition Bombay underworld. Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad's translations read well, despite the odd jarring Americanism.

Jona Oberski - A Childhood

Pushkin Press recently reissued Ralph Manheim's translation of this semi-fictionalised account of a childhood spent in wartime Holland and concentration camps. Written in a close approximation of a small child's voice, Oberski mercifully avoids the pitfalls of similar accounts, namely, a grating faux-naivety and cutesy-poo vocabulary (I'm looking at you, John Boyne). It definitely deserves a place among canonical Holocaust narratives, non-fictional or fictional.

Wilma Stockenström - The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

Archipelago books reissued this mini-masterpiece of Afrikaans literature this year, in J.M. Coetzee's translation. At barely over a hundred pages, what may appear to be a mere slip of a book is an incantatory, condensed epic narrated by a former slave eking out an existence for herself in the wilderness of the colonial Cape. Heartily recommended.

Khushwant Singh - Train To Pakistan

A revelation. Singh, who died this past year, had for the past few generations been one of the foremost English-language authors in India, but he hardly registered anywhere else. If A Train To Pakistan is anything to go by, this was nothing short a crime. This fierce, crystalline little gem of a novel, set during the harrowing Partition era, should rank with Things Fall Apart as a foundational postcolonial novel. It has been great to see it receiving some attention on the Guardian Books message boards.

Patrick White - Voss

Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the power of 10, with Austenesque social satire thrown in. A tale of a German explorer's ill-fated expedition into the Australian outback and his quasi-telepathic relationship with a young Sydney woman. White is a heavy read at the best of times, but what a pay-off.