The Baseball Codes is an entertaining, exhaustive look at baseball's unwritten rules, seen from inside the game.

So here we are on the last day of the year, and it's time for my favorite book of 2010 — for which I can thank Monkey See contributor Glenn McDonald, who wrote about it for the blog in March.

The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America's Pastime (yes, its title has two colons, but they're earned) is a wildly entertaining book about baseball, threading the needle perfectly in that it talks about the game with love without collapsing into the purple "on a dusty diamond doth man find his true heart" kind of stuff you find far too often in baseball writing.

It's really about professional baseball as a society. And it's a society that has rules, customs, expectations, hierarchies, and etiquette that most people — even fans — don't entirely understand. The business of a pitcher hitting a batter and another batter being hit in retaliation is amateur stuff, sophistication-wise. Here, writers Jason Turbow and Michael Duca get into much more complex sequences of payback and code enforcement. Sure, pitchers do much of the enforcement work through the built-in advantage of being entitled to throw a ball at a person at 90 miles an hour. But baserunners take out infielders, batters throw bats, fielders apply "hard tags" — there are lots of ways to be punished if you break one of the unwritten rules.

And those rules themselves form the most fascinating part of the book, because they are firmly rooted in the idea of respect, despite the fact that they may make little or no sense to people not in the game. Players and coaches quoted in the extensively sourced text disagree, for instance, about when the rule against running up the score kicks in and what it involves (not bunting? not running the bases aggressively?), but most of them agree that there is some point at which you stop trying quite so hard to score. How can that be? The losing team is still trying to come back; why wouldn't you keep trying to get further ahead? These are the mysteries of largely closed societies.

There is a furtive glee in the way some of these stories of lawmaking and lawbreaking are presented: a story of an epic brawl between the Padres and the Braves makes it seem embarrassingly stupid, but also quotes Goose Gossage who, in his autobiography, called it "the best, most intense baseball fight I've ever seen or been involved with." And that's after the book explains that the fight started because Atlanta's starting pitcher intentionally conked a Padres hitter and the Padres' pitching staff had trouble conking him back. It's theoretically a terrible story of a lot of guys acting like fools, but when a fan throws a cup of beer and a player watching in the broadcast booth because he's on the disabled list runs to the locker room to put on his uniform so he can run on the field and fight? That's a little funny, also.

There are a staggering number of people quoted in this book — good guys, bad guys, coaches, players, umpires — and they all have wonderful stories. It's not about glorifying hitting guys with fastballs for staring admiringly at their own home runs, for instance, but it is about explaining that this is a fundamental part of how professional baseball works, and if you don't get it, you're going to get hit a lot.

It's a terrific book, whether you particularly care about baseball or not.

Viking Adult

Favorite Books 2010 asks NPR personalities to talk about one book from this year that they loved. Jacki Lyden is a frequent substitute program host.

Lydia Davis' dazzling translation of Flaubert's classic, Madame Bovary, may mean that at last Emma Bovary gets a happy marriage: she is translated to perfect pitch by a woman who is dedicated to Emma’s passion for expression.  We can hear her breathing in this novel, hear her rent her dress as she tries to flee her debts and the bottomless Rodolphe, hear her trapped in the dreadful choices she has made as she seizes that fatal powder at the apothecary's. Emma Bovary may have been a prisoner of lust and temptations.

I don’t know Lydia Davis and haven’t interviewed her, but in doing some reading about her decisions to make this translation, I learned that she wrestled a bit with the idea that "each generation deserves a new translation of Madame Bovary." Davis has previously received the National Book Award for her translation of Proust's Swann’s Way. Sometimes, she said, writing in the Paris Review, a translation grows stale, or florid, or in some other way detached.

At any rate, to her thinking, Madame Bovary is a novel rich enough to admit for many translations. I'd certainly say it is necessary to have hers.

In  notes to the introduction, Davis tells us that Flaubert had the task of making generally sordid people interesting, and did this through his imagination and art. "The version he cut out was more lyrical than the one he let stand," she says, speaking of earlier drafts. But I loved the sense, sensation and minute detail of this novel, often called one of the first realist works of literature. I think it is, in fact, an essential classic.

Davis is not merely substituting richer, more poetic phrases for paler predecessors. She makes us feel Flaubert thinking.  In her notes she quotes that Flaubert wanted "grand turns of phrase, broad, full periods rolling along like rivers, a multiplicity of metaphors, great bursts of style." Indeed, she writes that he was infuriated when Zola said there was "more to the book than style."

You will be lost in Emma's acquisitions of silks and love notes and promissory notes, Charles' oblivious complicity, Homais' hypocritical betrayal. Just to walk inside these lives, knowing that we can leave them where Emma could not, is quite a thrill. And clearly, Lydia Davis has had a ball in the company of these poor wretches. She's left us the richer with this translation.

Knopf

Favorite Books Of 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about  one book from the past year that they loved. Bob Mondello reviews movies and covers the arts for NPR.

The sun comes up,
I think about Sondheim,
The coffee cup,
I think about Sondheim.

Well, not usually – but that's been my routine every day since I started reading Finishing the Hat, the belligerently accessible, altogether fascinating volume of "comments, principles, heresies grudges, whines and anecdotes" (that's all on the cover) from the musical theater's reigning genius.

If you don't already know that with Company, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, Passion, and more than a dozen other classics, Stephen Sondheim more or less singlehandedly made musical theater a form sophisticated adults needn't be embarrassed to enjoy, this may not be the book for you. It helps to be able to hum along, whether he's passing judgment (often critical) on his own rhymes, or those of deceased predecessors "who can no longer defend themselves, but who also cannot be upset by anything I have to say." He’s merciless with Noel Coward, annoyed by Alan Jay Lerner, and even a little snippy about his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II.

But he’s no less barbed about his own work, often chastising himself for lines most writers would kill to have come up with. (Some in West Side Story's rousing "America," he writes, "melt in the mouth as gracelessly as peanut butter and are impossible to comprehend.") And the book is crammed with photos of his worksheets — rejected rhymes, crossed-out but still-legible stabs at ideas he would later polish to perfection. If the rhyme in a lyric like "we have so much in common/ it's a phenomen/-on" makes you smile, you'll find grins on every page.

Technically, the book is a collection of the lyrics Sondheim wrote between 1954 and 1981, along with details about the creative process that led to them. And that's plenty heady stuff. But much as I love a snarky anecdote — and there are plenty — it's the asides about craft that fascinate. Just as one example, here's a parenthetical footnote on how to make rhyming tickle the mind as well as the ear:

Curiously enough, rhymes whose endings are spelled differently (for example, "rougher/suffer") are more interesting than those which are spelled the same ("rougher/tougher"), not only to the eye, but to the ear, perhaps because the brain subliminally sees them in print and is therefore more surprised when they come along. "Weary" and "bleary" are a less effective pair than "weary" and "eerie," or even "weary" and "leery," not to mention "weary" and "hara-kiri."

I've been grinning away for the better part of a month now. And will be until his next volume comes out.

Ayebia Clarke Publishing

Favorite Books Of 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about  one book from the past year that they loved. Ofeibea Quist-Arcton is an NPR foreign correspondent who covers West Africa.

Why, you may ask, Reine Pokou — translated in English as Queen Pokou:  Concerto for a Sacrifice? It’s an attractive, slim volume of poetic prose, with a colorful cover illustration by the author, about an African queen from a country that is back in the headlines — Ivory Coast.

I'll tell you why you should grab this book and read it: because Veronique Tadjo, who is herself Ivorian-French, was weaned on the legend of Queen Pokou. She has presented us with evocative and captivating stories — ancient tales based on historical fact and fable — that reach right into the soul and pull at your heartstrings.

Quite by chance, I picked up Reine Pokou (the 2009 English translation of a book I devoured when it was first published in French and won the prestigious 2005 Grand Prix Litteraire d’Afrique Noire) as I headed to Ivory Coast to cover the Nov. 28th presidential runoff vote.

Ivory Coast is struggling to emerge from a decade of political upheaval, rebellion and civil war. The election was meant to draw a line under ten years of troubles.

So, it was fascinating to plunge back into the past and savor one brave woman's sacrifice and vision and how she overcame. Add to that her people’s battle to establish a new kingdom — after fleeing certain death back home across the border and escaping the tyrannical rule of a ruthless royal uncle. 

Putrid, poisonous palace politics.

Intrigue, grief, triumph.

And all with a poetic flourish of Tadjo's quill, as she sweeps us up from one story of Ivory Coast’s Baoule Queen Pokou legend to another version of the same remarkable tale.

Sometimes it’s in terse prose: "The fugitives plunged even deeper into the forest: the realm of spirits impatient with mankind. The ground was damp, covered with a thick layer of dark soil where snakes lay in wait."

Turn the page and Tadjo switches to story-telling laced with rich, literary lyricism:

Legend says that Pokou’s exodus was slow and exhausting. The trees in the forest turned into monstrous spirits who grabbed the legs of those who were fleeing and strangled the most vulnerable with their vines. From all sides, beasts came out of their lairs to circle around them, smelling their fear and the blood of the wounded, which left red stains on the rich soil of the forest. Hyenas tracked them. Elephants — their trunks held high and their ears waving like fans — made the ground tremble beneath their weight. On the carpet of dead leaves, snakes followed noiselessly, their scales shining with deadly glimmers. Monkeys snickered.

The air was damp, the atmosphere suffocating. The men’s brows burned; their shoulders dripped with sweat.  The children shivered with malarial fevers.  The women’s backs were broken by suffering.  Everything combined to bring about their loss.  They were a vanquished people fleeing a fratricidal war that nothing could stop.

Are you hooked?  I am. The book is Queen Pokou: Concerto for a Sacrifice by Veronique Tadjo.

Translated from the original French by Amy Baram Reid. Published by Ayebia Clark Publishing. Distributed in the U.S. exclusively by Lynne Rienner Publishers Inc., Boulder, CO. Veronique Tadjo's web site is www.veroniquetadjo.com.

Bob Boilen is the host of All Songs Considered. Favorite Books Of 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about  one book from the past year that they loved.

I'm not a fan of books about rock musicians. Reading about the wild lives of the famous might get me listening to some old albums, but the details of crazed parties and recording sessions generally feel trite compared to the music.

Soul Mining: A Musical Life, by producer musician Daniel Lanois, is different. It's a story of overcoming the odds, an unlikely tale of a poor boy growing up in a small Canadian town and becoming a musical maverick. It's an inspired tale for any aspiring musician and a success story with a giant resume.

Lanois takes us from his homemade studio in his mom's basement to an old New Orleans mansion turned studio for Bob Dylan. You get philosophy mixed with technology, from the famed funk of The Meters to the sonic adventures of Brian Eno.

Recording and writing songs isn't about the drugs or the parties, but about soul and intuition. In this non-linear tale of anecdotes and attitudes, Soul Mining is a manifesto not a memoir, and I love that.

Soul Mining: A Musical Life, hardcover, 240 pages, Faber & Faber, list price: $26

Favorite Books 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that they loved. NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg asked for special permission to recommend a book from a previous year. What could we say?

In 2010 I caught up with this astonishing, powerful book. The story is told in scraps — 13 short and middle-sized and longish chapters. In some, the title character barely appears beyond a single sentence. Yet by the end you feel you know everyone who lives in her small town in Maine, and that you can smell the air and taste the endurance.

Olive is a difficult, snappish woman — an unusual protagonist. She clumps through life on tactless shoes. Underneath her aging lumpy body and gruff demeanor, you  just feel how much  she is longing for connection. The book, which won the fiction Pulitzer in 2009, is a triumph of structure and precision. The achievement of a marvelously talented writer.

Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout, paperback, 304 pages, Random HouseRandom House

Favorite Books 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that stood out as a favorite. Mara Liasson is NPR's national political correspondent.

For those of you who are sick of the sturm und drang of partisan politics but who still have a little space left on your shelf of books about President Barack Obama, here's a new one off the beaten track. It's called Reading Obama, by James Kloppenberg, and instead of a personal biography or an overheated attack on the 44th president, it's an intellectual history.

I cover the White House and the president, and I often wonder if there is such a thing as "Obamaism." This book offers one definition. Kloppenberg is the chairman of the history department at Harvard; he's written books about liberalism and social democracy, and he places Obama squarely in that progressive intellectual stream. Kloppenberg offers an answer to one of the great ironies about reactions to Obama: how the same man can be vilified as a socialist and derided as a sellout to Wall Street.

According to Kloppenberg, Obama's writings and speeches show that he is an adherent of philosophical pragmatism, a home-grown American philosophy developed at the end of the 19th century by William James and John Dewey. Philosophical pragmatists are anti-absolutists. They believe that compromise, public debate and civility are the building blocks of true democracy. Kloppenberg believes Obama's cerebral caution and his nuanced understanding of both sides of a debate are not personality traits or signs of weakness; they are a philosophical choice.

But what if there is no one in the opposite party to compromise with? Then the search for common ground comes up empty-handed, as Obama's seems to be doing.

To Kloppenberg, Barack Obama is a man of ideas — one of the most penetrating political thinkers elected to the White House in the past century. And the author may be right. But his book also puts Obama's failings into a philosophical context. All that cerebral detachment and flexibility make it hard for Obama to communicate the righteous passion that voters want. (That too is ironic, since righteous passion was exactly the trait voters seemed exhausted by after eight years of George W. Bush). And it makes it harder for Obama to inspire and persuade.

The most interesting part of the book for me is when Kloppenberg connects Obama's travels in Africa to his pragmatic philosophy. In Dreams from my Father, Obama writes about a conversation he had with a Kenyan historian who tells him, "If you make the wrong choice, then you can learn from your mistakes and see what works."

That's exactly where the philosophically pragmatic president is right now, starting to share power with the Republicans, figuring out what kind of midcourse correction he wants to make.

Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, by James T. Kloppenberg, Princeton University Press, hardcover, 296 pages.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Favorite Book 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that they loved. Guy Raz is the host of Weekend All Things Considered.

I read a lot of books. To be exact, I read 104 books a year, since we feature a different book on Weekend All Things Considered every Saturday and every Sunday. Among the 104 books I read this year, Freedom stands alone.

It tells the story of the Berglund family from St. Paul, Minnesota, and the relationship between father Walter and his wife Patty as their seemingly ideal existence becomes darker and more complex when an old friend, Richard Katz, re-enters their lives. The core of the book is about relationships — about family dynamics.

It is such an honest portrayal of a good, strong and flawed family. In other words, a normal family. It is about disappointment and expectations unfulfilled but, ultimately, about love and its redemptive power. But don't expect to come away from the book feeling uplifted; you won't. There's a good chance you'll come away with mixed feelings  about Walter Berglund, about his wife Patty, about Richard Katz and most of all, about Jonathan Franzen himself. He writes complex characters who are not always easy to like.

But the most terrifying thing about the book is that, in many ways, he is writing about us. About you and me and both the flaws and goodness within all of us. Every page of this book is a new adventure. And at times, one marvels at the simplicity and seeming effortlessness of the prose. Perhaps it's what makes Freedom so remarkable. Franzen spent nearly a decade thinking about the book and thinking about how to craft it in a way that makes it seem like it wrote itself. When I spoke to him about it, he told me "I wanted to produce something that really connected with how it feels to be alive now."  That is precisely what he did.

Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, hardcover, 576 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lynn Neary reports on books and the publishing world for NPR. Favorite Book 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about  one book from the past year that they loved.

I used to be the kind of person who loved to devour long novels — I still do sometimes. But more often these days, I find that I gravitate towards  a shorter form, often described  as "linked short stories" (for want of a better description I think). The "links" that hold the characters and their stories together can be as fleeting as a momentary encounter or as binding as a lifelong relationship. Either way, they shape and change characters in profound ways.

I think of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad as this kind of book,  even though Egan herself doesn't — she says the book defies categorization.  And she's right — A Visit from the Goon Squad doesn't fit neatly into any genre. Egan is playing with the idea of the novel, and the result is a swirling   time trip that is both fun and emotionally satisfying. One of the most effective and affecting stories in the book comes in the form of a power point presentation narrated by a 12-year-old girl. That feat in itself is a testament to Egan's powers as a writer.

The two characters who appear and disappear with the greatest frequency are Sasha, a young woman who has a compulsive urge to steal, and her boss, Bennie, a record company executive who was once a member of a punk rock band in San Francisco. The book travels back and forth in time with these characters and many of the people who have touched their lives. Each of the stories stands alone, each  has a distinct style and  narrative voice — and together they form a more perfect whole. They fit together like a mosaic. At first you can't make out the image, but then the jumble of pieces comes together to create a vivid picture of a fully realized world.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, hardcover, 288 pages, Knopf, list price: $25

Favorite Book 2010 asks NPR personalities to write about one book from the past year that they loved. Michel Martin is the host of NPR's Tell Me More.

If you've ever known the joy of finding ten dollars in the pocket of an old pair of pants at the back of the closet, or better yet, a long lost love letter tucked in the corner of your grandmother's armoire, then you will understand the pleasures of this remarkable work. It tells a story hiding in plain sight, about the mass migration of millions of black Americans from the apartheid south to the north and the west, beginning around World War I and lasting until about 1970. That mass migration changed this country forever, but, like that ten dollars, it's a story that's been relegated to back of the history closet, if it's been remembered at all.

Isabel Wilkerson, a former reporter for The New York Times, has revived this important story, but best of all she has figured out how to tell it as the epic drama it was through the eyes of the people who lived it. It's the story of racial codes so ludicrously specific that they barred blacks  and whites from playing checkers together in city parks, of a racial hierarchy that was so oppressive that fathers could not protect their daughters from being used for sport, sexual and otherwise, by the white people they worked for and lived alongside. Wilkerson tells how black people finally said goodbye to all this and stole away, sometimes under the cover of darkness, sometimes by driving literally for days without rest, all for the desire to taste, as she puts it, the warmth of other suns. It's an amazing piece of work.

The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, by Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, Hardcover, 640 pages.

Grand Central Publishing

Throughout the month of December, we are featuring NPR hosts, reporters, and writers talking about their favorite books of 2010. Scott Simon is the host of Weekend Edition Saturday.

Scott Turow avoided writing a sequel to Presumed Innocent for 20 years. He was offered many blandishments (which is to say: $$$), but felt that he still had many more stories to tell — and he has, creating a cast of characters in fictional Kindle County (a pretty clear stand-in for Chicago) that have moved through eight more novels, including Burden of Proof, Reversible Errors, and (my favorite) Personal Injuries. But great literary characters live on in our minds. If millions of readers continue to be interested in Rusty Sabich, the career prosecutor accused of murdering his former mistress in Presumed Innocent, why shouldn't the novelist?

The result is this year’s Innocent. It is an extraordinary novel, clearly the work of a writer who has matured as an artist, and a public figure who has peered behind the curtains (and robes) of the powerful. Rusty Sabich is now 60 and a supreme court judge. His wife dies in bed beside him, and the judge is accused of her murder, with the implication that she might have possessed the knowledge to undercut the acquittal he was given for the murder of which he was accused a generation earlier. All of the immensely intricate and satisfying courtroom serves and volleys are there. But so is a story of fathers and sons, allure and reason, and finding reasons to go on beyond despair.

Harper Collins

Throughout the month of December, we'll be looking to a wide variety of NPR hosts, reporters and writers to fill us in on their very favorite books of 2010. We couldn't be more pleased to kick off with Peter Sagal, the host of NPR's news quiz, Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! and the author of The Book Of Vice. There are many more favorites to come. As Carl Kasell would say: And now your host, Peeeeeeeter Sagal.

If you are interested in evolutionary biology (as I am) and are interested in sex (as everybody is), eventually you seek out an evolutionary explanation of human sexual behavior. It always goes something like this: Men, eager to spread their genes (in the form of unlimited sperm) far and wide, are naturally promiscuous, and women, eager to provide resources for their genes (in the form of rare and precious eggs), are nesters, trading sex with men for security for their offspring. Thus, horndogs and housewives: Eliot and Silda Spitzer, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tiger Woods and his wife Elin Nordegren, ad, quite literally sometimes, nauseam. With all that evidence on cable news, I, like millions of others, bought into this model. I even referenced it, approvingly, in my own book.

Which is why my favorite book of 2010 is Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins Of Modern Sexuality – it's the only book I read this year that proved that I was badly mistaken about something. The "standard model" is, as authors Ryan and Jetha point out, as false as the Piltdown Man. Even worse, it is, as they call it, a "Flintstonization of Prehistory," a way of mapping modern mores backwards onto our ancient past. For centuries, men were allowed sexual freedom, women were not, and thus this explanation exists to provide a "scientific" basis for what we already believe.

Their eminently convincing case argues that our current sexual practices — pair bonding in marriage, monogamy (which, again, historically we've imposed only on women), even the nuclear family — are all a cultural construct, dating from after the rise of agriculture and civilization. To describe sexual behavior in our natural state, in the hundreds of thousands of years before the scant few millenia of recorded history, they use evidence from anthropology, comparative zoology, and evolutionary biology. Their conclusion is that we are evolved to be highly sexualized creatures, almost unique in the world, who use sex as a form of social communication and bonding. And that in our natural state, females enjoy and exercise as much sexual freedom as males, if not more.

They are careful not to draw any conclusions about modern sexual morality, other than to urge sympathy towards those who "fail" at monogamy (see list above). What makes the book so valuable – beyond its good humor, sharp writing, and its remarkable asides on issues such as "female copulatory vocalization" – is the way it casually and effectively demolishes a Solomon’s Temple worth of conventional wisdom about something we thought we understood pretty well: who we are. It made me wonder how much else of what I think I know is wrong, and it makes me eager to find out.