At year’s end, The New York Times’ three daily book critics explain what goes into making our year-end lists. It’s an explanation liable to make heads spin, but it’s born of necessity. We can’t make trustworthy “10 best” lists because none of us reads everything, even though each of us reads quite a lot. So each critic’s list includes only books that the critic reviewed during 2014.

But we can’t help falling for favorites. And that’s really what these lists are about. They’re our recommendations, the ones we liked best in a crowded but amorphous year.

“Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life,” by Hermione Lee (Alfred A. Knopf)

This is a strong and sensitive biography of a writer who led an extraordinary life. Fitzgerald attended Oxford University, later found herself and her children homeless and did not publish her first book until she was nearly 60. Here we have a perfect match of biographer and subject.

“10:04,” by Ben Lerner (Faber and Faber)

This is an intimate yet oddly grand novel of New York City, one that takes place between two recent storms: Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy. The novel’s narrator, a writer, says he hopes to compose a book that is, on some level, “a long list of things that quicken the heart.” Lerner has written this sort of book.

“How to Build a Girl,” by Caitlin Moran (Harper)

Moran is a British newspaper columnist, and her funny and cheerfully dirty coming-of-age novel has a hard kernel of class awareness. It’s about a lower-middle-class girl who longs to go to London and be a rock critic, and it is sloppy, big-hearted and alive in all the right ways.

“My Struggle:

Book Three: Boyhood,” by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Archipelago Books)

The third book in Knausgaard’s six-part epic, “My Struggle,” this volume charts in topographical detail the author’s childhood with his family (father, mother and brother) on an island along the southern coast of Norway. The almost offhand intensity of Knausgaard’s prose is a secular sort of miracle.

“I’ll Take You There:

Mavis Staples, The Staple Singers, and The March Up Freedom’s Highway,” by Greg Kot (Scribner)

Kot’s biography of Mavis Staples and the Staple Singers is rich musical and social history. It charts the family’s origins in gospel music; their drift into folk, soul and pop; and the reverberations of their music during the civil rights era. It’s involving from beginning to end and will send you racing back to listen to the music.

“Every Day Is for the Thief,” by Teju Cole (Random House)

Cole’s novel is a book of peregrinations. It’s about a young Nigerian man, a medical student in New York City, who returns home for a short visit. It’s a book of impressions, of fleeting glimpses, that add up to a memorable portrait of a man caught between societies.

“Redeployment,” by Phil Klay (the Penguin Press)

The gritty, unsparing stories in this debut collection give us a visceral feel for what it was like to be a soldier on the ground in Iraq and what it was like to return home to a country that was mostly oblivious to the fact that America was even at war. A veteran of the Marine Corps, who served in Iraq during the surge, Klay writes with enormous precision and depth of feeling, the exactitude of his prose containing, and at the same time underscoring, war’s violence and chaos. His 12 stories are told in the first person, but from a variety of points of view (a young artilleryman, a member of Mortuary Affairs, a veteran attending law school). Together, these tales create a choral portrait of the war, and they testify to Klay’s range as a writer and his understanding of its human costs.

“A Brief History

of Seven Killings,” by Marlon James (Riverhead Books)

This novel is epic in every sense of that word: mythic, sweeping, over the top, staggeringly complex. James uses the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley as a portal into Jamaican politics and culture, and his novel becomes an elliptical inquiry into race and class, and the volatile relationship between the United States and the Caribbean. Although the novel’s sprawling cast and stream-of-consciousness patois can initially make the book seem overwhelming, James writes with such a love of language — language that’s musical, electric and fantastically profane — that he quickly immerses the reader in his characters’ lives, creating a story that is as compelling as it is complicated.

“Can’t We Talk About

Something More Pleasant?

A Memoir,” by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury Publishing)

As fans of her New Yorker cartoons well know, Chast’s work has long been informed by her experiences as a daughter, wife and mother. In her new book, she directly tackles the subject of her parents — her gentle, worrywart father and impossibly stubborn mother, who lived for 48 years in the same Brooklyn apartment filled with geologic layers of unopened mail, old Life magazines and antique appliances. Her account of growing up with them as an only child, and her efforts decades later to help them navigate the shoals of old age and ill health, is sad and funny and absurd, and it reminds us of the infinite elasticity of the illustrated book — in this case, the perfect vessel for a personal story about filial love and duty.

“Duty: Memoirs of a

Secretary at War,” by Robert M. Gates (Alfred A. Knopf)

In his forthright and highly impassioned memoir, Gates gives readers a compelling account of his 4 1/2 years as secretary of defense under Presidents Bush and Obama. Though inside-the-Beltway readers have already perused this volume for revelations about turf wars and policy disagreements in those administrations, lay readers will learn a great deal here about the workings of Washington and the challenges facing the United States at home and abroad. Gates’ assessments of a wide array of national security matters are informed by a keen sense of history and his longtime Washington experience, and he talks candidly here about the Iraq war he inherited when he took over as defense secretary in late 2006, recalling that he was “stunned by what I saw as amazing bungling after the initial military success.”

“The Sixth Extinction:

An Unnatural Selection,” by Elizabeth Kolbert (Henry Holt and Co.)

In a book that reads like the very model of explanatory journalism, Kolbert reports from far-flung parts of the world and interviews scientists and researchers to give readers an up-close-and-animal understanding of the globe’s many endangered species and their shrinking habitats. Her descriptions of vanishing creatures — including a Sumatran rhino named Suci and a Hawaiian crow named Kinohi — are vivid and touching, but the real power of her book resides in the hard science and historical context she delivers here, documenting the mounting losses incurred by mankind’s transformation of the planet.

“The Dog: Stories,” by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

The stories in Livings’ masterly debut collection (not to be confused with this year’s Joseph O’Neill novel of the same name) are set in China and show us how parts of that country are rushing to embrace the 21st century, even as many of its people still feel the magnetic hold exerted by history and tradition. Livings, who taught English in China and studied there as an undergraduate, writes with such sympathy and insight that he seems less like an outsider than like a sort of Chekhovian observer, attuned to the ironies of his characters’ stories, their entrapment by family expectations and government rules and their struggles to clear a small measure of personal freedom in their daily lives.

“Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s ‘Learned’,” by Lena Dunham (Random House)

This smart, funny book by the creator of the hit HBO series “Girls” is a kind of memoir disguised as an advice book, or a how-to book in the guise of a series of personal essays. The sharp observations and distinctive voice Dunham honed in “Girls” and her 2010 movie, “Tiny Furniture,” are translated here to the page. She writes about the most personal details of her life, from longstanding insecurities to terrible relationships to long-distance therapy sessions. At the same time, there is also an older person’s sort of wisdom here: a writer’s stereoscopic perspective on her hardly distant youth and an understanding of the transactions between life and art.

“We Are Not Ourselves,” by Matthew Thomas (Simon & Schuster)

A rich, sprawling first novel, supremely insightful about the family at its core. The story follows a young girl from Queens from girlhood through the seesawing changes of courtship, marriage, motherhood and a particularly brutal twist of fate. Big, honest, mesmerizing, painful and impossible to put down.

“To Rise Again

at a Decent Hour,” by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown and Co.)

Ferris hits a high-water mark in the literature of dentistry with this scathingly funny book that segues from oral decay into religious mysticism more easily than might be expected. So ambitious that the author lards it with fake biblical texts, this novel makes a riotous comedy of errors out of one cynic’s search for solace.

“The Innovators:

How a Group of Hackers,

Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution,” by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)

In many ways, this book is just a collection of thumbnail biographies of assorted inventors and scientists. But even if it’s a gloss, it’s an important and accessible one about what is arguably the most important subject of our time. Make that subjects: Isaacson has woven together two parallel histories, one about the development of the computer and the other about the evolution of computer programming. These are interrelated, but they are very different things. This book’s scintillation factor is slight, but the takeaway’s well worth it.

“The Short And Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League,” by Jeff Hobbs (Scribner)

Where would Hobbs be had he not been assigned to room with Robert Peace at Yale? It’s Peace’s story that makes this book, although Hobbs has done a fine job of investigating it. He found the mother who sacrificed everything to get Robert a good education, and the charismatic father whose criminal past intrigued Robert more than being a solid citizen did. And rich kids from Yale, happy to encourage this black scholarship student from Newark in his role as drug dealer. Could anything have changed Robert Peace’s destiny? That’s the kind of question that makes this book so wrenching.

“Being Mortal,” by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan)

Straight talk from a doctor about most doctors’ and patients’ least favorite subject. But Gawande addresses mortality as a compassionate pragmatist, beginning with a no-nonsense discussion of how the body changes over time that is just too interesting to ignore. (Ever look hard to see how much tissue there is at the base of someone’s thumb? Now you will.) Much of the book deals with the willful blindness of younger people about what their parents and other aging loved ones really want and need. Gawande incorporates his own family’s experiences with death into these reflections with particular grace.