and the awards go to...

Most helpful books for writing skills:
Writing True
The Situation and the Story

Lasting Impressions:
Scott Russell Sander’s A Private History of Awe
Patricia Hampl’s I Could Tell You Stories
Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life
Haven Kimmel’s The Solace of Leaving Early
T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
Everything Flannery O’Connor

Flat-out Best Individual Essays I've read this year:
Street Haunting by Virginia Woolf
Warping Time with Montaigne, Emily D. Chase
Expedition to the Pole and Sojourner by Annie Dillard
G K Chesterton on a Piece of White Chalk
Valmiki’s Palm and BirdWatching as Blood Sport by David James Duncan
Linda Buturian’s Great Bird
Snake Bit by Connie Weineke
Under the Influence by Scott Russell Sanders
And Dorothy Sayers’ Introduction to Dante’s Inferno

And for fun,
Auralia’s Colors by Jeffrey Overstreet, just a treat,
the recordings of A Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door, read by Madeleine L’Engle herself! And always, always, Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon: spend an hour with an onion.