Inevitably, there are some things that I would like to mention that I liked during the year but, for one reason or another, didn’t quite make the list. Here are the honorable mentions:

Henri Cartier-Bresson at the MoMA — I’ve only gotten a quick preview of this show, but it’s very promising, and I can’t wait to take the time to really take it in. Without Bresson, the sort of photography I practice wouldn’t even be possible, so I’m looking forward to the chance to see so many of his prints in person.

Audrey Tautou — I love her acting, her films, her style, and the fact that she uses a Leica to photograph people she meets.

Difficulty — This one really should have been on the list, but I chose to write it into a couple other entries. I feel like we’ve become less and less patient when it comes to difficult things—people, art, technology, and work. But one of the things I learned in my life as a reader is that difficulty often conceals great value. And that’s something I remembered in 2010. Difficulty is something to engage with, not run away from, because the rewards for doing so can be so great. It’s closely related to insistent compassion and creating possibilities, which both made the list. You can find someone difficult to know and just throw your hands up and walk away or you can insistently try to know them because, perhaps, their worth will justify their difficulty. You can leave Gaddis and Proust and Foster Wallace and Pynchon on the shelf because their books are too long and confusing or you can take the time to read them and, perhaps, find yourself changed. And, ah ha, wouldn’t that be worth any level of difficulty?

Yanidel — The street photographer Yanick Delafoge calls himself Yanidel, and his post-processing techniques produce a look that it utterly unique and European and brilliant. I especially enjoy his photographs from Paris.

Cosi on rue de Seine in Paris — In April I returned here for the first time in nearly nine years. It still serves the best sandwiches in the world.

Ken Griffey, Jr. — He was the hottest minor league prospect in baseball at the time when I really became fanatical about the sport, and I followed his entire career until it ended this summer. His swing was beautiful, and he should go down as the greatest player of his generation. I got to see him play in the 2007 All-Star game when he started in the same outfield as Barry Bonds in San Francisco, something I’ll never forget.

Subjective Time — This is the simple but not often cited concept of how we experience time subjectively in relation to our age. It’s no secret that time seems to pass faster as we get older, but it’s not commonly known that this concept has been scientifically studied and verified. In fact, there’s even an equation that describes one’s perception of time based on her age. Given current average life expectancies in the Unites States, we feel like we’ve lived half of our lives before the age of 20. Twenty is the subjective halfway point of our lives. It’s no wonder that it seems like such a formative age!

Concord, Massachusetts — Walden Pond, Mount Misery, Sleepy Hollow, and ridiculously large servings of ice cream—and only a 30-minute drive from Cambridge!

Love and Its Opposite by Tracey Thorn — That no one else writes songs about the disappointments of middle age makes this a unique album. That Tracey Thorn does so with brilliance and nuance makes it spectacular.

Printing Photos — So much better than storing them in the “cloud.”

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith — This is one of the better things that has been written about online culture, i.e. what the Internet has done to our culture.

J.D. Salinger — Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Don’t forget to read the final list. Click on the images to reveal the descriptions. And click on the Away arrow to open the page for a random favorite.

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However, just as puzzling to be was the Phillies failure to give Jimmy Rollins the chance to steal second base in the ninth last night. When Kevin Millar of the Red Sox walked in the ninth inning of Game 4 of the ALCS with his team facing elimination against the Yankees, the Sox put Dave Roberts into the game as a pinch runner. As reiterated in Ken Burns’ recent Tenth Inning, everyone at Fenway knew that Roberts was going to steal second. And after three pickoff attempts by Mariano Rivera, he did. The rest, of course, is history. Rollins reached base in a nearly identical situation last night, and I was certain that he would attempt to steal second. And yet he didn’t. Granted, the Phillies did eventually get a runner to second base in the inning, but that didn’t happen until there were two outs when Howard walked to the plate and back to the dugout after having watched strike three graze the outside corner.

Some other, brief notes from last night’s game:

• Opposing second baseman have had a very tough time in the field against the Giants this postseason. Will Ian Kinsler fare any better?
• The benches cleared last night because Jonathan Sanchez and Chase Utley have a history. Joe Buck didn’t not mention that until much later in the game after his producer alerted him.
• Tim Lincecum’s appearance had me worried not so much for the Giants, but for his arm and the future of his career. Fortunately, he didn’t last long. We’ll see how he fares on Wednesday’s Game 1 against Texas after five days of rest, excepting yesterday’s appearance.
• Roy Oswalt threw back-to-back pitches at 67 mph and 94 mph—that’s an incredible 27 mph speed differential, and he was frequently in the 20-24 mph differential range.
• Keep in mind that Sanchez was removed from the game after the fight in the third inning. He was not ejected or injured. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pitcher knocked out of the game in the second of a game that ended with his team winning 3-2. For all the troubles the Giants’ bullpen has had this postseason, they really came through yesterday. Granted, it was one of their starters, Madison Bumgarner, pitching on short rest, who got them through some critical innings in the middle of the game.
• This is an interview with Giants’ closer Brian Wilson, and this is Rangers’ pitcher C.J. Wilson’s Twitter feed.
• Do players bring their own ski goggles for post-game celebrations? Or does the team purchase a huge lot of them that are just sitting on a table when they enter the locker room?

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Leica M9 — A full-frame camera that not only is not an intimidating SLR but also comes from the greatest line of cameras—the Leica M series—but is also a gorgeous rangefinder, but also gives you access to the best glass in the world. In short, it’s my dream camera—the one that leaves me short of breath and utterly destroys my syntax when I attempt to write about it.

New York Yankees — There’s something about this team that I really liked more than any Yankee team since the 2001 group that lost the World Series to the Diamondbacks. Teixera, Sabathia, Damon, Matsui, Melky, Burnett, a beautiful new stadium, and the Core Four! What fun they made October and November.

Albert Stash — A laptop bag with a handle that you can actually use to carry it for long periods of time—score!

A Gate at the Stairs — Lorrie Moore’s first novel in I don’t know how long is ambitious and acutely observed and flawed and wonderful. It made me relive, for the first time in years, one of the most intensely felt periods of my life. It reminded me what it felt like then. Can I ask any more of a novel, of a work of art?

Changing My Mind — Many of the essays in this collection by Zadie Smith have appeared in the New York Review, the Guardian, and the New Yorker, but reading them in sequence gives you a greater appreciation for the intellect and wit behind them. Smith’s new essay on David Foster Wallace alone is worth the price of admission.

Too Big to Fail — Andrew Ross Sorkin set out to write a book structured like the film Crash and as thrilling as the business classic Barbarians at the Gate. I haven’t seen Crash, but his book is every bit as thrilling as Barbarians and full of choice quotes and anecdotes from the people at the top of the financial world.

Hiroshi Sugimoto at Gagosian Gallery — I walked across town in nine inches of snow to see this show. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

Sag Harbor — Colson Whitehead’s latest novel should be read on summer evenings on Long Island. Funny and nostalgic with language that is full of vitality and of the 1980s, its effect on me was similar to that of Lorrie Moore’s book, but the world it gave me access to was entirely imaginary—Whitehead’s not mine—and altogether enjoyable. Dag!

Lamy Noto — Okay, so this pen really came out in 2008, but I didn’t see it anywhere in the U.S. until the summer of 2009. A well-designed Lamy for $10? Yes, please.

Dehumanized — Mark Slouka’s essay in the September issue of Harper’s was, perhaps, the most refreshing thing I read all year—someone standing up, for all the right reasons, to the wrongheaded bias toward math and science (and away from the humanities) that has come to pervade everyplace from the university to the corporation to the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Ellipse — Imogen Heap’s first album in four years is awesome and her live show is even more awesome. The leadoff track on Ellipse, “First Train Home,” was my favorite song of the year, and I challenge you to not like it.

iPhone 3GS — I’m still using the original 2g version of the iPhone, but this year’s update brings more storage, video capability, and faster speeds. It’s great to have a product that delivers both Apple’s design sense and a large library of applications. (The Macs I’ve used for the past 15 years have always delivered the former but never the latter.) Listening to baseball games wherever I am? Check. NPR shows on demand? Check. The New York Times in a format that’s easier to browse than NYTimes.com? Double check. Now, if only it was available on a network other than AT&T.

Panasonic GF-1 — It’s no M9, but it’s sort of a poor man’s, i.e. my, rangefinder. When paired with Panasonic’s 20mm f/1.7 pancake lens, it’s the closest thing to a great compact camera that I’ve ever used. See sample photos from others here.

Unibody MacBook Pros — These things look solid!

Range — Was this San Francisco restaurant new in 2009? I don’t know, but it’s good.

The President — Our country got a new one in January, and it was a glorious moment. The man can play basketball and speak and write in complete sentences, and he seems to have a genuine intellect and conscience and sense of ambivalence.

San Francisco Panorama — A very well-done one-time newspaper for a city that has no good regular publication.

Economic Recovery — The Dow and I are both lower than we once were, but we’re certainly better off than we were a year ago.

Cape Cod — I had never been before this year and now I hope that there won’t be a year when I don’t go there.

Empire State of Mind — Maybe this isn’t a new anthem for New York but Jay-Z’s new single is certainly fun. Sinatra needs a break now and then, anyway.

Some things that I haven’t yet gotten around to that came out this year but that I think I might like when I do: The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter, Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, Wild Things by Dave Eggers and Where the Wild Things Are by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, and Wes Anderson’s film adaptation of the Fantastic Mr. Fox.

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• The New York Times – I previously posted about this application and how I would be willing to pay a fair amount for it. The only things I can fault this application for are that it’s not always clear when it’s finished downloading the day’s paper and it runs sluggishly on the iPhone 2g. Otherwise, the ability to save and email articles is great, and the interface makes browsing the paper easy. This is probably my favorite app, in part because it downloads the paper for offline reading and because I love the New York Times.
• MLB At Bat 2009 – This app costs $9.99, but it’s awesome. You can watch two live games a day and listen to any broadcast of any game live. I remember when I was a kid, I could barely get reception on the AM radio at night to listen to Vin Scully call the LA Dodgers games. Now I can listen to the Dodgers and the Yankees and the Red Sox and the Giants whenever I want. This app also features in-game video highlights from almost all games, which are nice, but the key feature is being able to listen to live broadcasts.
• Byline – This is another paid app, an RSS reader that syncs your folders from Google Reader. If you don’t read Google reader, Byline is a decent reason to do so, as it downloads complete items from Google Reader for offline reading. You can even star and share items from the app, and your selections sync with Reader when you’re online.
• WordPress – It’s not perfect, but you can write posts offline and then post them when you have an Internet connection again. I’ve used it for multiple posts on this and other blogs.
• Instapaper – Instapaper lets you save text from webpages for offline reading from your mobile or desktop web browser. I use it to read any articles of length from sources such as the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. For me, this app ranks right up there with the New York Times and MLB apps and has saved me much paper, as I often use it in place of printing stories that I want to read later or on something more portable than my computer.
• NPR Addict – This application lets you listen to stories from several NPR shows, including some that don’t have podcasts, such as All Things Considered and my personal favorite, Weekend Edition. Unfortunately, this app doesn’t always seem to work when I click the “Listen” button and it has some shortcomings. The most significant is that you can only select individual stories to play, and you can’t create a playlist or choose to listen to an entire show with all the stories playing consecutively. For some shows with long segments, such as Fresh Air, this is fine, but for others with short segments, it’s not acceptable and really limits the use of this application.
• Stanza – This e-book app is not bad at all. With the help of its online store and the Stanza desktop app, I’ve loaded in several of my favorite books and a few that I’m waiting to read. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do the best job of handling PDF files.
• eBay – If you can’t be at your computer when an auction is ending, this is the next best thing.
• Google – These guys run some sort of internet search engine and offer many of their products optimized for the iPhone, including said search engine with voice search capabilities.
• Bloomberg – This is another good news app that caches stories for offline reading. Another great feature of this app is that it lets you email the complete text of its stories, rather than just links to them.
• TwitterFon – There are several Twitter clients available for the iPhone, and Tweetie seems to be the best, according to user opinions. However, I don’t yet feel the need to pay for a Twitter client, and so I’ve stuck with TwitterFon, which does pretty much everything I need. It searches for both text and location and shows my direct messages, @ replies, and friends’ timeline. I do recommend using an older version of this app because the more recent ones show ads, unfortunately.
• Public Radio Tuner – This app allows you to stream live several public radio stations from all over the country.
• Pandora – You’re probably familiar with Pandora’s custom streaming online radio service, so imagine it in a portable edition. That’s what this app is, and the quality isn’t bad, even over 2g.
• WeatherBug – I’m not entirely sure why, but I prefer this app over The Weather Channel’s, which I also use.
• FlickIt – Take pictures with your iPhone and upload them directly to Flickr.
• WiFinder – Have you ever been somewhere and wanted to know if there was a WiFi network you could use? This app searches for local, open WiFi networks that you can connect to.
• Easy Wi-Fi – I believe that OS 3.0 has made this app obsolete, but I haven’t confirmed that yet. If you access Wi-Fi networks with web-based authentication pages, Easy Wi-Fi will automatically log you into the networks. It’s a great time saver if your school or company uses these sorts of authentication pages.
• Wattpad – This is another e-book app, but this one gives you access to Wattpad’s online library of user-uploaded content. My favorite feature of this app is one that more developers should implement: auto-scrolling. You set the speed and the text scrolls for you. It’s nearly impossible to get it entirely right, and you’ll probably have to adjust my manually scrolling every so often, but, for the most part, this feature rocks.
• Skype – Skype’s iPhone app offers text and voice chat—only video conferencing is missing.
• Shazam – Ever hear a song and wonder what it is? Open Shazam and it’ll identify it for you. Awesome.
• WSJ – The Wall Street Journal’s iPhone app doesn’t have a huge amount of content, but it’s fairly responsive and contains some good editors’ choices.
• Yelp – Yelp’s iPhone app works amazingly well with the phone’s location services, making searching near your location one of the most useful features in any app.
• Files lite – Store and read .doc and .pdf files on your iPhone, and a pro version even allows you to attach them to emails.
• StopWatch – This app is self-explanatory, but just looks too good to leave off this list.
• Textfree lite – Cell phone carriers are artificially keeping SMS text message prices high, but here’s a solution. This app allows you to send up to 15 text messages a day for free. Unfortunately, it appends a bunch of junk to your texts, but otherwise has worked fine for me.
• Amazon – Finally, we have Amazon’s app, which I, admittedly, don’t actually use to purchase anything from Amazon. What I do use it for. however, is looking up books when I’m in bookstores. If I can’t remember a title or an author, I often use the Amazon app before any search engine. I’ve had mixed results with the Amazon Remembers feature, which allows you to take a picture of a product and have Amazon automatically identify it in its catalog. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t work, it often gives you products that are completely wrong but match how its software might have identified the photo. For example, a blurry photo of a Patti Smith book produced a song called “Blurry” by a musician who is not Patti Smith.

Anyhow, there’s my list. I know that I’ve left off some apps that commonly make these sorts of lists, such as Evernote, and some apps that I want to like but just don’t use, such as IndieBound. If you want to dispute those omissions or suggest other apps, the comments section is the place for you.

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