Two books I’ve enjoyed so far in 2011:
Room by Emma Donoghue: I’m late to the party on this one, I know, but what a truly splendid novel. The kind of novel that leaves you feeling a little empty when you finish it. If you’re not familiar with the story, it takes place in a room where a child and his mother are trapped (well, by rights, the mother is trapped there — the child, having been born in the room, has no idea that the world is any larger than his familiar four walls). This child is a five-year-old boy, and the text is written entirely from his perspective. Instead of feeling gimmicky or clichéd, Donoghue’s prose is honest and arresting; the child’s perceptions have an innocent maturity that can gut the reader on moment and delight the next.
Appropriating that childhood voice and doing it well is exceptionally challenging, but the empathy Donoghue has for her characters and the real sense that she understands just how difficult the protagonist’s transition to normalcy will be makes the voice emerge seemingly effortlessly from the page. It’s the best work of fiction I’ve read thus far in 2011.
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell absolutely delighted me. 
The book is part gamer memoir, part engaging discussion of the development of video games, and part philosophy on video games as art. This is fan criticism at its best; Bissell’s unabashed love for the medium shines through, but he is acutely aware of the flaws and problems within the medium and its various genres. So many of his observations clicked with me — like the idea that what we love about platformers (games like Super Mario) is that they are difficult puzzles to solve, almost always frustratingly so, but the success we feel upon completion is much like the successes children feel as they learn to negotiate the world. It’s a sense of accomplishment that motivated me through my dissertation, because even when the page count seemed to tick by incrementally, I was “accomplishing” within the world of my beloved platformers at the rate of about a level a day.
Bissell’s prose is lucid and his observations sharp. I’ve read a lot of books that have tried to do what Bissell has accomplished here, but his clear eye for the good and the bad in the world of video games makes this book stand apart from past examples of fan criticism of gaming. I think you definitely have to value the medium of video games to bother with this book, but if you do (and you should), you will love it.