It’s time once more for The Capital Spectator’s annual recap of the year’s books and your editor’s struggle to choose ten titles that, for one reason or another, stand out as worthy releases in 2012. Just ten? Well, it’s a round number, and it’s easier than 20. It’s also a thankless task for an unusually productive year in publishing on matter of macro and money. The sad part is that there’s hardly time to read more than a handful of the fascinating works released this year, of which only a few are noted below. Sigh. But if one was limited to only ten books from a year that’s nearly complete, what would they be? An unfair question, of course, and all the more so since the list below is drawn exclusively from the Book Bits feature that appears regularly in this space every Saturday morning. What follows is a select remix of items previously published here. But enough with the explaining. Here’s my tally of ten, starting with five today and the balance paid off a week hence. Happy reading!