The best in picture books, middle grade and young adult fiction and nonfiction, selected by the children’s books editor of The New York Times Book Review from books reviewed in these pages this year.

Picture Books

DOOR. Written and illustrated by JiHyeon Lee. (Chronicle Books, $17.99.) A child wanders through a door and into a mysterious world, meeting fantastical new creatures, in this mesmerizing wordless book.

FOX & CHICK: The Party and Other Stories. Written and illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier. (Chronicle Books, $14.99.) A laid-back fox and an excitable chick are devoted friends in these simple yet sophisticated tales of misadventures.

HELLO LIGHTHOUSE. Written and illustrated by Sophie Blackall. (Little, Brown, $18.99.) This gorgeous tribute to lighthouses and the lives that were lived within them also celebrates the sea, ever-changing and always the same.

I was a reader without a rudder, trying to make sense of a thick stack of new books by and about people in show business. I was looking for an organizing principle, something with which to give the loopy don’t-try-this-at-home life lessons offered by the actor Gary Busey the same steady gaze I might apply to the cheery, working-bloke wisdom of the actor Michael Caine.

And I was failing. Until, that is, Justine Bateman took a breath in the middle of FAME (Akashic, $26.99), her own provocatively burbling, expletive-laden throw-down, to acknowledge the work of the sociologist Erving Goffman. Dropping her blue streak, the actor — best remembered as the materialistic teenage daughter Mallory Keaton in the wildly popular Reagan-era sitcom “Family Ties” — refers calmly and respectfully to Goffman’s revelatory mid-20th-century analysis of ordinary, private human behavior as theatrical performance in the service of impression management.

This season’s travel selections find authors facing crushing isolation, angry bulls and midnight checkpoints, as well as that most terrifying of travel’s perils, the family road trip. From the Azores to Patagonia to the Silk Road, the pull of the open road is as strong as ever — no matter the consequences. The results are among the most exciting crop of travel books in years.

As a child, Kate Harris was fascinated by Marco Polo. Forget that the famous explorer wasn’t as interested in exotic lands as he was in the riches and fame he might achieve. As a young girl growing up in rural Canada, Harris dreamed of the far-off lands Polo described, igniting an obsession with the world beyond the farthest bend in the road. LANDS OF LOST BORDERS: A Journey on the Silk Road (Dey Street, $24.99) is the gift Harris sends back from that beyond.

A few weeks ago, I received a crowd-source-designed cutting board with a phone dock carved into one corner. The message: The internet’s place is in the kitchen. True/not true. While it’s miraculous to have instant access to all chocolate chip cookie recipes at once, people still want to own a bound collection of recipes from someone they trust to give them the chocolate chip recipe. More than just an imprimatur of taste and talent, cookbooks offer us narrative and vision. A good cookbook is a trusted friend. Try sticking that in your cutting board, interwebs.

This season brings us new books from some of the food world’s best-selling BFFs. It also offers a welcome range of accents and insights that will expand your pantry — and your mind.

Flowers are very pretty, and that has made them less than compelling as a subject matter for photographers drawn to complexity and contradiction (although a number of modernists, from Karl Blossfeldt to Imogen Cunningham to Robert Mapplethorpe, were interested in them as architectural objects). So it may be hard to believe that the most exhilarating photo book of the year is entirely devoted to flowers — until, that is, you have actually turned the pages of Abelardo Morell’s FLOWERS FOR LISA: A Delirium of Photographic Invention (Abrams, $60). What began as a gift from the photographer to his wife on her birthday — an explosive photo bouquet involving multiple superimposed layers of flowers, rather than a run-of-the-mill three-dimensional one — turned into an expansive project, which tests the outer limits of how a bouquet might be represented photographically.

The Cuban-born Morell is an adventurous formalist with an interest in the mechanism of vision and the roots of photography, in particular the camera obscura (disclosure: I wrote the introduction to an earlier book of his). Here he employs an array of tools and techniques ranging from high tech (Photoshop) to low (painting, collage, bricolage) to amplify or simplify bouquets, flatten and scatter them, render them as Surrealist or Cubist or Abstract Expressionist tableaus, turn them into memento mori or distant memories or looming shadows or impossible, extraterrestrial manifestations of floral energy. The book is a tour de force, a sustained burst of emotion, and a transferable unit of joy.

In early 1989, an East German government report identified punk as the top problem among the country’s youth. And the thing is — as Tim Mohr points out in BURNING DOWN THE HAUS: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Algonquin, $28.95) — the study was more prescient than the authorities realized.

By the end of that year, the barrier between East and West Germany had been eradicated, and as much as America likes to credit Ronald Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech for the historic development, Mohr points to another social force that set the wheels in motion. By the fall of 1989, he writes, “the groundwork laid by punks and other activists influenced by the punk mentality was becoming a magical, spontaneous, mass uprising.”

The world feels extraordinarily full of woe. Signals of climate peril, affecting everything from the tiniest bees to the tallest trees, are intensifying. Temperatures climb. Polar icecaps melt. Species crash. Where to turn for comfort, much less optimism?

A few years ago the Danes offered a therapy for stress called hygge, a concept that gave us any excuse to drape ourselves in blankets, nestle into armchairs and enjoy the beneficence of cozy moments. This winter, Japan exports its balm for battered souls: shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing.

A “slash” player in football is one who excels at more than one position, an evolution of the “triple-threat” player of old. Books about sports have also evolved over time to include both sports-only works — Jack Nicklaus’s “Golf My Way” for instance — and “slash” works, ones that straddle genres: sports/history, as opposed to merely sports history. Nonslash sports books can be terrific. I learned to be the best golfer I could be (still not a very good one) by attempting to channel Nicklaus’s lessons, and there’s much to admire in players who do one thing really well, for example, run over people à la Earl Campbell. But generally when I stretch out on the couch with a sports book — or any book, really — I want it to also stretch my mind, to both overpower and reverse field, to ace and wrong-foot. The five books below all have that aim and some succeed beautifully.

In THE LAST TEMPTATION OF RICK PITINO: A Story of Corruption, Scandal, and the Big Business of College Basketball (Penguin Press, $27), Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine (where an excerpt of the book first appeared), tells a tale as fresh as the headlines about corruption and salaciousness in college sports. The rot starts from the ground — that is, on the feet of the athletes and the shoe companies that seek to influence them, Adidas in this case.