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Ann Powers picks her favorite chart-topping, radio-dominating songs of 2012.

At the end of a year in which pop songs were a constant, provocative part of the national conversation, NPR Music critic Ann Powers sifts through the 100 most popular songs of the year to highlight 10 pure pop pleasures worth remembering.

Dig below the strata of pop songs so ubiquitous you can't stand to hear them anymore, and you'll find plenty of riches in the Top 40, from country crossover to innovative R&B and classic pop.

Toni Morrison's 1987 work Beloved is the best American novel of the past quarter-century. That's according to a vote of writers and critics who were invited to weigh in with their choices by The New York Times Book Review.

A host of beloved authors have new books hitting shelves this week, including a memoir by humorist Barry, a Mark Twain bio by Chernow and essays by Richard Russo.

For some insight into the fighter pilot culture, Linda talks with Captain Rosemary Mariner, a retired Navy Captain Aviator. She was trained to fly planes like the fighter that collided with the US reconnaissance plane. Mariner is now a Research Fellow for the University of Tennessee, Center for the Study for War and Society.

Police are still not saying what motivated the gunman who walked into a crowded Aurora, Colo., movie theater and opened fired. Suspect James Holmes, 24, was apprehended immediately after the attack. Until recently, he was a grad student studying neuroscience.

Host Liane Hansen speaks with Martin Cruz Smith. The author of Havana Bay and Gorky Park now has a new novel of international intrigue, called December 6 (Simon & Shuster, ISBN 0-684-87253-6), set on the brink of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941.

Liane talks with Mark Frost about his latest novel, The 6 essiahs, which continues the fictitious adventures of 19th-century author rthur Conan Doyle. (William Morrow)