Best of 2011, Update 3

Well, it looks like Blogger figured out what caused its "routine maintenance" to go so badly yesterday - things appear to be up and functioning correctly again after the crash that lasted for the better part of the last two days.  While things are working again (I'm a little gun shy about the whole Blogger experience after this and other similar incidents), I'll update my Top Ten lists.


Of the 32 fiction titles considered, Beach Music, Love at Absolute Zero, One Thousand White Women, and The Keeper of Lost Causes appear on the YTD Fiction Top Ten list for the first time.

1. The Glass Rainbow - James Lee Burke (Dave Robicheaux series)

2. Dead Man's Walk - Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove series)

3. Nemesis - Philip Roth (novel)

4. Beach Music - Pat Conroy (novel)

5. Love at Absolute Zero - Christopher Meeks (novel)

6. Autumn of the Phantoms - Yasmina Khadra (Algerian detective fiction)

7. Standing at the Crossroads - Charles Davis (British novel)

8. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe (classic British novel)

9. One Thousand White Women - Jim Fergus (Western novel)

10.The Keeper of Lost Causes - Jussi Adler-Olsen (Norwegian crime fiction)

Of the 14 nonfiction titles considered, Tiny Terror, How Literature Works, and The Long Goodbye make their first appearance on the YTD Nonfiction Top Ten list:

1. Wolf: The Lives of Jack London - James L. Haley (biography)

2. Hitch 22: A Memoir - Christopher Hitchens (memoir)

3. Tiny Terror - William Todd Schultz (psychobiography of Truman Capote)

4. Chinaberry Sidewalks - Rodney Crowell (memoir)

5. We Were Not Orphans - Sherry Matthews (memoirs from a Texas home for neglected children)

6. Lincoln's Men - William C. Davis (Civil War history)

7. The Siege of Washington - John and Charles Lockwood (Civil War history)

8. How Literature Works - John Sutherland (Instructional Text)

9. The Long Goodbye - Meghan O'Rourke (memoir)

10. A Widow's Story - Joyce Carol Oates (memoir)

The year is not yet half over, so it will be interesting to see how many of the books on the list are still there at the end of December. I would guess about one-third of the titles will survive - at most.