A list of “best of” lists

Now that we’re in the year’s eleventh month, we’re also in the season of Top 10 lists — opinions on the year’s best of all things cultural, including, of course, books. So I thought I’d include a list of the lists … at least a few of them.

For The Guardian, Howard Jacobson has compiled a list of the Top 10 Novels of Sexual Jealousy. From James Joyce to Jane Austen, the list includes Shakespeare’s Othello, “only not a novel because novels weren’t a going form yet.”

Publishers Weekly released its Top 10 Books of 2009, which includes not one book by a woman. This NY Times article on the reaction to the all-male list is followed by reader comments.

The Atlantic lists only five Books of the Year, but also includes a long list of runners up.

The New York Times has posted its critics’ Top 10 Books of 2009 — Dwight Garner, Michiko Kakutani, Janet Maslin — and the NYT Book Review has posted its list of 100 Notable Books of 2009, compiled from the year’s reviews.

I was very happy to see that the Seattle Books Examiner’s Best Books of 2009 includes three short story collections (happiest of all that one of them is Forgetting English, which is in excellent company among Mary Gaitskill’s Don’t Cry and Amanda Eyre Ward’s Love Stories in This Town).

And this post from literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog is a top ten list of another sort: Top 10 Myths about E-Books, an important read for readers and writers alike.

I will be adding to this post periodically — the year’s not over yet! — but this should be enough to cover holiday reading and holiday shopping over the long weekend.

And what’s on your top ten list?