A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

FRANKLINS V. ORTHOGONIANS: Amazon.com has released its list of the top ten books of 2008, including:

• The Northern Clemency, a novel by Philip Hensher
• Hurry Down Sunshine, Michael Greenberg's memoir about his daughter's mental illness
• Nixonland by Rick Perlstein, about which I'm totally biased because I'm friends with Rick, but it's his masterful history of how America went from voting in LBJ 60-40 in 1964 to the Nixon landslide eight years later
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski
• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins, reporting from the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan

Five Four novels help round out the top 10 -- The Likeness by Tana French; Serena by Ron Rash; So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger; and The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon -- followed by The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu, a history of the comic book censorship crusade of the 1950s.