My Top Ten for 2011

I don't blog about all the books I read, and I don't review everything on Amazon either. (And just so you know, many of the books I've blogged about this year were actually read in prior years - not even I can read that much.) But as I looked over the books I actually read this year I saw a lot of very good ones. Sometimes my feelings about a book change: I may have wrote glowingly right after finishing but soon forgot about it, or I may have been rather critical but it stayed on my mind. So, of the books I read this calendar year, I thought I'd list those that - in retrospect - feel like the best (in no particular order and linked to my reviews). And YES it was very hard paring it down to only 10!

• Rawhide Down: The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan by Del Quentin Wilber
• Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides
• Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie
• The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick
• Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation by Andrea Wulf
• Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobsen
• To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 by Adam Hochschild
• Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt
• A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel by Alan Bradley
• The Clockwork Three by Matthew Kirby