Last Monday, Publisher’s Weekly pronounced its picks for this year’s very best books. The list looked like this:

Cheever: A Life, by Blake Bailey; Await Your Reply, by Dan Chaon; A Fiery Peace in a Cold War, Neil Sheehan; In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin; Big Machine, by Victor LaValle; The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes; Stitches, by David Small; Shop Class as Soulcraft, by Matthew B. Crawford; Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer; and Lost City of Z, by David Grann.

The title of this post has already given away what would have been a good observation: No books by women this year. Some individuals and groups, such as WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts), aren’t very happy about it. According to a Salon.com article, the “fledging feminist literary organization … set up a wiki page inviting visitors to add titles to a list of ‘great books by women’ published in 2009.” There’s also a Twitter hashtag, #fembooks, for anyone wanting to tweet on the subject.

According to Salon:

Tweeters pointed out that women buy the majority of books sold in the U.S. and usually make up about half of the authors on any given New York Times Bestseller list. Others complained that classic novels by men get trumpeted as “must reads” while those by women are often pooh-poohed by male readers as “not to my taste.”

Salon helpfully refers to a 1998 Harper’s article by Francine Prose, in which she makes the argument that there is “greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants.” By Prose’s estimation, this is the result of the assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important — anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory, or wise.”

Did Publisher’s Weekly realize that they had excluded women? Yes, and here’s what editor Louisa Ermilino had to say about it:

“We wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration … We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the ‘big’ books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”

The author of the Salon article, Laura Miller, has a certain amount of sympathy for the PW employees responsible for compiling this list. After all, two years ago, Salon, too, came up with an all-male list for the year’s best fiction. The Salon team comforted themselves with the knowledge that more often than not, women ruled their top-fiction list. It would have been unethical to swap in a woman’s novel just because they wanted to represent women.

How will Salon be handling things this year?:

Without tipping our hand, I’ll merely say that it’s unlikely Salon will suffer the drubbing P.W. has endured when we run our own 10-best list in early December. But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

Miller says later — and I find this very fascinating — that at Salon, if they “adore” two novels or biographies, etc., “to about the same degree,” then they do factor in the gender of the writer or the size of the book’s publisher when compiling the final list. She says she doesn’t doubt that PW’s list is reflective of their “unvarnished preferences,” she just wonders whether their horizons were truly broad to begin with.

I’m miserable about reading contemporary lit — in some ways I’m still working through the stuff normal kids read in high school and English 101. What books would you have on your “Top 10 of 2009″ list? And what’s the gender ratio like?