To do list for November:

• Order turkey and find Brussels sprouts.

• Retrieve Pilgrim hat from attic.

• Take in lawn furniture.

• Send Glenn Beck a get-well card.

• Compile "best books of 2009" list.

Usually that last item poses few issues for me because I try not to limit it to an arbitrary number like 10 but do limit it to the books reviewed in the Post-Gazette.

These lists are often forgotten soon after they appear, but Americans crave controversy these days, a craving turbocharged by the instantaneous blurting of half-baked opinion provided by the Web.

Ergo, the Internet-based irritation with the top 10 list from Publishers Weekly, the trade weekly of the book industry. In announcing it, PW's Louisa Ermelino said the staff sifted through more than 50,000 candidates.

Here are the selections: "Cheever: A Life" by Blake Bailey; "Await Your Reply" by Dan Chaon; "A Fiery Peace in a Cold War" by Neil Sheehan; "In Other Rooms, Other Wonders" by Daniyal Mueenuddin; "Big Machine" by Victor LaValle; "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" 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.

"We wanted the list to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration," said Ermelino. "It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male," she added, without apology.

There are several things objectionable about the choices, such as the inclusion of several inferior writers, but what has the 'Net hopping mad is the absence of a woman.

From a wiki page created to list the year's best books by women to the bleats of Twitter (should that be Tleats?), the list has been treated as a commentary on the dominance of males in our literary culture.

You don't need a doctorate in feminist studies to realize that men have ruled the publishing roost for centuries and that male authors have gotten all the breaks, from big promotion budgets to the publishing of their underachieving works -- Philip Roth's new novel, "The Humbling," is an example.

It's also no secret that a majority of American book buyers are women, but are those facts important when singling out the 10 best books? Should we, as Ermelino claims, use only quality as the criterion?

Salon.com's Laura Miller says no. In writing about the issue, Miller admits her best-books lists do "take in factors like an author's gender or the size of the book's publisher into account ..." although why the greatness of a book depends on who published it seems odd.

Taking another tack, was 2009 just a bad year for female authors, even though the writers with books this year reads like a who's who of women authors?

A.S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Barbara Kingsolver, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Atwood, Louise Erdrich, Rita Dove, Lisa See, Rebecca Wells, Jane Hamilton, Hilary Mantel, Francine Prose, Jayne Anne Phillips, Lorrie Moore and Audrey Niffenegger.

But, shouldn't I include Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwell, Anne Rice, Sue Grafton and Kathy Reichs, hit authors all? Some of them sell more books than all the above novelists combined. Shouldn't Salon.com factor sales into its list along with publisher considerations?

The point being, we can put together lists of all kinds, but when the category is "best," then we must confine our selections to it, as PW claims, without the wiggling of Salon.com.

The National Book Awards will be announced Wednesday, perhaps a better barometer than PW or Salon.com. Two women are among the five fiction finalists, one in nonfiction; and three in both young people's and poetry. We await the results.

"Bob Hoover's Book Club" is available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.