LET IT ALL GO: 2011 BEST-OF. I’m sorry this is so late!

Best books read (nonfiction): David Carr, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life–His Own
Johnny Weir, Welcome to My World–a perfect cocktail of humility and glamour!
Christopher C. Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage (video talk here and my comments on it here)
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, The Soviet Intelligentsia, And the Russian Orthodox Church
Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying

and it’s just so different from the others that it deserves its own category, but I read the Sayings of the Desert Fathers for the first time this past year, and I know I’ll be returning to them.

Best books read for the first time (fiction/whatnot): Imre Kertész, Fateless
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Christopher Coe, I Look Divine
Louis L’Amour, The Lonesome Gods
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

Best movies watched for the first time: Of Gods and Men
Solaris
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains!
Ivan’s Childhood
This Gun for Hire

also should be mentioned: Attack the Block (more), A Boy Called Charlie Brown, Black Caesar, Everything Must Go, The Hunger, I Start Counting, The Island (Остров), Less Than Zero, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Macbeth (1979), The Nun’s Story, Smoke Signals, The Virgin Spring

Best theater (etc): The Mariinsky Ballet, Anna Karenina
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, Arena Stage
“Venus in Fur,” Studio Theatre
Mariinsky, Giselle
“King Lear,” Synetic Theater (I ultimately didn’t think this production worked–it was a kind of commedia dell’arte/Eurotrash interpretation–but it was interestingly wrong!)

Best blog posts: “Stronger at the Broken Places“
“The Proper Basis for Marriage Is a Mutual Misunderstanding” (service journalism)
“How a Thrill Becomes a Law“
Notes from the Oriented to Love retreat
A series of posts, which I wish I could redo but which still have value, on the Mountain Goats

and a bit more service journalism: a list, with notes, of my favorite children’s novels from Diana Wynne Jones

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): “Beyond Liberalism,” my essay for Cato Unbound’s symposium on “traditionalism in a futuristic world” (and the follow-up, “Tradition’s Comedies of Error“; my other follow-up, “Who Put the Tradition in ‘Traditional Marriage’?“, is fine but not as good)
“Flawed Reflection” (my review of the oh-so-controversial “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery”
“Breaking ‘The Rules’” (review of Extravagant Expectations and Premarital Sex in America)
“How to Convert” (title is misleading!)

…And wow, I think that’s it, since my Weekly Standard reviews are subscribers-only. Uh, I’ll do better this year! Ouch.