Another year comes hurtling around the corner, another sinks gratefully back into its easy chair, and in the traditional spirit of openness and honesty it's time to look back at the literary stories which have made 2011 – or at least the stories we've all been reading on the Guardian Books website. With only the briefest nod to the usual caveats, here they are: the most popular stories of 2011.
Except that, er, here they aren't. I would love to share this year's top story with you, but Jon Ronson's witty, touching and illuminating account of Tony – who faked madness to avoid five to seven years for GBH and wound up spending over a decade in Broadmoor – was extracted from his latest book, and, so, as our page glumly announces, "has been removed as our copyright has expired". Some of you are no doubt grinning smugly and turning to your paper archives, but for those who don't have the relevant copy of Weekend magazine to hand, I suppose I could point you to Will Self's excellent review of The Psychopath Test, or try to give you a flavour of how artfully Ronson flips between sympathy for Tony – who finds it's "an awful lot harder … to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy" – and the clarity provided by Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist, but I guess I should really just apologise and move on.
Except, um, moving on is pretty hard when second on the list of 2011's top books stories is a sorry page. Pottermore: Harry's digital adventure was a specially-created page which lasted just one day to host one of the clues for the internet treasure hunt leading to JK Rowling's online project, Pottermore. Maybe it's only a marketing wheeze, as Sam Jordison suggests, but more than a decade after Harry Potter first found the Philosopher's Stone, his popularity clearly remains undimmed. Our tech-folk had to wall off this page from our usual content in a custom-built silo to withstand the fierce attentions of Potter fans from around the world – my browser can't even find the server that it was sitting on.
Coming in at numbers three and four are two pages I can actually link to: our list of the 100 greatest non-fiction books and the evergreen 100 greatest novels of all time. Now, readers who have watched me duck and weave around the lasting popularity of such lists in recent years will detect something of a volte face here, as I used to see this success only as evidence for the peripheral nature of literary culture. I used to be more than a little queasy about the idea of any definitive list of the top 100 books of all time – well, frankly, I still am – but in the wake of the expansion of the site this year we've finally found a way of turning such a list into the beginning of a conversation, a celebration of the great books we all enjoy. Right next to our list of non-fiction greats you'll find a lively discussion of its faults – including a fascinating debate about the possibility of lasting literature on technical subjects intended for the general reader – as well as the tool which allowed us to gather recommendations for books on science, history, culture and more. Besides, the fact that these lists bring to the site people who wouldn't normally visit is hardly an embarrassment. If we want a vibrant, open and inclusive literary culture, then hooray and welcome to readers who don't usually want to read about books – the challenge is to make a place where these new readers want to stay.
Embarrassment there is aplenty, however, with another no-show at number five, this time an extract from Michael Moore's Here Comes Trouble. His account of how an Oscars acceptance speech, delivered while the first bombs of Operation Iraqi Freedom were falling over Baghdad in March 2003, in which he called George Bush a "fictitious president … sending us to war for fictitious reasons" turned him into the most hated man in America is powerful stuff. I refer you back to your paper archives and move on.
Number six isn't really a proper story either, it's a quiz. Then again, it isn't any old quiz. It's not motorways in literature, or football in fiction, oh no. Coming in at number six on the list of the most popular stories of 2011 on the Guardian books site is a quiz which strikes a blow for gender equality. After the Nobel laureate VS Naipaul riotously asserted that no woman writer is his equal, that he could tell "within a paragraph or two" whether a piece of writing is by a woman or not, we put it to the test with a selection of a few paragraphs of our own. Can you tell an author's sex? I can't.
Bearing my new-found love of lists in mind, I hope you'll join me as I salute number seven – the venerable top 100 books of all time. And considering that we've already had three no-shows on this list we should perhaps slide by another at number eight double quick. Except that an unprecedented four no-shows in the top 10 stories of 2011 makes me wonder if a reader is more or less likely to go out and buy the book concerned after showing some interest in its subject and author, but being unable to read anything from that author about that subject. And also it's worth mentioning that the page which has vanished in this case is an introduction penned by Martin Amis to The Quotable Hitchens – a volume to which its author will sadly be adding no further.
Number nine on the list is another list, but this time it's a list of tips from writers such as Elmore Leonard, Anne Enright, Margaret Atwood and Jonathan Franzen on writing fiction. As I said last year, these recommendations not only offer hard-won advice, but also reveal something about the way each author approaches the blank page ("Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip").
The final place is a piece of actual news. Or at least books news of a sort. When Brian Michael Bendis wrote issue 160 of the Ultimate Spider-Man series he had "tears in [his] eyes like a big baby", but then it's not every day that you kill off an icon.
