As the action on the fiscal cliff debate shifts to the Senate, the Post assesses where Boehner stands with his caucus. Boehner will need GOP support to bring any Senate compromise bill to a vote in the House, and could not find the numbers within his own party for his "Plan B" compromise.

A fellow Ohio Republican, Rep. Steven C. LaTourette, told the paper, essentially, that Boehner's failure to lead with a decisive hand is what House Republicans admire about him.

“Boehner’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness,” said LaTourette, who then contrasted Boehner with Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

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We live in a golden age of top-10 lists -- that is, if you really like drowning in year-end rankings.

That's where the first annual What To Read Awards come in. We wanted to bring some clarity to the barrage of bests. After all, top-10 lists should be a chance for readers to get a sense of what was really important over the last year. That's what Laura Miller does every week with her What To Read column, by selecting the one must-read book that she can really recommend as worthy of your attention.

And that's the goal of these awards. We surveyed almost 20 of our favorite critics, both print and online, veterans and newcomers. We aggregated their top-10s to generate a consensus of what the smartest critics see as the most essential titles of the year. The results are below.

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"Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, the Rumpus

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Back to the What To Read Awards

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“If it’s crazy to call for putting police in and securing our schools to protect our children, then call me crazy,” LaPierre said. “I know there’s a media machine in this country that wants to blame guns every time something happens."

Asked by Gregory about specific changes to gun control laws that might have made it harder for Adam Lanza to kill 26 people a week ago Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary school, LaPierre discounted all of them.

"I don't believe that's going to make one difference," he said, when Gregory held up a magazine that allowed Lanza to get off dozens of shots without reloading, and asked whether fewer people might have died if that was banned.

"There are so many ways he could have done it," LaPierre said.

He put the blame on the mentally ill -- and said "we have no national database of these lunatics," and that "these monsters walk the street," he said, because too many have been deinstitutionalized.

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Just how bad was Mitt Romney's campaign? So bad that top Republican officials are now trying to "reverse engineer" his race to make sure no GOP candidate ever makes the same mistakes.

According to a behind-the-scenes story of the Romney campaign in today's Boston Globe -- by reporter Michael Kranish, who co-authored the biography "The Real Romney" -- Mitt's aides are still in disbelief over what hit them.

It describes a campaign that was deeply divided on whether to run on Romney's biography or on his business record. Ultimately, the paper reports, Romney sided with campaign manager Stuart Stevens rather than with the family members who wanted to stress his biography.

Among the revelations in the story:

* Romney's Ohio director had no idea what Obama's campaign was doing with all of its ground-game power. In a hilarious quote, Rich Beeson tells the paper: “Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices. They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters.”

* Beeson wasn't the only mystified member of the team. The Globe reports that when Tagg Romney studied Obama's spending patterns, he "could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory."

* Romney's campaign was caught flat-footed on social media. They wanted to build a Facebook app to locate voters who do not have landlines. They did not unveil it until three weeks before the campaign, and it was downloaded only 40,000 times. In contrast, Obama's had been released months earlier, and was downloaded some 1 million times. The project's coordinator tells the paper that the goal was: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”

* Romney was still convinced he would win Ohio. Beeson, in late October, wrote a memo that "all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his 'better ground game,' could lose." One problem, as the Globe notes: "But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called 'state of the art' crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day."

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According to the New York Times, Morell sent an internal memo to CIA employees on Friday, criticizing the "strong impression" in the film "that the enhanced interrogation techniques that were part of our former detention and interrogation program were the key to finding Bin Laden. That impression is false.”

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The Journal, in what may be the deepest account yet of the inner workings of the Lanza family reports that:

* Adam Lanza stopped talking with his father, Peter, during summer 2010, which coincided with the time a relationship with Peter Lanza's now-wife turned serious.

* That Christmas, Lanza stopped communicating with his older brother Ryan.

* Nancy Lanza let Adam use her guns at a local shooting range in order to bond with him and "teach him responsibility."

The story suggests Adam Lanza's problems started in first grade, at Sandy Hook (where he attended classes through fourth grade). After a stint of home schooling, he was back in the Newtown system for middle school, but remained shy, socially awkward and isolated from classmates.

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In the piece, Obama comes across as emboldened post-election to push for a better deal than the debt ceiling "grand bargain" that collapsed during the summer of 2011. Boehner, meanwhile, wanted something in return if he agreed to raise income tax rates on those earning more than $1 million a year.

When Boehner asked Obama if they agree on a deal along the same lines as the one he walked away from during the 2011 talks, according to the paper, Obama retorted: "You missed your opportunity on that."

Obama's frustrations grew, and he told Boehner he would rail publicly against the Republicans in the absence of a reasonable compromise.

As the Journal reports:

Mr. Obama repeatedly lost patience with the speaker as negotiations faltered. In an Oval Office meeting last week, he told Mr. Boehner that if the sides didn't reach agreement, he would use his inaugural address and his State of the Union speech to tell the country the Republicans were at fault.

At one point, according to notes taken by a participant, Mr. Boehner told the president, "I put $800 billion [in tax revenue] on the table. What do I get for that?"

"You get nothing," the president said. "I get that for free."

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Affleck will appear Sunday on "Face the Nation," and the CBS Sunday morning show released an advance video of the interview, in which the actor sounds like he's considering a run for John Kerry's seat in the Senate.

Kerry was nominated Friday to be secretary of state in President Obama's second term, succeeding Hillary Clinton. Scott Brown, who was defeated by Elizabeth Warren in November, is considered a likely GOP nominee, and an early favorite.

Here's the key quote:

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But he didn't stop there.

We tracked down Rush's most inflammatory statements so you don't have to listen:

* "The NRA was very classy and laid back for a week. They didn't say anything, didn't get involved, didn't attempt to exploit it one way or another. They are the greatest, the largest gun safety organization in the country."

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Surprise, it's Rush Limbaugh.

On his radio show this afternoon, Limbaugh called the NRA leader "an adult looking for real solutions," and said he was "disrespected" by Code Pink protesters who, he claimed, would never interrupt a hearing on Benghazi.

"No matter what he said, Wayne LaPierre sounded like an adult looking for real solutions, but that's not what this country's interested in right now. Sorry. The adults are not running this show," said Limbaugh.

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The former Nebraska senator, widely considered a finalist to succeed Leon Panetta as secretary of defense, opposed James Hormel's nomination as U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg in the late 1990s because Hormel was "openly, aggressively gay."

Buzzfeed and the New York Times reported Thursday evening that in 1998, when Hormel's nomination was before the Senate, Hagel told a Nebraska newspaper that he had concerns about Hormel representing his country because of his sexuality.

“Ambassadorial posts are sensitive," Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald. "They are representing America," he said. "They are representing our lifestyle, our values, our standards. And I think it is an inhibiting factor to be gay — openly aggressively gay like Mr. Hormel — to do an effective job."

Conservatives in the Senate blocked a vote on Hormel's nomination; then-President Bill Clinton used a recess appointment to place him in the post.

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But as Erik Wemple points out in the Washington Post today, Lott has not appeared on Fox News or its web site since the Newtown massacre -- but he has been a regular on CNN, on various panels and in much-talked-about arguments with Soledad O'Brien and Piers Morgan.

Wemple writes:

While Lott has been given ample opportunity on CNN to air his views on the Newtown massacre, he hasn’t yet spoken up on the matter on FoxNews.com. His last column surfaced Dec. 6, a second critique of Costas’ call for a new look at guns. He has written a column on the implications of Newtown — for U.S. News & World Report.

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As Rush details on his web site, Lanza -- whose mother, Nancy, was reportedly a doomsday "prepper" -- either couldn't deal with the possibility of the Mayan apocalypse on Friday or wanted to "save people" from it.

As he pushed this theory, Limbaugh had it both ways. "I'm not espousing it, I just want to bounce off of it." Here's how he bounced:

The theory that Adam Lanza somehow had been convinced the world was gonna end Friday and he was discombobulated by it. His mother was a prepper and a survivalist and showed him guns and he went in there and did what he did to either deal with the pressure of it or maybe save people from the end, who knows what.  It happened in China, is the point.

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But Solomon's brilliant "Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity" -- a staple on year-end best book lists -- has been about the only book on my mind since Friday's horrific massacre in Newtown, Conn.

The great genius of Solomon's book comes in its empathy for the parents and children who find themselves in situations they never imagined. There's a chapter on children with autism and Asperger's. And in another, he writes about getting to know the parents of one of the Columbine shooters, Dylan Klebold, as he sought to understand how two loving parents could end up, unknowingly, raising a killer.

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In a statement, the network announced: “After being kidnapped and held for five days inside Syria by an unknown group, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel and his production crew members have been freed unharmed. We are pleased to report they are safely out of the country.

Engel and his crew are live on the "Today" show now; we will update with more details.

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Earlier this month, Oprah Winfrey selected Ayana Mathis' debut novel, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie," as the second selection in the reboot of her book club. Knopf instantly upped her print run to 125,000 books and moved her publication date ahead six weeks. It instantly struck the best-seller list.

Reviews have been sensational. In the New York Times, critic Michiko Kakutani said that Mathis "writes with uncommon narrative authority... conjuring the lives of the Shepherd family with extraordinary psychological precision." She compared Mathis to Toni Morrison and Louise Erdrich, before concluding "her elastic voice is thoroughly her own — both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral."

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The story, by Edmund Mahony and Dave Altimari, begins:

Adam Lanza blasted his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School. He fired a half-dozen thunderous rounds from a semiautomatic rifle to open a hole big enough to step through in one of the school's glass doors.

Once inside, he had to make a choice.

Principal Dawn Hochsprung's office was straight ahead. To the right, 25 or so children were rehearsing a play in the school cafeteria. To his left were the first-grade classrooms.

Lanza turned left.

Among the other details:

* Lanza skipped the first classroom he passed. The teacher, Kaitlin Roig, had already heard the gunfire in the school and barricaded her kids in a bathroom.

* Then he arrived in a class led by a substitute teacher, Lauren Rousseau, "where he proceeded to systematically shoot everyone inside — the 14 children who investigators believe were huddled and clutching one another in fear."

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