Opinion: The Letters Top Five

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The Letters Top Five is back from vacation and obviously ready for a new start: last week, correspondence about Barack Obama’s historic inauguration led our Letters to the editor tally.

During the week ending Jan. 25, The Times received 886 usable letters, 738 of which were in our Top Five Topics:

• The Inauguration: 467 letters, including messages sent in response to Editorial Pages editor Jim Newton’s plea for readers’ thoughts on the change of guard in Washington;
• Gaza: 75 letters, including correspondence about this heart-wrenching piece about a father who lost his daughters;
• Bush’s legacy: 69 letters;
• Huckleberry Finn: 66 letters, responding to this story about a teacher who wants to shelve the American classic; and
• California’s budget: 61 letters, about continuing budget woes in Sacramento.

How the Top Five is tabulated: Each week, your letters maven receives thousands of e-mails, dozens of letters through the good old U.S. postal service, and even a few faxes here and there.

After she cuts out spam, obscene mail, letters addressed to more than one recipient, letters that seem to be the fruit of letter-writing campaigns and letters with attachments (which gum up our computer systems,) she is usually left with several hundred eligible items, represented in the Letters Top Five tally. From these, she selects the somewhere around 100 that get published in the newspaper. Faxes and snail mail are not reflected in the chart.