New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

The New York Times announced their annual 10 Best Books of the Year list today. It's always a deeply conservative list, and this year is no different. (How conservative? Since 1998, by my count, of the 87 books chosen for these lists, only 3, all from academic presses, have not been published by one of the major conglomerates or Norton or Harcourt.) But I certainly can't take much issue with the books they chose this time, since I had five of them on my personal top 10. In alphabetical order:

Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by, yes, Amy Hempel
The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
Falling Through the Earth by Danielle Trussoni
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright
Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
The Places in Between by Rory Stewart
Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl

Of course, one reason these books are familiar is that Times reviews helped make them so--with Stewart and Pessl in particular (and perhaps Messud too), the early Times rave was what pushed them up onto the high bestseller plateau.The top 10 follows shortly on the heels of the Times's 100 Notable Books of 2006 list, which thankfully they have shrunk the past couple of years to a smallish round number--in previous years a couple hundred books could claim the "New York Times Notable Book of the Year" line on their paperback editions--but it's still too long to say much about. And Canada's leading national newspaper, the Globe & Mail, has chosen their ninth annual globe 100(whose longer-lived number was perhaps a model for the Times's new policy). At some point I should do a mammoth grid and put all these lists together... --Tom, Amazon Bookstore