New York Times 100 Notable Books

A few years back the New York Times wisely trimmed down their endless year-end Notable Books list (which seemed to include any book that got a decent review in the Book Review during the year) to a more focused 100. In the holiday hubbub I missed that they had put this year's Notables online last Wednesday: 50 books each in fiction and nonfiction. (We've put the lists on our site too .) Still hard to say much on first glance about a list this long, until you start to notice what's not there. Looking at our own '07 favorites, only 6 of our top 15 made their list, with, well, notable absences like A Thousand Splendid Suns, The World Without Us, and our favorite thriller, Heartsick.

Meanwhile, in their year-end list published a few weeks ago, Publishers Weekly went in the other direction, from last year's 100 to a full 150 this year (like us, they include children's books, as well as a healthy showing for categories like religion and comics). I'm not sure what's more interesting to a reader: the ones all three of our lists agree on, or the books that only appear on one, but since the latter is a much longer list, I'll leave that to you to compile. Here's the list of the books that appeared on all three lists:

• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
• Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
• A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah
• Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman
• The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
• Falling Man by Don DeLillo
• The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
• Time and Materials by Robert Hass

That's 11 books, which, as it happens, would make an excellent prediction for the 10 Best Books of the Year list the Times will announce this Wednesday. --Tom