Best of the Year: Kakutani and Maslin

Regular readers of Old Media Monday may have noticed that there are two reviewers who receive one-name treatment in the weekly review roundup: the two regular reviewers in the daily Arts & Leisure pages of the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin. (The third regular there for most of the year, William Grimes, never really seemed to earn that iconic status--for better or worse--which might explain why he's left the book pages, to be replaced by Dwight Garner, who moved over from the parallel world over at the Sunday Book Review. I'm a Garner fan, so I'll see how just calling him "Garner" works out. And come to think of it, I think in the new year I'll drop the first names of the Washington Post's regulars too: (Michael) Dirda, (Jonathan) Yardley, and especially (Ron) Charles, whose lively and well-constructed fiction reviews are probably the ones I link to more than anyone else's except for the "notorious" Kakutani, whose reviews have a news value of their own although they're not usually as good as Charles's).

Today Kakutani and Maslin announced their top 10 "favorite books of 2008" among the 100 or so they reviewed during the year (which I think they did last year for the first time). Casual Times readers, don't confuse these top 10s with the Sunday Book Review's closely watched 10 Best Books list, which will come out on Wednesday, or their 100 Notable Books list, which was announced already this week. As the Times is often at pains to explain, the daily reviewing and the Sunday Book Review are completely separate worlds (which explains why they'll often review the same books). (It's an obvious assignment for someone at New York or the New York Observer to write a gossipy piece about the two reviewing cultures at the Gray Lady--so obvious that I'm sure somebody's already done it...)

Kakutani:

• Apples and Oranges by Marie Brenner
• America and the World by Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft
• The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll
• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
• Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• Alex and Me by Irene Pepperberg
• Lush Life by Richard Price
• Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics by Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais

Maslin:

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano (see also the 3-pb set, the one I'd get)
• Charlatan: America's Most Dangerous Huckster, the Man Who Pursued Him, and the Age of Flimflam by Pope Brock
• Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris
• The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
• Serena by Ron Rash
• The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
• Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives by Jim Sheeler
• Audition by Barbara Walters
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

The only crossovers with our own Top 10 list: Serena and Edgar Sawtelle, although 2666 and Pictures at a Revolution were in my personal top 10.

The Times has constructed a whole "Holiday Gift Guide" out of its critics' picks this year, and Garner (no first name anymore!) contributed his favorite coffee table books of 2008. Along with big collections from big names like Leibovitz, Avedon, Iooss, Playboy, and, yes, the New York Times, he singled out (tripled out?) three favorites above the rest:

• Scrapbooks: An American History by Jessica Helfand (we love this one too!)
• Old Rare New: The Independent Record Shop, edited by Emma Pettit
• Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric, a long-lost collaboration between photographer Barry Feinstein and Bob Dylan, whose poems, Garner says, "aren’t totally unreadable."

They also have lists of Art & Architecture books and notable children's books. --Tom