New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008

The finale of the rollout of the New York Times year-end best books lists arrived today with their 10 Best Books of 2008 list. (Last week they announced their 100 Notable Books of the year, as well as Critics' Picks from their daily reviewers and separate lists for children's, coffee table, and art and architecture books.) Here's the top 10, which is split evenly between fiction and nonfiction, although I don't think they always do that:

Fiction:

• Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser
• A Mercy by Toni Morrison
• Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
• 2666 by Roberto Bolano (available in single-volume hardcover or a (gorgeous!) three-volume paperback set)
• Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Nonfiction:

• The Dark Side by Jane Mayer
• The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
• Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
• This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust
• The World Is What It Is by Patrick French

Not too many surprises (especially since this list is based in part on their original reviews, and these were all raved in the Sunday Book Review)--I guess the biggest one is Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is by a well-known writer but which got fairly mixed reviews. The thing that everyone within the book biz will be noticing is that 9 of the 10 books are from Random House imprints, and 7 are from Knopf alone, which is fairly remarkable.

Only one of their top 10 (The Forever War) was in ours, although Netherland, 2666, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Dark Side were further down in our top 100. (They haven't reviewed our top choice, The Northern Clemency, yet, so it was ineligible, since they only include books they've reviewed since last December.) Want to take the comparison further? In our two top 100 lists, we had 27 books in common. Throw in Publishers Weekly's list of the 150 or so best books of the year, and 13 books were consensus picks on all three lists (last year we agreed on 11):

• The Forever War
• Netherland
• 2666
• Unaccustomed Earth
• The Dark Side
• The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
• The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju
• Lush Life by Richard Price
• The Boat by Nam Le
• Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris
• My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru
• The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed
• The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

And of these, Netherland, Lush Life, 2666, and Pictures at a Revolution also made the daily Times's critics' top 10s. Also, three books made our list and PW's as well as the Times's Notable Children's Books list (their main Notables list doesn't include kids' books):

• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Volume II by M.T. Anderson
• Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
• Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

The end of year lists are coming in fast and furious now--we'll try to flag some more as they come in. --Tom