There are numerous sources of books reviews, but a rave review in the New York Times is the most coveted of all by publishers and by many readers. So it is interesting to parse the paper’s choices for 10 best of the not-yet-concluded year:
FICTION
The Art Of Fielding by Chad Harbach
11/22/63 by Stephen King
Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
Ten Thousand Saints by Eleanor Henderson
The Tiger’s Wife By Téa Obreht
Notice that the National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is not here, nor is the much-praised Man Booker winner, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. In fact, only The Tiger’s Wife was on a shortlist for either prize, the NBA. Also missing: Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot.
NONFICTION
Arguably Essays. By Christopher Hitchens
The Boy in The Moon: A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son. by Ian Brown
Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention. by Manning Marable
Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman
A World On Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War. by Amanda Foreman
The outlier here is Brown’s heartbreaking work about his son Walker, who suffers from a rare condition that renders him to speak or to eat on his own, or to stop himself from punching himself repeatedly. Among the other choices, the Malcolm X biography (sadly, the author died just as the book was published) was shortlisted for the National Book Award nonfiction prize. That prize went instead to The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which did make the Times “100 Notable” 2011 list. Still to come: National Book Critics Circle prizes and the Pulitzers.
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