And where there’s a list — specifically, the 100 Most Notable books of the year as chosen by the Book Review — there are stats, things noted, and other sorta-kinda-unusual stuff:
61 of the books are non-fiction; 4 are poetry collection and the rest — 35 — are fiction.
The National Book Award nominees are well represented: 3 from the fiction category, 4 from the non-fiction and W.S. Merwin for poetry.
The Booker Prize Winner is on here (John Banville) along with 2 shortlistees (Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro) and 3 longlisted authors (Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and J.M Coetzee)
Genre fiction is essentially ignored save for Elmore Leonard’s THE HOT KID and, if you want to call it that, HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (but that’s really in the “crassly commercial cash cow” category, which must be a new record for alliteration…)
Overexposed young things: 4 (Dave Eggers, Curtis Sittenfeld, Zadie Smith and Benjamin Kunkel.) Overexposed not-so-young thing: 1 (Bret Easton Ellis.) Overexposed Times columnists: 1 (Maureen Dowd.) Overexposed old white guys: 0. (I mean, E.L. Doctorow and Cormac McCarthy are old, but they don’t really count, do they?)
Any categories we should add? Additional thoughts and comments? Send them our way.