Some notables are more notable than others

Fresh on the heels of its list of 100 notable books of the year, the New York Times recognized your attention span is too short to appreciate it and made a new list of the 10 best books of '09. Two of the six books I singled out made the cut, A SHORT HISTORY OF WOMEN and CHRONIC CITY. (I also requested HALF BROKE HORSES and RAYMOND CARVER: A WRITER'S LIFE to review, but didn't get either. Scribner, are we not friends any more? Is this about what happened in Valencia?)

Funny thing about CHRONIC CITY, though: Jonathan Lethem's latest received two reviews from the Times, one from editor Gregory Cowles in the Sunday Book Review and another from big-name critic Michiko Kakutani. Cowles' was positive, calling it "astonishing" and praising its "beautiful drunken sentences," but Kakutani's was first and negative, concluding that it was "lame and unsatisfying." A few books every year get this treatment, but normally the review people remember is the most timely one.

My own review (which can be read here) is closer to Kakutani's than Cowles', but in promoting the book to the top 10 I sense a little skirmish among the Gray Lady's luminaries. Was a tie-breaker brought in? Did Sam Tanenhaus administer an arm-wrestling bout for that contested spot? I picture the disgruntled critic, having been overruled by her boss, storming back to her office, slamming the door and taking the whiskey bottle out of the bottom drawer before prank-calling Philip Roth and Photoshopping Thomas Pynchon's Naval portrait onto the bodies of World's Strongest Man competitors.

But I'm letting my imagination run away from me. If you've read one of the other books on the list that you'd like to speak up for, the floor is yours.