The New York Times Book Review announced its Ten Best list about eight minutes ago. (Not that I was watching or anything. Haha. No, I didn't make it.)

There were some surprises there, and several books I can't wait to read.

For me, the biggest, and happiest surprise was seeing Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City make the cut. I have not read it, but am highly amused that it could get savaged in the daily edition of the Times and still make the top ten for the year in the book review. 

If you're not aware, those are two completely separate operations. But still. The review of Lethem in the daily Times, by Michiko Kakutani was merciless.  The first sentence described it as  this tedious and overstuffed, a bit later as insipid and his charaters as annoying and tiresome. It's like that start to finish.

At the same time, the paper's Sunday book review section loved it. Gregory Cowles called it astonishing and bravura, and makes a strong case for those adjectives.  

Looks like Jonathan had the last laugh. (The Book Review's take is far more important than the daily's to start with, and the ten best list, that's a real feather.)

I also can't help snickering about it, since I got my first bad review and my worst to-date in the daily Times (from Janet Maslin), offset by a great one in the book review, and a spot on their hundred list. I quite enjoyed that. I bet Jonathan is laughing his ass off. I hope so.

Jeanette Walls also surprised me by making the list for Half Broke Horses.  It's gotten good reviews, but not on a level with her first book, The Glass Castle. 

I have not gotten to either of them yet, but planned to. I think I'll swap the order now and see what Horses is like. The reason her appearance pleases me is that I met her last month at the Texas Book Festival and she was wonderful. We chatted for awhile and she's completely genuine--plus funny and nice. It's good to see nice people make the list. I don't judge art that way, so we'll see what I think of the book, but I do like to see good people succeed.

And she told some wonderful stories. She also took a lot of chances with the book--deciding to keep it in her grandmother's first-person voice and release it as a novel--and I like seeing those pay off, too.

After the ruckuss over Publishers Weekly choosing an all-male top ten list--(followed by an equal number of women on a list compiling the eleven books that made the top 100 from PW, NYT and Amazon)--a lot of people were surely watching the gender breakdown today. The Times' list included six women and four men.

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I was not the only one surprised by this list.

This Amazon piece a few days ago predicted these six would make the list (working off the Times 100, which narrowed things down a bit): "The Age of Wonder, The Good Soldiers, Lost City of Z, and Cheever to be on that list, along with the big award winners Wolf Hall and Let the Great World Spin."

They got only two right (the first two). Not a very predictable list. Which is good, because taste in books is highly subjective, and all the lists have been very different this year.