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Tina Jordan, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review, started keeping track this year of the titles the team was considering for review.
She lost count around 1,500.
Working all the way from there to eventually create the annual 10 Best Books list takes a full year of spirited debates among a dozen staff members — but it’s also a task that the Book Review team sees as a serious responsibility. Ms. Jordan, along with Emily Eakin and Greg Cowles, two senior editors on the Book Review, recently sat down to discuss the process of choosing the top 10, the books that made them laugh — and cry — and the titles they wish had made the final cut. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
You spend so much time and thought creating this list. Can you walk us through the process?
GREG COWLES: It starts with an individual reader and an individual book, and the decision on whether to assign that book for review. The preview editor gets the book, loves it, assigns it, can’t stop thinking about it, brings it to colleagues and says, “I’d really like somebody else to read this, so I could propose it for Best Books.”
Once a second staff member loves the book, it goes to the big group, which is what we do on a regular basis: meeting to talk about books and argue about books. We start early in the year, meeting monthly, then by the middle of the year we’re meeting biweekly and eventually weekly.
TINA JORDAN: We have very different tastes. But we have these jobs because we love to read and we’re book nerds. We really are trying to do right by the year’s top 10 list.
Were there any books you came into those meetings ready to fight for?
JORDAN: “The Fate of the Day” by Rick Atkinson, which is the second volume of a projected trilogy about the American Revolution. I’ve never read a book like this. The war unspools in your head as you’re reading. I thought this could stand on its own, but I couldn’t convince people that volume two of a three-volume series was the one. I think every single person on the desk has favorite books that didn’t make it.
COWLES: Mine was the James Baldwin biography by Nicholas Boggs. In the end, it got a number of votes, but not enough.
EMILY EAKIN: That is worth underscoring. There are so many books that almost make it, and they’re often the books that appear in the comments. Readers say, “I can’t believe X isn’t on the list.” And you want to say, “Actually, that was No. 11, one vote short!”
How do you define a “best” book?
COWLES: I think it entails a certain ambition and a certain relationship to the culture, speaking to the moment, and that it can speak to a big audience. And this is our best list. We don’t pretend that our readers might not have an entirely different list, and we’re thrilled with that.
EAKIN: We also understand acutely how perverse it is to make a list, which suggests ranking and comparing things that are utterly unalike. Books are like fruit, and we are compelled to compare apples and oranges.
JORDAN: These last few meetings are tough. We’re taking straw polls. People are politicking.
COWLES: There are arguments.
EAKIN: It’s not a total consensus. What’s unusual is a book where we all just love it. There are a dozen of us, and I would say with “A Marriage at Sea,” almost everyone immediately came to a consensus.
What books provoked the most conversation?
EAKIN: “Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus, which unfolds in a single sentence across several hundred pages. A lot of readers reacted to that with fear and anxiety.
COWLES: It was fairly polarizing. Some people are completely bowled over by its accomplishment, and some people thought it was kind of show-off-y.
EAKIN: One colleague read a passage out loud to persuade us that perhaps this book did not rise to the level of best books, and his reading of this passage actually persuaded some that it did.
Which books strike you as not just the best of the year, but books that will stand the test of time?
EAKIN: We always think the books we are picking are not fly-by-night books that, once you get to the last page, you never think about again. Maybe that’s one of our conscious or unconscious criteria. But of course, we look back at our lists from a decade ago and think, “What? Why is this stuff on there?”
COWLES: It’s all a bit of a gamble. I would say, in nonfiction, we do look for books that speak to the moment — but because they speak to the moment, it is harder to imagine they might speak to posterity. “There Is No Place for Us,” by Brian Goldstone, speaks to a crisis of the moment.
EAKIN: It’s about the working homeless, a population of people who hold down jobs but don’t go home at night. These are people who can’t afford to rent an apartment actually anywhere in the United States in a city where a minimum-wage job is.
JORDAN: I could see that book having staying power, even though it speaks to the moment, in the same way something like “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich [chosen for the Book Review’s 100 Best Books of the 21st century] has.
Did any of the books this year change your perspective on something?
JORDAN: In “Angel Down,” the idea of telling the story of World War I in a sentence sounds crazy. And to throw in a fantasy element, like an angel? It doesn’t seem like it would work. I do think, when we’re looking at fiction, we prize freshness. We love it when we see something we’ve never seen before.
EAKIN: Even the way “The Sisters,” a novel by Jonas Hassen Khemiri, conceptually used time. Each section takes up half the time frame of the previous section.
COWLES: Until by the end you’re in a single minute.
EAKIN: I’d never seen a book try to do that.
Was there a book on the top 10 list that made you laugh?
EAKIN: “Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy definitely was a comic experience.
JORDAN: “How to Dodge a Cannonball” by Dennard Dayle, which made the 100 Notable Books list. It’s a Civil War satire. I was on the Metro North laughing out loud.
One that made you cry?
EAKIN: “Mother Emanuel” by Kevin Sack [a former reporter for The New York Times]. The book is framed by this horrific hate crime. And it’s handled with such compassion, the way this event is described in detail, this white supremacist murder of nine worshipers at a Bible study class. I did cry reading that, and I know this story.
What do people absolutely need to read right now?
JORDAN: That’s hard. It depends on what you need in this particular moment, right?
EAKIN: I think just reading, because it’s an endangered art.
COWLES: I would say reading requires an attention span, but anyone who can binge-watch four seasons of “The Bear” has the attention span to read a novel.
EAKIN: And audiobooks count!
JORDAN: It’s reading.
EAKIN: And you’re thinking.
The post They Read Hundreds of Books a Year. How Do They Pick the Top 10? appeared first on New York Times.
