Am I the only person who realizes it's still November? The year is not over, people! So far we've had lists from Publishers Weekly, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle and Waterstone's, and there are still six weeks to go. If you folks want to present these lists as "great Christmas gifts," that's one thing, but there's still time for books to surprise us...

The peer pressure has built to such a level that even the august New York Times Book Review has given in and posted their list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. (Not in ranked order, sadly -- I'd love to see the arguments if they had.)

I saw the Times list from a Locus Online link, and Mark Kelly noted there that the Times has apparently not broken out a SF/Fantasy list this year, as they had in years past. (Yet another way Gerald Jonas was superior to Dave Itzkoff, I'm afraid -- it looks like "Dave" doesn't read enough to put together a decent end-of-year list.)

On the long Times list (divided into precisely fifty fiction books and fifty non-fiction) are such books of interest to us as Julie Phillips's James Tiptree, Jr. biography, Lisey's Story by Stephen King, The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. But nothing published as SFF made it onto their list -- not Blindsight or Farthing or Glasshouse or Wintersmith or Three Days to Never.

The Times does note that a "Top 10" list (presumably drawn from the books on this long list) will be posted on November 29th.