Books, 11/28.

The New York Times Book Review list of "10 Best Books of 2007" is up.

"Polling our nearly 800 members, as well as all the former finalists and winners of our book prize, we asked, What 2007 books have you read that you have truly loved?" blogs John Freeman for the National Book Critics Circle. "Nearly 500 voters - from John Updike and Robert Hass to Carolyn Forché, Anne Tyler, Julia Alvarez and Cynthia Ozick - answered the call."

And Dwight Garner points to more lists and recommendations.

"The star system existed only because the movies used to be a volume business," writes Scott Eyman, reviewing The Star Machine for the New York Observer. "If a studio is making 10 or 12 movies a year, you can just go buy people, which is what happens today. But if you're making 40 or 50 a year, as was the norm in the 1920s, 30s and often in the 40s, it's much more economical to develop talent in-house.... That some of the types Jeanine Basinger writes about in her long, luxurious, often delicious book no longer exist - the classy WASP gentleman, for instance, exemplified on the high end by the miraculous, saucy William Powell, and on the low end by the frigid Robert Montgomery, or by distaff equivalents such as Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert - doesn't negate what they meant to previous generations, and what they can still mean to us."

The Literary Saloon notes that Alberto Moravia would have turned 100 today.

And William Blake would be turning 250: If Charlie Parker... and wood s lot.

Posted by dwhudson at November 28, 2007 1:16 PM