Hello, I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the book review podcast. Last week, you heard our episode on the 10 best books of the year. That's [music] the collective hour, the collective we. And this week, we have something just as interesting, which is our staff book critics are going to talk about their years in reading.

One of the great joys in my life since I was a teenager has [music] been reading year-end list after year-end list in December on books and movies and music and really everything. I read [music] them across publications and definitely across critics, even those critics I intensely disagree [music] with. It's one of the primary tasks of a critic to simply be themselves to experience culture with their own unique [music] and idiosyncratic minds and then tell their audience about that experience.

And here with me today are [music] three wonderful and unique and idiosyncratic minds and they're going to tell all of us about how [music] they experienced this year in books. Dwight Garner, welcome.

>> Hey [music] Gilbert, great to be here.

>> Hi Gilbert. Jenzalai, hello there.

>> Hi Gilbert. Alexandra Jacobs, it's a pleasure to have you on [music] again.

>> It's a pleasure to be here, Gilbert.

>> There's so much to talk about. The three of you, as you have done for the past three years, have done each in your own way, a unique look back at a couple of books or several books that you enjoyed this year. I want to start with Dwight, who just loves to mess with us and this year [laughter] did a list of great How would you describe it? It's a list of sentences that I loved from the books that I read this year and I ran them together to make them comment upon one another and tried to make them funny and provocative.

>> And you can do this because as we've talked about on this podcast before, you have a book, commonplace book as it is called, in which you keep all these lines.

>> Yeah. And it was a good year for sentences. I think that the sentence is my favorite unit of prose. A lot of people love the book. They love the entire poem. I love the ideal sentence. I love it. Short, sharp, shocked. the voice. I like something intelligent, something that's intelligent and really well expressed. That's what I live for as a reader. And so I love sentences.