The National Book Awards Longlist

One of the best birthday gifts I’ve ever received was a stack of four or five books, all published the year I was born. I hadn’t read John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” but now I felt a connection to it; we’d both come into being at roughly the same time. I wasn’t much of a sci-fi fan, but it seemed like a requirement that I read “The Dispossessed,” by Ursula K. Le Guin after receiving it in the stack.

The gift was meaningful in the way that receiving a reprint of the front page of the newspaper from your birth date is: Here is a snapshot of the world, which was already awake and complicated with ideas, at the moment you arrived in it.

I’m interested in how people choose the books they read. Do they pick up the most alluring from a table teeming with new releases at the bookstore? Read reviews and make selections based on critics’ picks? Get recommendations from friends or celebrity book clubs? The all-you-can-read buffet of books available begs a reader, especially a slow reader like me, to develop a strategy. As with an actual buffet, where you can fill up at the pasta station but be full by the time you get to the make-your-own-omelet bar, I worry about spending too long with any era or genre to the exclusion of others. Perhaps the right move is to graze, a little bit of everything in moderation, keep it interesting, keep moving.

This week, the National Book Foundation announced the longlist for the 2023 National Book Awards, presenting a crop of books on which a hungry reader could happily feast from now through the end of the year.(“Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah and “Fire Weather,” by John Vaillant just moved to the top of my list.)

A friend recently suggested to me that the longlists and finalists from National Book Awards past offered an abundance of uncommon ideas for what to read. Pick a year and see what you haven’t read — or better yet, what you haven’t heard of, the books that were admired in a particular year but, for whatever reason, don’t come up on your radar today. You could, of course, choose the year you were born and go to town.

But you’d best get to reading this weekend. The finalists for the 2023 Booker Prize will be announced on Thursday, and the Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Oct. 5. Add those to the fact that it’s fall, the season when many publishers release their biggest titles, and your reading plate is about to be very full.

For more

• The New York Times Book Review’s best books of recent years.

• Drew Barrymore’s invitation to host this year’s National Book Awards was rescinded after she announced that her talk show would return without unionized writers. She apologized yesterday but signaled she was sticking to her plans.

• Sign up for the “Read Like the Wind” newsletter for recommendations from the Book Review.

It’s Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, which is traditionally celebrated by dipping apples in honey and savoring other sweet dishes. Dorie Greenspan’s baked apples would be a perfect addition to a Rosh Hashana dinner, and they make a festive finale to any autumnal meal. Dorie’s recipe — a riff on her mother’s — calls for stuffing firm and tart baking apples (like Rome Beauty) with crystallized ginger and diced, dried apple rings, then bathing them with honey-spiked apple cider. As the apples bake, they soften, turning plush, and the liquid in the pan reduces and caramelizes until it becomes sticky and sauce-like. Serve these golden, fragrant confections topped with sour cream, sorbet or ice cream for dessert, or with dollops of yogurt for breakfast the next day. They’re a lovely way to ease into fall.

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Unpacking: The distinctive paper shopping bag at Bloomingdale’s is turning 50.