I was just reading a book review in the New York Times, and I was going to post and say “Why the hell does the NYT put book titles in quotes instead of italics? Don’t they have an AP Style Guide?” It turns out, however, that putting quotes around book titles is the correct procedure according to AP Style. What’s up with that? No other style guide does that, why does the AP? It’s actually kind of stupid, if you think about it, since using italics to denote book titles and quotation marks to denote shorter works is a convenient short-hand way of differentiating between the two forms in a review. Do quotation marks have more journalistic integrity than italics?

On another note, this review is by the Times’s new SF reviewer, DAVE ITZKOFF, who is a former editor of Spin and Maxim. I know what you’re thinking: yes, those are the perfect qualifications to review SF for one of the most respected review venues in the world.

Now to be fair, I don’t know much about the guy–I didn’t know who he was until I googled him, but he says things in his review that make me scratch my head. First, he starts off with “Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?” and goes on to refer to the genre as “sci-fi” several times. He also says that, though he enjoyed Counting Heads very much, “[he] cannot [recommend the book to Kite Runner readers, friends, or anyone] in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual.”

And this is the guy who the NYT decided would be the best person to review genre books for them?