Full-time book critics approach recreational reading with a head start. We’re already reading for pleasure. We are immersed in books we find appealing, since the nearly 300 books chosen for the daily reviews in The New York Times have been culled from tens of thousands of volumes published each year. Some are chosen for their self-evident importance. Some are terrific sleepers. Even if a book’s foremost quality is its awfulness, a review in these pages means there’s something about it that one of us found noteworthy.

But we have favorites. And they meet criteria that any reader will recognize. These are the books that are disappointing only because they have to end. They’re the ones we mention to friends. They’re the ones worth taking on vacation, and they are well executed, whatever their genre or subject matter. They are what we’d read even if Michiko Kakutani, William Grimes and I weren’t designated readers.

The 10-favorite lists that follow are not 10-best lists. They’re not based strictly on merit. They don’t cite books we admired in the abstract but didn’t particularly like. Nor are they based on comprehensiveness; with so many books afoot, none of us can hope to have a complete overview. Each of us has stayed within the confines of our own reviews published in 2007 and picked the 10 books we covered most avidly  though there is one exception. Because Times critics do not review the work of their Times colleagues, Michiko Kakutani did not review Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes.” She recommends it nonetheless.

Think of these as lists that leave off the broccoli, figuratively speaking  though we have nothing against broccoli at all. (Michael Pollan’s new pro-vegetable manifesto, “In Defense of Food,” might be on my list were it not for a technicality: Its publication date is Jan. 1, 2008.)