First Book and random good thoughts

I first heard about this nonprofit organization when I attended a literacy conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (you know, the home of the 2009 National Champions!!) back in 2007. I'm sure that many of you have heard of it, but if you haven't, you should really check out the website. They provide books for kids in an attempt to foster early literacy and a lifelong love of reading. I chose this organization to read for during Dewey's Read-a-thon last weekend. Even though I didn't get much reading done, I still wanted to donate to this very worthwhile cause. I know many of the read-a-thon participants read for a worthy cause during the event, as well. In fact, there was a nice list of possible charities on the Dewey's Read-a-thon site you may want to check out if you haven't been there already.

Oh, and as most everyone in the world knows by now -- she won!! For the first time ever, the person I was rooting for actually won. Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her book Olive Kitteridge. I loved this book and have gushed about it often.

I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind thoughts and wishes over the last week. I'm much better and actually glad to be back in a routine and at work. :) It sure is nice to know that there are so many wonderful book bloggers out there who care.

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees Announced

I don't normally put too much faith in book awards simply because my choice hardly ever wins. However, I like to watch and see what happens anyway. There are other categories, but I've listed the fiction and nonfiction below. I definitely hope Olive Kitteridge wins in the fiction category. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time has heard me sing the praises of this book. I read it as an arc and absolutely loved everything about it. I have Marilynne Robinson's Home, but I haven't read it, yet. I know it will be good, though. You can find the entire list here. What book are you rooting for?

The 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award Nominees:

Fiction
Roberto Bolaño, 2666, FSG
Marilynne Robinson, Home, FSG
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project, Riverhead
M. Glenn Talyor, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, West Virginia University Press
Elizabeth Strout, Olive Kittredge, Random House

Nonfiction
Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, Knopf
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Knopf
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Doubleday
Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, Atlantic Monthly Press
George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776, Oxford University Press

2007 National Book Award Winners

I posted a list of the finalists for the 2007 National Book Awards earlier. The winners were announced this week. The website has interviews and a list of the awards going back to 1950.

Booker Prize Rant

I just came across this post over at Book Chase. Apparently, there are those who not only don't put much stock into awards, but think that they are evil. This is interesting. Check it out.

Man Booker Prize Announced

Anne Enright is the recipient of the 2007 Man Booker Prize for her book The Gathering. The annual award is given to an author from Britain, Ireland or The Commonwealth and includes a $102,000 stipend.

The other authors on the short list included Ian McEwan for On Chesil Beach, Lloyd Jones for Mr. Pip, Nicola Barker for Darkmans, Mohsin Hamid for Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Indra Sinha for Animal's People.

The problem with giving awards for anything (books, movies, TV shows, etc.) is that people do the choosing. We all have our own opinions regarding what makes something worthy of an award. We simply can't understand why everyone doesn't love the same things that we do. So, I do feel somewhat sorry for judges in this regard. No matter what choice is made, there will be some people who are unhappy. For this year's Man Booker Prize, it took the judges two and a half hours to make a decision, and according to the New York Times, Ms. Enright "wasn't everybody's first choice. She was "a choice with which all the judges were happy."

So, what does this mean? Does it mean that The Gathering is a far superior book to On Chesil Beach or Reluctant Fundamentalist? Or Hard Row by Margaret Maron (which happens to be the cozy mystery that I'm currently reading) for that matter? Of course not. It means that according to a particular group of people on a particular day, that particular book was chosen as deserving of merit. I haven't read The Gathering. In fact, I hadn't even heard of it until it won yesterday. I'm sure it's a fine piece of literature, and I may add this book to my ever-increasing to-be-read pile, but, not necessarily because it's an award winner. I'll seek out reviews and recommendations from other book blogs and from Library Thing before I make up my mind.

2007 National Book Award Finalists

Finalists for the 2007 National Book Award were named yesterday. The winners will be announced in New York in November. After looking at the list of finalists, I am once again surprised at the number of books with which I'm not familiar. As an acquisitions librarian, reading book reviews is a major part of my job, and I normally feel like I'm pretty much on top of things -- until this list comes out each year. This brings up the question of the value of book awards and what they really mean to the average person. The answer is probably not all that much. Yes, as a librarian, I want to make sure that we have all the major award-winning books in our collection. However, that doesn't mean that I necessarily want to read all of them. As long as I'm making confessions, I read more fiction than nonfiction. Nevertheless, I was actually more familiar with the titles on the nonfiction list this year.

On a related note, NPR had a story today about bestseller lists. They make a similar point by saying that bestseller lists, such as the New York Times no longer carry the weight they once did. This probably has to do with the fact that people have access to book news and reviews today that they didn't have before Amazon and Google.

However you choose the books you want to read is fine, as long as you READ!

Fiction
Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
Varieties of Distrubance by Lydia Davis
Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

Nonfiction
Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution by Woody Holton
Ralph Ellison: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner

Poetry
Magnetic North by Linda Gregerson
Time and Materials by Robert Haas
The House on Boulevard St. by David Kirby
Old Heart by Stanley Plumly
Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 by Ellen Bryant Voigt

Young People's Literature
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One by Kathleen Duey
Touching Snow by M. Sindy Felin
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
Story of a Girl by Sara Zarr

Last year's winner for fiction was The Echo Maker by Richard Powers.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Doris Lessing has been awarded the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. She is a prolific author who is best known for The Golden Notebook, which was published in 1962. She lives in London and is still writing as she approaches her 88th birthday. Her award didn't come without some controversy. Outspoken literary critic, Harold Bloom, didn't agree with the committee's decision. He says, "Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable...fourth-rate science fiction." However, others feel that the criticism comes more from her past political beliefs than from her ability as a writer.

During the announcement of her award, the academy described her most famous work by saying, "The burgeoning feminist movement saw it [The Golden Notebook] as a pioneering work and it belongs to the handful of books that inform the 20th century view of the male-female relationship."

Quill Book Awards

On October 27, the third annual Quill Book Awards will air on NBC. According to the site, "The Quill Awards are the only book awards to pair a populist sensibility with Hollywood-style glitz. They are the first literary prizes to reflect the tastes of all the groups that matter most in publishing--- readers, booksellers and librarians." They are also the only book awards to be televised. A group of 6,000 librarians and booksellers choose the winners in 19 categories, including children's literature, biography, graphic novels and debut fiction. Readers can get involved by going to the site and voting on the book of the year from the list of winners in the individual categories.