Baby Got Books

Book Awards & Bad Timing

First round action in The Tournament of Books is well underway. Here’s how the match-ups have gone so far…

Roberto Bolano’s 2666 hog-tied Steer Toward Rock by Fae Myenne Ng
A Partisan’s Daughter by Louis de Bernieres edged out Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland in a contest in which neither team looked sharp
This year’s Cinderella, Harry, Revised by debut novelist Mark Sarvas upended this year’s Booker Prize winner, Aravind Agida’s White Tiger
Perennial all-star Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth) was sent packing early by Tom Piazza’s City of Refuge
Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, the National Book Award winner, defeated The Disreputable History of Frankie-Landau Banks by E. Lockhart, a Young Adult novel that was the finalist for The National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
The Lazarus Porject by Aleksandr Hemon (my pick to take it all) gets the tourney started by defeating Philip Hensher’s The Northern Clemency

As in most year’s, some of the best action takes place in the announcer’s booth with the color commentary by Kevin Guilfoile & John Warner. Warner has an outstanding rant about the state of the publishing industry that you should read in its entirety. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version:

…due to the frankly, totally fucked-up nature of the book business, I could not acquire a copy of the book in order to read it…Publishing treats books like they’re the McRib or Shamrock Shake, available for a limited time only before mothballing them…it doesn’t really hit home until one of the (apparently) best books of the year can’t be purchased in a bookstore outside of an initial three-month window. Is there any other industry that treats their product this way?

Anyone who uses a Shamrock Shake reference in a rant wins, as far as I’m concerned.

Meanwhile, the National Book Critics Circle handed out their awards in a ceremony last week in New York City. Check out all of the winners at the NBCC web site. I was in NYC a few hours after the nominees read from their works on the 11th. Then I left a few hours before the prize ceremony on the 12th. Timing is everything.