Fresh off the heels of winning the Tournament of Books, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. At this point, Junot Díaz has to admit that Oscar’s life has been more zafa than fukú.
My review of Oscar Wao is here.
Yesterday marked the end of this year’s Tournament of Books. As always, The Morning News hosted a classy event. The winner by a landslide:
Here are how my brackets played out:
(click for larger view)
Since I had also wagered on Oscar Wao to win with actual cash, I’m actually in the running for some schwag. Schweet.
The Believer is now accepting votes from its readers for the best books of 2007, which will be published in the May 2008 edition. Timely, eh? In the interest of transparency, here’s my slate of candidates:
The NBCC is also taking votes for its quarterly (?) Good Reads recommendations. I chose the novel How the Dead Dream by Lydia Millet as best read of early 2008 (Fiction). The Winter Good Reads recommendations can be found here.
National Book Critics Circle Awards
The NBCC Awards were handed out last night in New York City. The winners were:
I’m starting to feel pretty good about betting on Oscar Wao to go all the way in The Tournament of Books.
The NYT’s Paper Cuts blog reports on the winners of the prestigious children’s book awards, the Caldecott and Newbury Medals. (Many thanks to Dr J for the link.) The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Caldecott Winner) looks spectacular. Amazon features a “deleted scene” from the book.
The shortlist of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Award 2007 have been announced. As usual, The Guardian is there, with excerpts from the offenders contenders. The list is always good for a few belly laughs and some blushing.
I’ve only read one of the finalists, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, and I feel that I must come to the novel’s defense here. The fellow depicted in the excerpt is an independently wealthy 400-pound Russian who longs for the NYC hip-hop lifestyle. You try to write a scene featuring that guy gettin’ jiggy without sounding ridiculous. Also: the novel is called Absurdistan. Some level of absurdity might be expected.
Update: The award went to Norman Mailer. Talk about kicking a guy when he’s down.
National Book Awards & Oprah & Okra
Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke won the National Book Award for Fiction last night.
Other winners:
In a shocking coincidence, Oprah announced her new book pick on the same day that the National Book Awards were handed out. Crazy timing. Oprah’s new book will be Ken Follet’s 900+ page The Pillars of the Earth.
Billboard of the month: last week driving from Mississippi to New Orleans I saw an advertisement for the Zatarain’s Cajun seasoning company that reads “As seen on Okra.” Sadly, I did not have my camera. However, I did find a version of the sign on Flickr.
Each of the Booker short-listed novels will be made available for free (no pay) download. In this scenario, I think I can see myself checking out The Gathering. I also expect to finally get my Mr Pip on.
The annual Booker Prize winner is usually a no-brainer purchase for me. Even if I haven’t heard of the book prior to the announcement, chances are it will turn out to be an excellent read. This year’s winner though…eh, I don’t know.
The Booker Prize was awarded last night to The Gathering by Anne Enright. The Booker’s web site calls the story an “exhilaratingly bleak family epic.” Are they trying to minimize book sales?
Has anyone read it?
Update: Posts elsewhere have me rethinking my initial gut reaction to the Booker winner:
…In short, just about everyone else.
Update 2: The publisher has just announced a reprint run of 75,000 copies, which just goes to show what I know.
This year’s Booker Prize Short List has been announced.
I’ve been meaning to acknowledge and thank Ragdoll at My Tragic Right Hip for kindly recognizing us with the Thoughtful Blogger Award. In some circles, such an award is an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or compassionate conservatism. Not here. We are humbled by the recognition and will try not to let if go to our heads. This award is going on the mantle over the fireplace. Stay classy, Ragdoll.
The Guardian’s book blog will be reading a Booker longlist title a week and writing about each one. This week though, they judge the books’ chances by checking out the covers, the heft, and the jacket blurbs. Worth a read for the least pretentious overview of the nominated books that you may ever see. Examples:
Fortunately, closer inspection reveals that the type is quite big, and there are lots of spaces. Plus, the skulls and tombstone motifs give it an appealing gothic edge.
I know it’s wrong and I know it’s immature, but I find this guy’s middle name rather amusing.
A half-ruined family photograph on the front and mention of “Dublin”, “sexual history” and “lyricism” on the inner sleeve elicit the big yawn response.
Plus, the book is only 130 pages long, so I’m all for it.
Galley Cat has a nice round up of the reaction to the Booker longlist, which is really handy when you don’t have time to do that sort of thing yourself. Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones and Consolation by Michael Redhill are emerging as possible contenders to the Ian McEwan hegemony.
The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize were announced yesterday. Is it me, or is Booker season longer than hockey season? I haven’t read any of these novels. Actually, I haven’t even heard of any of the books - with the exception of Ian McEwan’s. McEwan is required by British law to to make the list.
Said list:
As I’ve said, I am unfamiliar with everyone here except McEwan. If you’ve got a recommendation, I’d love to hear it in the comments. Unless it’s Winnie & Wolf - I’m not too keen on fiction featuring Hitler.
We’ve been honored with the Thinking Blogger Award. Beth (the Toronto One) of Books Etc. found herself tagged with the TBA meme and was forced to choose five blogs to recognize with this prestigious award. She randomly selected five of her most read blogs from a hat, and we were one of the five selected.
However we were selected, it is nice to be recognized, and we are honoured (I’m going with the Canadian spelling here as a tip of the hat to the selection committee) to have even been in the running. Here’s what Beth had to say about us on her blog:
Baby Got Books — because reading this blog is like taking a Continuing Education course in Contemporary Literature with the added bonus of it being taught with wit, humour and a delightful dash of sarcasm.
I’m blushing on behalf of all of us here at BGB. I think that I’ll use that if we ever craft a mission statement. Thanks, Beth.
NBCC, ToB, and the Ghetto Burger
Or, BGB plays catch-up with last week’s news…
The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last week. The winners were:
My thoughts: I’m surprised by Desai’s win. She bested Richard Ford, Dave Eggers, Cormac McCarthy, and Chimanda Ngozi Adichie (more on him her in a minute). I was pulling for Ford and Eggers. The Lost sounds completely heartbreaking. Weschler’s Convergences book sounds amazing. It will be mine.
The Morning News’ Tournament of Books started on Thursday while we were still groggy. Why start on a Thursday? Who knows. Two of the matches are now history. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimanda Ngozi Adichie defeated Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan in Match 1 of Round 1. In Match 2 of the first round, The Echo Maker by Richard Powers lost to Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. In Round two, the brackets steer these two winners to judge Jessa Crispin of Bookslut. She loathes The Emperor’s Childen, so find a chump and bet accordingly.
And in perhaps the most sought after award of all, the “Ghetto Burger” from Anne’s Snack Shop was named the Best Burger in the United States by the Wall Street Journal’s Raymond Sokolov. Also rans, The Vortex and The EARL, make Atlanta the best city in the US to get a burger, says the article. I’ve never stepped up to the Ghetto Burger at Anne’s, but I can vouch for the other two restaurants. Perhaps a field trip is in order…
It must be March. The annual “Tournament of Books” is about to get underway at The Morning News. The contenders have been selected (scroll down), but the brackets have not been set up yet. I’ll keep you posted.
In other news: the preferred version of our unofficial theme song has been melded to the video of the Sir Mix-A-Lot original. Before you click on the link, please put down any beverages that you don’t want shooting out of your nose. Download the mp3 of the song here.
Ragdoll (@ My Tragic Right Hip), a friend of the blog and a Canadian, hooked me up with an incredible book that is set in the northern reaches of Canada. I’m keeping the book under wraps until I’m done (post coming soon), but believe me when I tell you its fantastic. Now that I’m well steeped in flannel fiction, I was intrigued to read that this year’s Costa Award (formerly the Whitbread) was awarded to Stef Penney for her book, The Tenderness of Wolves. The book is a “murder saga set in the snowy wastes of 19th-century Canada.” The surprising thing, to me, is that Ms. Penney has never been to Canada. She researched the settings and customs in the British Library. For dialog she just added an “eh” to the end of every third sentence. No was apparently the wiser. A follow-up article explains that the reason she had to research the book exclusively in the library is that she’s agoraphobic (fear of places where escape may be difficult) — not so agoraphobic that she couldn’t put on her green party dress and get her award, just too agoraphobic to go to Canada. There’s no escape from Canada. (Actually, it says that she is now over her condition.)
Please note our new “Comix” category in the sidebar. Right over there. Since Shaft’s post yesterday now means that there are now two of us befouling the blog with graphic novels, I’ve made it easier to track them.
Get yourself some culture and check out the paintings of Kehinde Wiley. Wiley creates huge portraits of black men in a stylized version of the old master paintings of European kings and Popes. The December/January Believer Magazine came with a pack of note cards depicting reproductions of several Wiley’s paintings. I mailed one to each of our readers, but I think that they got lost.
The National Book Critics Circle awards nominations were announced. The contenders for best fiction in 2006:
Read the nominees for the other categories here. Of note to the Atlanta crowd: Atlanta writer Taylor Branch is nominated for the third (and final) part of his biography of MLK, The Edge of Canaan. Part 1, won this award. I think that Branch recently read from the book at The Center for Southern Literature, but there is no evidence of that at their web site. So I may be making that up.
I’m locked away in a gloomy conference room in a place where it is warm and sunny (outside) so this will be brief.
The NYT has published their list of the 100 Notable Books of 2006. I haven’t tallied my readings from the list yet. I was relieved to see that I have read at least some (n>1) of them.
The Guardian has also published a list (sort of) of writers and critics favorites of 2006 - in three ? parts (Part 1 — The Second Part 1 and Part 2).