'Tis the Awards Season, Part 2

Growing up, most of us were probably required (forced?) to read books we didn't really like, most likely for a school assignment. I personally remember reading a great deal of Newbery Award book, probably because most teachers assign books that have been recognized as "good" by some authority figure or organization.

The American Library Association gives it the Newbery Medal and Newbery Honor awards every year to "honor the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." It also gives out the Caldecott Medal for the best picture book for children. In the world of literature, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals are essentially the Oscars of children's books. The runners-up for each prize are given the distinction of "Honor" books. Previous Newbery Medal and Honor books include Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Lois Lowry's Number the Stars and Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia.

In recent years, however, there has been grumbling within the children's literature world. Some people feel the Newbery Awards go to books that the ALA and librarians like, as opposed to books that are actually popular with real-live children (which could be part of why the Harry Potter books - which did win numerous other awards - were never nominated for the Newbery medal). This year, that trend was apparently broken when the ALA gave the Newbery Medal to Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. Gaiman, a sci-fic/fantasy author for adults as well, is popular among younger readers and librarians, it seems.

Meanwhile, a relatively newer award, The Michael L. Printz Award for young adult (or teen) literature, was given to a little-known novel by Melina Marchetta, Jellicoe Road. While certainly well-deserved, Marchetta's book doesn't have the popularity or visibility of other young adult books. In an article in the School Library Journal, the authors commented on the fact that Marchetta's novel was decidedly below most people's radars while the critically acclaimed and reader-popular The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins wasn't even on the list of Printz nominees.

And therein lies one problem with book awards for children's literature. With adult literature awards (e.g., the NBA's, the Pulitzers, etc.), the people who decide the winners are adults reading adult books. With the Newbery Medals, the Printz awards and other kid-lit prizes, it is most often adults choosing the winners of books meant for children. The adult deciding the winners are not the authors' intended target audience. So what one group of adults might like for children may not be what the children themselves actually like.

Perhaps the discrepancy between the deciders and the readers simply proves the completely subjective and relative nature of awards in general. Or perhaps it points to a deeper divide between adults and children. Either way, I figure as long as kids are reading something, it's better than nothing.

For a mostly complete list of the ALA's children's awards, visit Amazon.com's blog.

John Updike 1932-2009

From the New York Times obituary:

Updike was the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, a prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire. Best known for his four ''Rabbit'' novels, he died Tuesday at age 76.

Updike was a literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists. He wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir ''Self-Consciousness'' and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams .He released more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s, winning virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for ''Rabbit Is Rich'' and ''Rabbit at Rest,'' and two National Book Awards.

He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Normal Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing. Last year, judges of Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize voted Updike lifetime achievement honors.

But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it ''to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached."

'Tis the Awards Season, Part 1

When most people think of awards season in January and February, they think of the Golden Globes, the Grammy's, the Oscars, etc. But it's also the season for book awards, as a host of organizations announce their picks for the best books of the previous year.

Part 1 of this series highlights the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which announced their nominees for 2008 this past weekend. Of the three most prestigious awards an American book can win (besides any specific genre awards, such as the Hugo Award for science-fiction or international prizes like the Nobel), the NBCC Awards fall third. The winners don't receive money, but there is a good deal of bragging rights involved. (For those of you curious, the other two awards in the "big three" for US book are the National Book Awards and the Pulitzers.)

The NBCC Awards are also a bit odd - though distinctly American, the NBCC's are open to any book published in English in the United States, which means there are usually non-American authors included on the list for this American award (whereas the National Book Awards specifically go to American authors).

Five nominees are selected in each of the following categories: fiction, non-fiction, biography, autobiograph, poetry and criticism. Included among this year's nominees are books previously nominated for the National Book Awards, including Marilynne Robinson's Home, Aleksandr Hemon's The Lazarus Project and Annette Gordon-Reed's NBA biography winner, The Hemingses of Monticello. Also nominated in the fiction category is the critically acclaimed novel Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Omnivoracious has published a complete list of nominees on the blog.

The NBCC Award winners will be announced on March 12.

And the Oscar goes to...

Last week, the 2009 Oscar nominations were announced and the rush to find the year's best film is now on. Most of you probably know that there is a category devoted to "best adapted screenplay," meaning that the story on screen came from a book or other written work.

This year, 4 of the 5 Best Picture nominees were based, in some degree, on a book. The good folks over at Amazon.com's Omnivoracious wrote all about it:

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was loosely based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
  
• Frost/Nixon was originally a play by Peter Morgan (who also wrote the screenplay), who based that play on a nonfiction manuscript by James Reston Jr., who was an assistant to the real David Frost.
• The Reader comes from an Oprah book club book by German author Bernhard Schlink.
• Slumdog Millionaire was based on Vikas Swarup's novel Q&A.
  

Only Milk had an original screenplay. Other movies nominated in different categories were also based on previously published materials: Revolutionary Road, from Richard Yates' novel; Doubt, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by John Patrick Shanley; and the documentary film Man on Wire, which is based on Philippe Petit's memoir.

The official nominees in the category "Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Published or Produced" are:

- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Doubt
- Frost/Nixon
- The Reader
- Slumdog Millionaire

The 81st Academy Awards will air live on ABC on Sunday, Feburary 22nd.

How to Read Like an American President

As part of the inaugural festivities, Amazon.com's Omnivoracious blog posted President (!!!!) Obama's reading list. It's fairly detailed and as accurate as it can be, considering most of the information comes from other news sources.

Still, it's nice to have a president who is literate and actually reads on a regular basis. I suppose Bush did read sometimes, but you'd never know it from the way he spoke. At any rate, I think I'm going to try to include some of President Obama's books in my own reading this year. I first came across Doris Kearns Goodwin because of The Daily Show and her book on President Lincoln is very well regarded by many presidential academics.

And for those who might be interested, I was able to find Elizabeth Alexander's website. She was the poet who spoke at the inauguration and I was curious to learn more. I'm not sure if she was just the inaugural poet or if she's the new poet laureate of the U.S. I'll have to check into that.

Happy Inauguration Bookworms! It's a brand-new world.

Things to Ponder

"All of the great scientists, like Newton, like Einstein repeat the same thing - that the discoveries don't come when you're consciously looking for them. They come when for some reason you've let go conscious control. They come in a sudden flash, and you can receive that flash, or you can refuse to. But if you're willing to receive it, then for that instantaneous moment of time you're really you, but you're not conscious in the same way you have to be later on when you look at what you saw in the flash, and then have to work out the equations to prove it...

What I think is that if we're still around after we die, it will be more like those moments when we let go, than the way we are most of the time. It'll be - it'll be the self beyond the self we know."

- A Ring of Endless Light, Madeleine L'Engle, pages 163-164

The Imperfect Memory

I just finished reading Multiple Blessings by Jon and Kate Gosselin from the TLC show "Jon and Kate Plus 8." Then I started another non-fiction "true life" story - Escape by Carolyn Jessop. It details her life on and eventual decision to leave a fundamentalist Mormon compound.I would generally classify both as memoirs, in the sense that they were written by the people about themsevles (as opposed to a biography, which is written by other people about the people).

In general, I try to stay away from memoir-type books because there's often a sense of self-congratulations that permeates through them. When a person is writing about him or herself, there is always the chance that the reader is dealing with an unreliable narrator. Is anyone truly able to see him or herself clearly, flaws and all? And if we aren't, as I believe, then doesn't it stand to reason that a self-penned memoir would be inherently flawed? That's not to say that all memoirs are bad, but I do think you need to take them with a grain of salt. In this case, I think truth is in the eye of the beholder. After all, all I have to say is "James Frey / Oprah" and I've made my point.

I also think that memoirs pose the problem of accurate memories. Memoirs involve the remembering of certain situations and events, without any outside sources verifying the facts. While these can somtimes end up as straight lies (see again: James Frey), other times it's simply a faulty memory messing up the facts. Memory is a tricky thing and it can fool you into thinking that certain things took place when, in fact, they didn't. Biographies, at least, often have a built-in fact check to make sure the information is accurate. The simple fact that many celebrity memoirs have spurred defamation law suits should be enough proof that what one person remembers may not be what another does.

So why bother with memoirs at all? I think there's a sense of voyeurism involved with reading a memoir. We get to peek into a person's head and hear his or her thoughts in a way that no other genre allows. There's the sense of treading where we don't belong, into the most private recesses of a person's mind. Beliefs, feelings and emotions all take on new importance when we can see it from the inside, instead of looking in from the outside. Memoirs may not be entirely reliable, but they offer the intimacy a biography cannot.

How about you, bookworms? What's your take on memoirs and their sometimes unreliable narrators? Should we read biographies over memoirs? Is one genre better than the other?

Beginnings

Now that we've started a new year, I've been thinking a lot about beginnings. Beginnings are great in many ways because they're filled with possibilities. Anything can happen at the beginning and this is especially true with books.

A really good beginning to a book will hook you right away and compel you to keep reading. What's more, a great book beginning will make you think that absolutely anything can happen in the following pages, even if you've already read the book and know how it ends. One of the things I love about Jane Austen, for example, is that I can start reading Pride and Prejudice for the 100th time and still worry that Lizzie and Darcy may not end up together because Austen's beginning so thoroughly convinces me of their mutual dislike.

Beginnings also get your own creative juices flowing. A great book beginning will stimulate your imagination and let you think of the thousands of possible journeys the characters might take. It's almost like a "choose-your-own-adventure" story inside your head.

Here are my favorite first book lines:

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen -- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon -- "One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."

3. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens -- "Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that."

4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling -- "Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams -- "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

So bookworks, what are your favorite first lines? What beginnings do you like best?

New Year's Reading Resolutions

As a general rule, I don't make New Year's resolutions. I'm not opposed to resolutions, but I never seem able to keep them and then I feel bad for not being able to maintain a resolution, so I figured - why bother in the first place?

This year, however, I've decided to break my own rules and make some reading resolutions for 2009. Inspired by last week's Booking Through Thursday prompt, I hereby resolve to do the following:

• Read more non-fiction; I need more balance in my yearly reading material and hopefully some non-fiction will complement my reading nicely.
  
• Re-read at least 3 classic novels NOT written by Jane Austen; I tend to fall back to Austen when I want to read classic novels, but in 2009, I vow that at least 2 of my 3 classics will be from other authors.
• Read at least 3 books by authors I have never read before; in addition to expanding upon my reading genres, I also think I should look beyond those authors I already know and love. I'm a creature of comfort, but it's a good thing to break out of a mold and find something new and exciting.
  
• Continue with my yearly 50 Book Challenge; every year, I challenge myself to read 50 books unrelated to work and/or school. I made it to 50 this year, but just barely. I haven't had as much luck in previous years. So 2009 will be the year that I easily make it to 50.
  

There you have it - my New Year's reading resolutions. What are yours?