Carnegie Medals: In which I (almost) make a literary prize reading deadline

[gallery type="slideshow" ids="1576,1575,1574,1573,1571,1572"] Every year when the shortlists for various literary prizes -- Booker, Pulitzer, National Book Award -- are announced, I think hey wouldn't it be cool to read all the finalists and compare my judgment with the judges? But I never do. This year, however, I had no excuse when the finalists were announced for the Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This is the second year for this prize, given by the American Library Association -- and I would be attending the annual conference in Chicago. I bought tickets to the ceremony and started reading -- there were only six books total, three fiction and three nonfiction.

Neither of my top choices -- The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Mansion of Happiness by Jill Lepore (with a serious caveat I'll get to below) -- were the ones chosen by the judges. The winners were Canada by Richard Ford and Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan. All six were excellent reads; I highly recommend them and I'm glad I did this. I'll probably do it again next year. And then maybe take on another project: reading the winners of the various big contests and comparing them to each other.

A couple things I learned along the way:

* I've been neglecting my literary fiction -- for the last couple years I've been on an extended genre jag. Which is cool ... but means I'm missing out on some great books. It was good to have a reason to read some of the best current fiction. Canada was probably my least favorite of the three but it was an absorbing, if grim, read. It did feature a few fantastic lines like this one about spending the day at the movies in Mississippi:

"We'd emerge at four out of the cool, back into the hot, salty, breathless Gulf Coast afternoon, sun-blind and queasy and speechless from wasting the day with nothing to show for it."

And that is EXACTLY what it's like after you go to the early show at the Regal.

* After reading This is How You Lose Her, I didn't at all buy the argument that it was misogynistic or otherwise hostile towards women -- if anything, Junot Diaz goes out of his way to show what an idiot Yunior is for repeatedly screwing up relationships with smart, cool women. Hence, the title.

* I liked Spillover and I feel kind of guilty for it not being my favorite in the nonfiction category -- in fact, it was probably my least favorite of the three -- but I'd just like to take the opportunity here to say that David Quammen is an amazing science writer for nonscientists and if you haven't read The Song of the Dodo, his masterpiece about island biogeography, go do it RIGHT NOW. It's one of the books I'd grab if my house were on fire. Seriously.

* There wasn't a theme at all to the choices, but the fiction titles were all coming of age stories, which is interesting since Erdrich and Ford are in the double digits, bookwise. And even more interesting, all three were celebrations of geekdom -- Canada's young hero is seriously into beekeeping, Yunior is a comics geek and Joe and his buddies in The Round House are obsessed with Star Trek: The Next Generation. I liked that about all of them.

* The Mansion of Happiness was the easiest going down of the nonfiction titles and I was glad to see it here since it didn't seem to make a lot of other year's best lists, and I admire and respect Jill Lepore as one of those top-notch academics who writes for humans (she's a Harvard professor AND a New Yorker staff writer). But the book felt more like a compilation of great New Yorker pieces than a cohesive book. I'd already read most of them in the magazine and I still enjoyed reading them again -- it was full of fun facts about board games and attitudes toward breast-feeding (like the book called Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, Drawn out of the Breasts of Both Testaments, published in 1646), the history of library children's rooms and the publication of Stuart Little, sex education and eugenics (including the fact that the guy behind the Ladies' Home Journal column "Can This Marriage Be Saved" was a hardcore eugenicist. Lovely).

* This little project helped clarify for me the role of ebooks and ereaders in my life. Obviously they're great for immediate gratification and convenience and I have no intention of giving them up. But I think I'll try to limit my use of them on my genre reading, which is really focused on plot and character, and not for nonfiction and literary fiction, where I need to focused in a different way. I bought Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher as an ebook shortly after it came out -- but when it came to reading it, I had a difficult time. Which also could have been due to other events in my life at the time. I didn't finish it before the awards ceremony, which made me feel bad -- I was so close to actually meeting my deadline. But I bought a couple print copies at ALA -- they were reduced price! And we didn't have it in the library collection! -- and found my reading was much easier when I switched formats. This is not a judgment on the quality or value of different types of books -- just an observation of my own reading experience. And means, as I had suspected and hoped, that there will be a continuing role for print for many of us even as ereaders and ebooks find their place in what one marketing dude at ALA called "the reading ecosystem."

The inevitable end-of-year best list

My list of best books I read this year is composed of books that were published this year, at least in fiction. That's not usually the case, but I think it's part of the deal with working at a library (and getting ever-increasing access to advanced review copies, both in print and digitally).

Fiction:

This year for me, fictionally, was all about the sequels. Like everyone else I adored Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel's Booker Prize-winning follow-up to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall. If you can't get enough of the Tudor era, having a fine novelist at the top of her form inhabit that era -- from a previously underrepresented viewpoint, that of Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell -- is literary nirvana.

Also in Tudor-land but with a contemporary, and paranormal, perspective was Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness, sequel to her blockbuster A Discovery of Witches. In this book, the protagonists travel back to the time of Elizabeth I in search of answers about their history, their destiny and the powers of academic scholar and reluctant witch Diana Bishop. The best shorthand description I can come up with for these books is Harry Potter for Grownups.

I also loved Crucible of Gold, the seventh entry in Naomi Novik's Temeraire series Napoleonic Wars -- with dragons! No honestly, it's awesome -- of course thanks to George R.R. Martin and HBO dragons have a little more cultural cache than when I first started raving about this series. To be perfectly honest, the last couple entries weren't as engaging as the first three, but I was invested enough in the series to keep going and I'm so glad I did.  The newest book is definitely back on track. Here's hoping she keeps going with this story as long as Patrick O'Brian did with his Aubrey-Maturin series.

Nonfiction:

I'm going to go with the collected works of Rick Geary, who does historical true crime in graphic format under the rubric A Treasury of Victorian Murder and A Treasure of 20th Century Murder. I read a bunch of them this year and I can't pick a favorite. They're all fantastic.

I also loved Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer, his memoir/meditation on not really getting down to writing a critical study of D.H. Lawrence, though the book does include many interesting considerations of Lawrence as Dyer checks out various Lawrence hangouts. Dyer will be here for the Key West Literary Seminar next month (both sessions!) and I am simultaneously dying to hear him in person and terrified to hear what he'll have to say about Key West. He is hysterically, viciously funny on the less appealing characteristics of various tourist towns he visits in Out of Sheer Rage so I'm guessing we'll be in for it from him, sooner or later.

Honorable mentions:

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry -- Contemporary true crime done extremely well, with nuance and compassion. Blessedly free of sensationalism and righteousness.

Live By Night by Dennis Lehane -- Another sequel of sorts, a follow up to The Given Day and even better, in my opinion. Set in Boston and Tampa during Prohibition. Fans of Boardwalk Empire should check it out.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn -- The bestseller that keeps on going -- and for good reason. I gulped this one down in just a couple sittings.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin -- Yes, yet another sequel, this one to the post-viral-vampire-apocalyptic The Passage. He jumps around in time and wields a huge cast of characters and you manage to stay with him. As with Mantel and Harkness, I'm now trying not to count the days until the final installment in the trilogy.

I can't get enough of end-of-the year best lists. If you're like me you can't do better than this source, a blog by Large-hearted Boy. In the individual list category, I loved this one. And I appreciate the large-mindedness of NPR in their different categories. They even acknowledge that smart people read romance!

Besties forever

I am unable to resist best book lists of almost any form so I've been keeping an eye on the usual end of the year productions. I'm not as into it as some others, like the blogger Largehearted Boy, who amasses a giant list of best lists, or the librarian/bloggers at the Williamsburg Public Library, who take all those lists and turn them into one mega-list (though that list is broken into different categories, mostly for fiction). Mostly, I keep an eye out for the lists compiled by the sources I rely on most for book reviews -- The New York Times and Salon (which has separate lists for fiction and nonfiction). But I have to admit this year my favorite list came from Lev Grossman at Time magazine (which also had separate fiction and nonfiction lists). Perhaps it's Grossman's unapologetic appreciation of genre fiction -- which was an awful lot of my fiction reading this year. Or, in a related angle, it's his noticing books that are not the usual suspects -- two graphic novels (The Death-Ray and Hark! A Vagrant!) became Christmas gifts in my house this year after I saw them on the list.

My best list consists of books I read this year, whenever they were published -- though a large number were indeed new this year (one of the many benefits of working at a library is access to advanced review copies and awareness of newly published works). I chose my favorites with flat-out enjoyment as my only criterion, realizing that many factors go into that.

Fiction: A Song of Ice & Fire, books 1-3, George R.R. Martin (That's A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords)

Nonfiction: Rin Tin Tin, Susan Orlean.

Why the George R.R. Martin? As so many others already knew, and millions more of us have discovered since HBO started airing the screen adaptation, this is an amazing world Martin has created, full of compelling characters and apparently endless plot possibilities. I've only read the first three books because 1) I'm waiting for a co-worker to finish Book 3 so we can talk about them as we read them and 2) I don't want to catch up to Martin too soon then become of those disgruntled fans who hates him because he's taking so long writing his next book. Grossman has an excellent explanation for why he chose Martin's latest book, A Dance With Dragons, in this Salon compilation of writers naming their favorite books of the year. In case you don't feel like scrolling through 50 writers, here's the meat of Grossman's case:

As for craft: Yeah, on the level of sentence, you couldn’t stack “A Dance With Dragons” up against Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot,” or Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child.” But as a plotter, an orchestrator and pacer of narratives that weave around and resonate with each other, Martin leaves them far, far behind. Is that important? Maybe not to the people who give out Pulitzers. But it’s important to me. It’s why “A Dance With Dragons” is the best book I read this year.

If I were to name the best literary nonfiction I read this year, I'd go with Birds of Paradise by Diana Abu-Jaber, followed by The Leftovers by Tom Perrotta. Outside of those, my top five were all genre: A Surfeit of Guns, by P.F. Chisholm, part of her entertaining Sir Robert Carey series and The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor, another historical crime novel. Honorable mentions to Heartstone by C.J. Sansom, the latest in his keeps-getting-better Matthew Shardlake series (soon to be on screen portrayed by Kenneth Branagh!) and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, the latest but I hope not the last of Sally Gunning's novels set in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts.

As for nonfiction, I read a lot of good ones this year. Really good books, written by smart people who neither talked down to their readers nor preached to the academic choir. But my favorite came out of journalism: Rin Tin Tin by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean. I'm a dog person for sure, but I am not a big consumer of dog books. I wouldn't even call this a dog book. It's a book about 20th century America, and about how an image can influence a culture. And it's a story about the incredible bond between a lonely man and the puppy he rescued on a World War I battlefield. Many twists and turns, with several side trips into related but separate storylines -- yet Orlean keeps it all together and keeps it moving and coherent. Brilliantly done.

The rest of my top five in nonfiction, in no particular order: Destiny of the Republic by Candice Millard (who knew James Garfield was such a good guy? Certainly not me). She-Wolves by Helen Castor, about the women who ruled, or tried to rule England before Mary. The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, about the rediscovery of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius and how that poem helped usher in the modern world. The Magician's Book by Laura Miller -- my favorite kind of literary writing, where she tells the story of the book and of the book's impact on the culture in general and on her, as a reader, in particular. If you were a Narnia kid, and I was, this book feels like it was written just for you. Honorable mentions to Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great and Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm.

With the holiday boost in ereader sales, I expect we will be seeing even more of the essays predicting the death of literature, of reading, of writing, of culture, of life as we know it. Perhaps I am fooling myself, like a newspaper journalist circa 1998, but I don't think so. The modes are changing, the economics are changing and who gets published and what sells may change. But people appear to have a thirst for narrative, for stories in the form of the written word, that is spurring the production of plenty of good (and lots of terrible) books that are now available in all kinds of forms. It's certainly an unnerving time to be a publisher, or an aspiring writer, or, in some ways, a librarian. But as a reader I feel confident that the well is nowhere near running dry. On to 2012!

My top 100

I wonder what it is about lists? Is it staving off death by making sure there's always something left to do? Is it trying to bring order to chaos? Whatever it is, I'm obsessed with them, both with the "best of" types compiled by various publications and organizations and with my own, books to be read, books I have read, etc. So I was intrigued to see on Pages of Julia, one of my favorite new blogs, a list of 100 books people most like to read, give and share compiled by a British organization called World Book Night. It's an interesting list. Julia, a Houston librarian and book reviewer, also has a page on her blog with her own list of 100 "most important/should read/best books". So as with all excellent ideas, I decided to steal it.

My list of 100 consists of books I've read and that have stayed with me, some for decades. When I was a kid I was a big re-reader; I would read some books (the Little House books, the Chronicles of Narnia, Caddie Woodlawn) over and over.  The first 31 of these titles I came up off the top of my head; after that I had to consult my LibraryThing catalog.

I had thought a lot of my personal "best books" were nonfiction so I was surprised to find fiction winning the race here -- especially impressive since fiction in series were limited to one entry. I hope anyone who finds their way to this list might come up with some titles of interest -- and it may change over time. The last entry is a book I finished reading last night -- Susan Orlean's new book about Rin Tin Tin -- which I think is her best book yet.

I hope this list also helps me, and anyone who comes across it, in providing book recommendations. A friend asked me awhile back to name my favorite book -- and i blanked. After compiling all of these ... I still can't name a single favorite book. But all of these are books I would recommend to others and would not mind re-reading.

Addendum: Time magazine provides its list of 100 best nonfiction books of all Time. Hmph. I think the only one we share is Mystery Train by Greil Marcus -- though it has me considering switching from The White Album to Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. My list will change, by the way. Just yesterday I took out one of the three Jane Smiley titles and replaced it with A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. And I'm always reading!

Is this just fantasy?

Best lists aren't just for the end of the year -- and they're not just for professional book critics, either. Right now, NPR has a fun exercise going, compiling a list of the 100 best science fiction and fantasy books ever written. They're soliciting suggestions (five titles at a time) from listeners/readers and in four days they've received more than 4,600 posts. Take that, all you reading-is-dead handwringers! There are a couple rules -- you can suggest a series as one of your entries, as long as that series is written by a single author. And YA is banned, which made it a little difficult for me because Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy would have been high on my list.

Still, even though I would not consider myself a big reader of scifi or fantasy, I managed to come up with five. * Here's my list, in no particular order: Naomi Novik's Temeraire series (always glad to give this one a mention; it's alternative historical fiction, Napoleonic wars with dragons and it's AWESOME). Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, a loopy literary alternaworld to which I will be forever grateful for getting me through the Horrible Hurricane Year of 2005. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis -- highly recommended for people who like medieval stuff and/or time travel. American Gods by Neil Gaiman, which needs no help from me but is pretty cool, and will soon be a major motion picture. And The End of Mr. Y by Scarlett Thomas, a book about a book that is powerful and strange. Both books, I mean. Just read it.

If you are into books, by the way, and you don't follow or check NPR's books coverage (it's compiled at their website and has the requisite Facebook and Twitter feeds) then you are missing out. And if you prefer to get your radio auditorially but can't listen to NPR all day long, they do a nice podcast of compilations of their books coverage every week or two.

The Guardian, another bastion of book coverage in the popular media, has also compiled a 100 best list recently, their picks for best nonfiction titles. They solicited reader suggestions after the fact; my contribution was The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen. Amazing book about biodiversity and evolution and island biogeography and if those sound like heavy, dry subjects then trust me, in Quammen's hands they are not. If and when I have to do a serious weed of my own book collection, this will be one of the last to go.

* Addendum from 8/18/11 -- Since writing this I have joined the George R. R. Martin Cult and am midway through the third book in his Song of Ice and Fire series -- and they really as addictive as everyone says. Martin didn't need my help -- he still scored high on the final list -- and I'm not sure which of my initial five I'd knock out. Either American Gods or the Thursday Next series, which is loopier than straight-up fantasy anyway.