A Reader's Guide to the Book Prize

    The end of the year brings with it the conclusion of the literary awards circuit. With the Nobel Prize in Literature announced in October, the Booker Prize & National Book Awards following suit in November, and pretty much every other book award having been announced already, we've got a whole list of books that are supposed to be pretty good.

    Coincidentally, it's also gift-giving season, and having this list of books is a great resource for finding things to both ask for and give as gifts. Besides just announcing the prize-winning books, many awards will also provide their long & short lists for you to review. One of my favorite new releases from last year, Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake, was on my radar because it appeared on Booker's long list way before the book was even released.

    Consulting rewards lists can also be good if you're looking to buy a book for someone who reads outside of your genre. For the Science Fiction & Fantasy readers in your life, consult the Hugo or Nebula awards. Looking for some Horror? Then check out the Bram Stoker & Shirley Jackson awards. For Romance there are the Romantic Novelist awards, complete with twelve different subcategories, but if you need a romance recommendation in store there's always Bookseller Preet's staff picks shelf!

    Awards lists are a good starting point for finding a good book, but with tens of thousands of new titles releasing every year there are simply too many titles for the panels of judges to review. Luckily we've got each other to fill in the gaps, like with Preet's aforementioned staff picks shelf. Additionally, if you find a book on a list that looks interesting, a good way to find similar titles could be checking out the rest of the books in the publisher's catalogue. Fitzcarraldo, for example, has published the works of a number of Nobel Prize Recipients, but they also publish the works of Fernanda Melchor, one of my favorite authors who hasn't claimed that specific prize yet, and plenty of other cool authors.

    To sum it all up, awards lists are a good place to find good books but they aren't the only place. A couple well placed questions can also get you where you need to go, whether they be addressed to a friend, bookseller, or internet search engine. And at the end of the day, if you give or receive a book that you don't particularly enjoy it's not the end of the world. It might even give you something to laugh about down the road.

The Books We Prize

    My grandmother kept a modest bookshelf. The top few rows held her photo albums, folios filled with memories of her people, her travels, the playbills of operas she’d seen. Then there were her Dutch books, ancient volumes that have seen more of the world than I have. The writings of philosophers and psychologists, books from her youth that followed her for the rest of her life.

    Below those shelves sat her fiction. I’ll always think of her when I see People of the Book, not because she ever mentioned to me that she particularly liked it but because it was what she had on her side table when I’d visit her seventeen years ago. The cover really etched itself into my mind.

    In her last months, she read The Dutch House. I would ask her about it when I’d visit, curious to hear what she thought of Ann Patchett’s writing.

    “Well, it’s not very Dutch,” she answered, a sly smile on her face. As a native of the Netherlands, I could tell she was a bit disappointed.

    When she passed and we had to gather up her belongings, it was easy to tell which books were the ones she prized. Her children’s children’s books, grown brittle and yellowed from years of shelf-life. The foreign language dictionaries that helped her to forge a new life, first in North America and then in the South, before finding her way up to Tennessee. The rows of photo-albums that extended past the modest bookshelf, into her guest room and closet.

    We kept all of that, minus some photo-albums, but we also kept some of the other ones too. The one’s that reminded us not just of the places she went and what she accomplished there, but of who she was when you’d visit her on a Saturday in August and ask her about The Dutch House. The ones that transport us back to those childhood visits. The ones that remind you that a person weaves a long and storied tapestry of life over one hundred years, but at the far end of that weaving there’s still a smiling Oma ready to crack a few jokes and offer you something to snack on.