National Book Award nominees announced

Our very own Anstrat has read and reviewed Now We Come to the End but otherwise we seem to have made it through another year without reading any of the best books. Very sad. I guess we have until November 14 to get the rest read. If anyone has read any of the other nominated books, be sure to post about it in the comments.

Doris Lessing wins Nobel for Literature

What does everyone think of this choice? I've recently read The Sweetest Dream and wasn't terribly impressed. I tried to read The Golden Notebook in college and it never grabbed me. Post your thoughts on Ms. Lessing or other Nobel literature choices.

The Westing Game

I loved this book as a kid. A millionaire has died and a group of specially chosen individuals move into Sunset Towers. They include 12 year older Turtle Wexler, her parents and older sister Angela, the Hoo family, the Theodorakis family, and several others. One of the people in the towers took the millionaire's life but before the book reveals the answers the reader must puzzle through tons of clues and each character's back story. This is a highly sophisticated children's book and richly deserved the Newberry Medal.

The Giver

This Newberry Award Winner was suggested as a pick by a friend. Twelve year old Jonas lives in seemingly perfect world. Each family has one boy and one girl, everyone trains for their career (selected for them by the elders), everyone marries a suitable spouse selected by the elders. Jonas' world begins to show its cracks when he learns he has been selected to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Jonas comes to realize that not only has his society eradicated hunger, war and poverty, but has also removed the pain from their lives, going so far as to medicate them to tamp down any sexual or violent impulses. As Jonas, one of the few people not so stifled, learns, pain is what brings life much of it color.

A Wrinkle in Time

I have been entering my kids books into blogger and I came across this book, I favorite of mine in the junior high era. Meg Murray and her little brother Charles Wallace don't fit in very well. They appear to the town as either idiots or genius and everyone thinks they are strange. Plus their father is mysteriously missing. One dark and stormy night they travel through time via tesseract (the wrinkle in time) as well as space to rescue their father from where he is being held. A popular boy from Meg's grade -Calvin O'Keefe joins them and find he fits in better with Meg's family than his own. The story it great, exciting and fun, but as a kid, Nerdy Meg finding a a person who likes her and feeling useful on the hunt for her father were the highlights of the book for me. This book is a Newberry award winner.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

I haven't recommended many of my favorite books in this blog yet, mainly because any time I sit down and start to write about one I want to immediately reread it to be able to fully capture what makes the book so special. I resisted reading this book for quite awhile because I didn't really get the appeal of comic books. But this book is really about much more than that. Sammy and Joe are two cousins who unite as a formidable team in the superhero comics world. Flipping through this to refresh my memory, I almost forgot just how much more there is--Hitler and WWII, golems, Antarctica, and Houdini. Even though this book has a lot of action, I was moved forward by the complex inner struggles of both characters. Initially, I was mostly drawn to Josef's feelings for his family left behind and his muse, Rosa. But then Sammy reeled me in with his guilt. I hit a couple of rough patches along the way, but when I closed the book it ended up being one of my most favorite reading experiences. Michael Chabon also brought the cousins' creations to life in a line of Escapist comics.

The Testament of Gideon Mack

Gideon Mack is a minister in the Church of Scotland, despite the fact he hasn't believed in God since childhood. Nonetheless, he follows in his austere father's footsteps and is stationed in the small Scottish village of Monimaskit. Though lacking in faith, he tends to his parish and runs marathons for charity. His closest acquaintances, college friends John and Elsie Moffat; his late wife, Jenny; and town elder Catherine Craigie are atheists, too. On a run one day, he discovers a standing stone that wasn't there before and he starts to question everything. Then he falls into a gorge and is not discovered for three days. Gideon believes he was rescued by the devil. When he tries to tell this story, he is dismissed as a madman. This book raised a lot of questions for me about the nature of faith and the things we do and do not choose to believe, as well as the sometimes fine line between faith and insanity. John Robertson's novel was long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Interpreter of Maladies

I heard about this book about five years ago or so when I saw the author, Jhumpa Lahiri, interviewed on BookTV (just when we thought I could not be a bigger nerd). The interviewer was carrying on about how she'd won the Pulitzer Prize for her first book and a very young age (32). This book, a collection of short stories, is probably the best book I read in all of 2006 and when I picked it up to write this blog entry I was sucked into the first story, "A Temporary Matter", all over again. Lahiri is brilliant at showing life in America filtered through a Indian cultural lens. I hope to read her novel, The Namesake, soon and then see the movie.

Dave Barry's Greatest Hits

Dave Barry is a funny guy. So funny, in fact, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for it. There are a ton of books by Dave Barry out there, lots of compliations of his columns, and "theme books" like Dave Barry Turns 40 and Dave Barry Slept Here, a Sort of History of the United States. Some of those are funny, all have funny moments, but this book, above of his others is hilarious. When I loaned to my Dad, he woke up my mother he was laughing so hard. In conclusion-- it really is his greatest hits!!

NBCC Nominations Are Out

The National Book Critics Circle announced its 2006 finalists last week. The NBCC will be profiling one book each day on its blog. I've only managed to read two books on the list, Fun Home (recommended in the post above) and Stuart: A Life Backwards. My book club is reading The Road for next month, too. I don't usually make my reading choices based on awards, but I do look at the nominees and shortlists for any unknown gem I might have missed out on. Here are the list of nominees:

Nonfiction:
Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)

Fiction
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)

Memoir/Autobiography
Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Poetry
Daisy Fried, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again. (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Troy Jollimore, Tom Thomson in Purgatory. (Margie/Intuit House)
Miltos Sachtouris, Poems (1945-1971) (Archipelego Books)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
W.D. Snodgrass, Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions)

Criticism
Bruce Bawer: While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the WestFrom Within (Doubleday)
Frederick Crews, Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays (Shoemaker & Hoard)
Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion As A Natural Phenomenon(Viking)
Lia Purpura, On Looking: Essays (Sarabande Books)
Lawrence Wechsler, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences(McSweeney's)

Biography
Debby Applegate: The Most Famous Man in Amerca: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (Simon& Schuster)
Frederick Brown, Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown)
Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St.Martin's Press)
Jason Roberts, A Sense of the World: How a Blind Man Became History's Greatest Traveler (HarperCollins)

Which of these have you read? Do awards influence your reading choices?