The finalists for the National Book Awards were recently announced. I always take a look at readers' comments. Here are the top two "Reader Picks" from comments in the New York Times. I am adding one additional comment that I found interesting
[58 Recommendations] These nominees used to suggest next reads for me. Now they prompt me to just stay away.
[46 Recommendations] Alas, nobody takes these awards seriously these days, and least of all in the publishing industry. The arbiters of social justice, and those running in fear of it, aren't doing awardees any favors in the end. A debased currency won't buy reputation. If only we were as activist in questions of class and finance -- who has money and who doesn't -- as we are in the arts. Of course, the finance program would require sacrifices by persons who actually have money, rather than the vicarious ones which consumers and arts administrators insist on in the arts, and which someone else will pay for, in the form of obscurity and penury.
[26 Recommendations] It's vital to learn about other cultures and other ways of living, and we all benefit from reading challenging fiction, but it's as important for a great number of people to see themselves analyzed and reflected by a thoughtful, intelligent author. There may be 35-year-old versions of John Cheever, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Paula Fox, James Salter, or Patricia Highsmith writing today, but few of them are getting published and recognized.
Those not provided with writing like that of the authors above (and many more) flee to romance novels, thrillers and mysteries, which have their place, but shouldn't be all someone reads.It seems like if you want to get published today and you are a normal white person with a name that wouldn't stand out in 1950, forget about it.
Below are the finalists for two categories—fiction and nonfiction. I have annotated them with a few facts about the authors' that were readily available (nationality, "ethnicity," man/woman). Are the readers' comments fair? FWIW, I bought James when it came out, and I just bought Martyr!
2024 FINALISTS FOR FICTION
’Pemi Aguda, Ghostroots
Nigerian writer (woman)
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Iranian-American poet (man)
Percival Everett, James
African-American novelist (man)
Miranda July, All Fours
American filmmaker, writer, and artist (woman)
Hisham Matar, My Friends
Libyan-British author (man)
2024 FINALISTS FOR NONFICTION
Jason De León, Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling
Eliza Griswold, Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church
American journalist and poet (woman)
Kate Manne, Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia
Australian philosopher (woman)
Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder
Salman Rushdie – British-Indian author (man)
Deborah Jackson Taffa, Whiskey Tender
Native American writer (Quechan Nation) (woman)
Just for the sake of nostalgia, here are the National Book Awards winners for 1970-1979
1970 Joyce Carol Oates, them
1971 Saul Bellow, Mr. Sammler's Planet
1972 Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories
1973 John Barth, Chimera
1973 John Williams, Augustus
1974 Doris Betts, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories
1974 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
1975 Donald Barthelme, Guilty Pleasures
1975 Robert Stone, Dog Soldiers
1976 William Gaddis, J R
1977 Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird
1978 Mary Lee Settle, Blood Tie
1979 Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato
Oh, yah, "everything's going to hell because people don't write what I'm used to" is a common refrain at lit prize season. People like to show off how discriminating they are but end up looking like Phillistines.
ReplyDeleteI don't pay much attention to prizewinners, but "James" was one of my favorite reads this year. So was Kingsolver's "Demon Copperhead," which won stuff last year or the year before.
Now reading Olga Tokarczuk's "Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead." It wasn't my usual fare because I don't read a lot of books in translation. But I liked that it has an elderly lady protagonist, and it's growing on me. Did not realize until yesterday that she is a Nobel winner. My response is "big deal, so is that fraud Bob Dylan."
I no longer track my reading, just sort of let it all percolate into the dump that is my aged brain. Everything's got something interesting to tell you if you are willing to absorb it.
Still partial to dystopian novels and stories about nuns. Don't cotton to nonfiction unless it's about a doomed expedition.
Switching from Babel Polish lessons to internet group lessons with "Polish with Dorota". Classes start October 19. I hope someday I can read Togarczuk in the original Polish but that is far away but hopefully not never. Firstly, I'll tackle all that family correspondence with the Polish relatives in the 20's through the 50's. Amazing how well everyone wrote despite getting only six years of education in a rural setting. Reading, writing, arithmetic. They nailed it.
DeleteGoing through the old letters, I found a letter to my grandfather, not personal but sent to a group regarding finances. A gentleman named Dziduch. I wikipedia'd him and found he was a member of the Polish Sem in the 1920's. Died in the early 40's in the Bergen-Belsen Camp. Can't wait to be able to competently read all these letters.
DeleteWhat a treasure trove, Stanley! You learn so much history looking at family history. I recently found the paper trail of my g-g-grandfather's wrangle with the Dept of Interior (no VA in those days) for his Civil War disability. Sad story.
DeleteI just finished reading "Demon Copperhead". Loved it - one of the better books I've read in recent years.
ReplyDeleteWithin the last year or so I read "The Night Watchman" by Louise Erdrich (not to be confused with "The Night Watch" by Jayne Anne Phillips, which won this year's Pulitzer for Fiction). Loved Erdrich's book, too - I think I've commented about it here in the past. Obviously, both are by women; Erdrich is Native American. So if the point is a bias among award-bestow-ers toward intersectionality and award-winners belonging to groups which historically have been underrepresented in the publishing world, then I guess I would reply that these two books stand on their own merits, regardless of who the author is. And I'd rather live in a world where authors aren't "screened out" (i.e. discriminated against) because of who they are.
Read Erdrich's "The Sentence" this summer. Had never read her before. It was OK. She's trying to pull together themes from the roil of Minneapolis during covid/George Floyd/Trump election defeat through some Native women who run a bookstore, one of whom comes from a deeply dysfunctional family. Some parts were very good, but it didn't always gel as a cohesive whole for me. Reading it was like re-living 2020. And I'm off magical realism. But it was worthwhile.
DeleteI agree with your take on The Sentence. The Night Watchman is considerably better.
DeleteI've been reading more nonfiction than fiction lately. The book club I'm in read Two Trees Make a Forest, by Jessica Lee lately. It's part memoir, part nature/ travel / environmental book. Jessica Lee is Taiwanese/ British/Canadian. The book is about her journey to Taiwan in search of her family's past. I enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteAnother nonfiction book I read lately was Bad Blood, by John Carryrou. It's the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandle. John Carryrou did an excellent piece of journalism with it.
Sorry, I tried to read Demon Copperhead and got halfway through the nearly 600 pages of it. But I reached a point where I couldn't do the depressing heartbreak of it any more. I liked Barbara Kingsolver's earlier novels, The Bean Trees, and Animal Dreams. But Demon Copperhead was way different. One thing I did get out of it was learning about the Melungeons. I hadn't previously heard of them.
Nobody seems to know what a Melungeon is other than that their families were always identified as Melungeon. It seems as much a place identifier as an ethic one. Movie star Ava Gardiner, with her famous green eyes, is sometimes classified as a Melungeon from North Carolina.
Delete*ethic s/b ethnic.
DeleteMelungeons are sorta like Scots Irish. As far as I know, Scots and Irish are genetically indistinguishable. So Scots Irish sometimes refers to Scottish settlers of the north of Ireland, sometimes to any Irish Protestants, sometimes to Southerners of Scottish or Irish descent. Whoever they were, they settled in pockets of the South and invented clogging and snake handling. Scots Irish up here are mostly just Presbyterians who belong to the Masons/Eastern Star.
I guess their DNA shows part European, native American, and African. Which covers a lot of territory. In the old days they were discriminated against, but now are claiming a bit of ethnic pride.
DeleteYou might find this interesting: https://www.newsleader.com/story/news/2021/03/08/new-dna-study-melungeons-attempts-separate-truth-fiction/4611383001/
DeleteI hadn't heard that term "Melungeon" either, until I read Demon Copperhead. Had to look it up.
DeleteOff topic, but you can order free COVID tests from the government here: https://special.usps.com/testkits
ReplyDeleteIf you prefer to support our Capitalist Overlords you may be able to get them thru yr friendly chain pharmacies who have not yet gone belly up for their part in the oxycodone debacle.
Some friends have been sick lately. "I asked them, ".was it Covid?" They said "no". I said, " Oh did you test for it?" They said no. I let it drop. The symptoms they describe could easily have been Covid. They apparently didn't want to know. Personally I like to know what I'm dealing with, so I'll send for some tests.
DeleteThere was a lot of COVID going around here in August, and people were scrambling for tests. Lots of people with health issues need to confirm what they have in case they need paxlovid or remdesivir. The lady at the dairy cow supply store where we get our eggs says they are doing a brisk biz in ivermectin. She kinda rolled her eyes and shook her head.
DeleteGot my USPS freebie tests. Last time I used one was a month ago when I was at a birthday dinner where one of the attendees got it afterwards and alerted us. I was negative and no one got it. I don't want to spread it. People have things to do and not enough time and energy to do it.
DeleteGot my tests yesterday amid many notices on our village page that school kids are falling sick with COVID left and right. I wish we had school nurses at every building who could test for this stuff and notify parents like they do for head lice.
DeleteHello
ReplyDeleteHi, Rachel. Good to see you again.
DeleteSo nice to have you back.
DeleteThanks David. Couldn’t figure out how to comment. Where is everyone?
ReplyDeleteThis is it. About five or six of us left. Welcome back.
DeleteWelcome back Rachel.
ReplyDeleteWhere is everyone? Interesting question.
Tom Blackburn passed in 2021. Here is our virtual wake.
https://newgathering.blogspot.com/2021/01/tom-has-gone-to-heaven.html
Besides the six of us, Rita (Ferrone), Margaret Steinfels, Claire Mathieu and Gene Palumbo were there.
NewGathering: Sad News About Jim McCrea (Jimmy Mac) Monday September 5, 2022. Only the six of us participated. I think Jimmy Mac was also part of an e-mail group that continued after the end of the Commonweal blog. Maybe Gene and Claire were also part of that and so did not comment here even though they may from time to time read this blog.
Fr. Komonchak dropped out in the first year. I think he thought we might have a bigger audience and more participation. He gave a post with a line to his own blog. I don't think we heard from him afterwards.
https://jakomonchak.wordpress.com/
He was still posting there regularly in January 2024.
Crystal's last post here was in December 2017
https://newgathering.blogspot.com/2017/12/trump-israel-and-evangelicals.html
She still has her own blog https://povcrystal.blogspot.com/
She posts daily but has few comments. She sends her posts to X where she gets a 20 to 30 replies to some of them.
Patrick posted here for a while, then disappeared.
Gene Palumbo, whose e-mail I have, told me that he periodically reads this blog although he has rarely commented. I wonder how many are out there like that that don't comment.
Which brings me to my question for you. How often do you read this blog?