Awards News Roundup

It has been a busy week in major literary awards. First, the Man Booker Award was announced.  This year's winner was Harold Jacobson for his novel, The Finkler Question, which thankfully came out this week in America.  You can click here for the official announcement. For a collection of reviews of the novel, click here.

The Man Booker Award and its historical list of past winners and nominees is a great list to use when selecting book discussion titles. I don't know what it is exactly about them as a group, but books singled out for this prize tend to lend themselves to an excellent book discussion, more so than any other award group taken as a whole.

On a personal note, when assessing my personal reader profile, I have noted that quite often, winning a Booker is enough of an appeal for me to enjoy a book. I don't know why, it just is. So rest assured, I am as weird as your patrons when it comes to why I like something.

In other book award news, the National Book Foundation announced their nominees for the National Book Award yesterday. Here is the full list.  What is of note here is the controversy around what was NOT nominated.  That would be Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.  Read more about it here.

I have to say, I was not surprised that it wasn't nominated. As you can see in my review, it was good, but not great.

The National Book Award winners will be announced on November 17th.