Best American Books

The National Book Award short lists were just announced. You can read about them here, or just see the listing here.

I love the National Book Award because they have four categories: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young adult. Those are basically all the books I read, so I'm covered. I'm especially pleased that there's a YA category, since YA is perhaps the most important literature right now--i.e the one that most forms public opinion--and also one of the most vibrant literatures currently.

I haven't read most of this year's books. In fact, out of the twenty books in four categories, I've only read one, and that's a YA. Given that I'm a person who reads--as I discovered last year and this year--at a rate of about a book a week, the fact that I haven't read most of these books will tell you something about the relevance and interest of ... perhaps these books, perhaps the award, or perhaps mainstream American literature today.

Frankly, there's almost no one who will have read all the books in any one category except writers and other professionals in that category (bloggers, critics, publishers, editors). And not all of them, even.

Now I'm depressed.

But the bright spot is that the one nominated book I have read, E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, is wonderful, and I hope it wins. Here's my review of it.