Award Winning

There are a lot of awards for books.  People seem to like the idea of slapping a golden foil sticker on a cover and thus marking it as better than its peers.  Kind of like when, as a child, you cleaned your room or ate your carrots. Some awards I trust: I will pick up the golden foiled P of a Michael Printz award winning book and know that it is smart YA.  The Man Booker prize winners, whose books are emblazoned not with a sticker but with a rather modern looking printed circle claiming the fame, are usually good, maybe because they announce a "short list" first and then the winner, so it feels more like Miss America than the Kentucky Derby.

Then there is the Pulitzer prize: Now this prize is given in many categories, kind of like your local newspaper when it it hands out awards for Best Burger, Best Bookstore, and in the case of Eugene, Best Roller Girl (she is called Bullet Brains if you were wondering).  The Pulitzer is a widely admired prize and again we have finalists and then winners which only seems to lead to a lot of discussion of why someone other than the winner should have won, but I digress.  I have a lot of admiration for many of the past Pulitzer Fiction winners: The Road was a wrenching read but ultimately transportive, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay goes down in my top five favorites of all time! And any list that includes To Kill A Mockingbird has to be considered brilliant.

So why is it that I wish A Visit from the Goon Squad hadn't won this year? Well it isn't for the same reason that everyone else can't seem to stop talking about, it isn't that I think Freedom should have won, for me it is because all these prizes make me expect too much.

23.  A Visit from the Goon Squad

*Didn't take long for them to slap a sticker on that one did it?

We give out prizes for anything and everything these days but that doesn't change the fact that if something has "won" you expect more from it somehow.  And the fact is that reading is subjective.  Its success as a story depends on the many variables of the reader, and so while I think this was a good book, and well written, I do think that with its shifts in point of view and time it takes a certain type of reading to make it really work.  Specifically time and quiet; and wouldn't it be lovely to be on the board of these awards and have it be your job to concentrate solely on reading and evaluating book? But for me, the common reader, it is my job to make sure my 2 1/2 year old doesn't harm himself while I flip a few pages when I can.