One-Minute Book Reviews

April 8, 2008

Why Do Unworthy Books Win Awards like Pulitzer Prizes? Quote of the Day (Neville Braybrooke)

In last night’s post, I listed some classic American novels that didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, given yesterday to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. A related question is: Why do unworthy book win awards? One obvious answer is that most prizes are given out annually, and every year may not bring a great book in a category.

But more subtle factors may come into play. A truism of literary prize-giving is that awards often go to everybody’s second choice. Judges may split into two camps with each side fiercely opposing the other’s first choice. To reach a decision, they may choose a second-rate book they can all support.

Judges tell many stories in among themselves about such compromises but rarely discuss them publicly. Who wants to admit to having honored a clinker? But Neville Braybooke suggests how the practice can work in his preface to the Every Eye, the elegant second novel by his late wife, Isobel English. Braybooke writes that English refused to add the happy ending that an American publisher wanted to her to give her first novel, The Key That Rusts:

“More significantly, during these early days of her career, came the news that The Key That Rusts had been shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award, tying for first place with Iris Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net. In the event, the judges were unable to decide who should be the winner, so they gave the prize to the runner-up, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim.”

Neville Braybrooke in Every Eye (David R. Godine/Black Sparrow, $23.95) www.blacksparrowbooks.com.

Comment by Jan:

Braybrooke may have been willing to tell this anecdote partly because there would have been no shame in losing either to Lucky Jim or Under the Net, both modern classics. And few critics would argue that Amis’s comic novel was unworthy of an award. The Somerset Maugham Award is given annually by the London-based Society of Authors www.societyofauthors.org to the writer or writers under the age of 35 who wrote the best book of the year.

Do you think any unworthy books have won awards? What are they?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved. www.janiceharayda.com

“ …

April 6, 2008

Pulitzer Prizes To Be Announced Monday, April 7, at 3 p.m. — Here’s a Link to the Pulitzer Site

Filed under: Book Awards, News, Uncategorized — 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom @ 8:34 pm
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[Update at 3:30 p.m. Monday: Junot Diaz has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscao Wao, a novel that last month won the National Book Critics Circle Prize for fiction. Here’s a link to the AP story that lists all the winners for books and journalism, which has more on the winners right now than the Pulitzer site:

ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j7vuQ5ogo7UJ6MEjWWaYBGpyOTCgD8VT75DG0.

This more extensive story has a complete list of all the winners (with descriptions of the work) and finalists, including all the books that were finalists www.huliq.com/56234/columbia-university-announcees-2008-pulitzer-prize-winners.

The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes will be announced on Monday, April 7, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time. The awards honor books in five categories — fiction, poetry, history, biography, and general nonfiction – though the judges may decline to give an award in any of them. You should be able to find the winners after they are announced at the Pulitzer site, www.pulitzer.org. In the meantims, the site also has questions and answers about the prizes.

March 10, 2008

National Book Critics Circle Award Reality Check: Mary Jo Bang’s ‘Elegy,’ Poems About Her Son’s Death, an ‘Addiction Catastrophe’

Filed under: Book Awards, Poetry — 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom @ 10:13 am
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The latest in an occasional series on book-award winners and whether they deserved their honors

Title: Elegy: Poems. By Mary Jo Bang. Graywolf, 92 pp., $20.

What it is: Sixty-four poems about the year after the death of Bang’s 37-year-old son, an event described as an “addiction catastrophe.” Elegy consists mostly of short- or medium-lined free verse and includes the three elements of classical elegy: praise, lament and (in this case, faint) consolation.

Winner of … this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for poetry www.bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com

Was this one of those awards that make you wonder if the judges were all on Class B controlled substances? No. But some of the judges did seem to be enjoying the wine at the reception after the awards ceremony on Thursday night.

Worthy of a major prize? Yes, chiefly for the poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” At times Elegy reads less like poetry than therapy, strewn with banal words or phrases: “describable,” “a wince-making barrenness,” “Paxil’s myoclonal kick.” Some of its ideas might have come from a card rack at Shop-Rite or a women’s-magazine article on coping with loss. (“I love you like I love / All beautiful things.” “Grief was complicated.”) But poetry collections can justify their awards with a single poem. And Elegy does it with the exceptional “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” an homage in multi-part harmony to Bang’s son, to the Bruegel masterpiece with the same title and to poems about the painting by William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden. In this 22-line poem Bang recalls the last time she saw her son, standing on a subway platform after they had admired mosaics at the Met, and reflects that their day should be embedded in amber. Then, in the chilling final lines, she suggests a brutal truth about the isolating effect of death: “ … And how can it be / that this means nothing to anyone but me now.” Bang knows what Auden meant when he wrote in “Musee des Beaux Arts” that “everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” And in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” she deals with this ageless idea in a way that is fresh and memorable.

Best line: The lines quoted above, beginning: “And how can it be.”

Worst line: The jarring pun in the line: “And my I sees.”

Published: October 2007 www.graywolfpress.org

Consider reading instead: Anne Porter’s Living Things, which has both new poems and all of those collected in her An Altogether Different Language, a National Book Award finalist www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/28/. Living Things includes the wonderful poem “For My Son Johnny,” Porter’s elegy for her son, who had what she believes was autism or schizophrenia. Bang tells you so little about her son Michael that Elegy is almost a misnomer and Grief might have been a better title. You don’t feel you know Michael from the book — you how his mother experienced his death. This isn’t a “flaw.” Poets have a right to choose their subjects. But Porter’s son Johnny is so alive on the page in “For My Son Johnny” that you learn more about him from one poem than you do about Bang’s son from her entire book. Poetry groups might want to compare how two admired contemporary poets have portrayed the loss of a mature child.

Furthermore: Bang has written four other collections of poetry. She is a professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” appeared in The New Yorker. Other poems in the collection have appeared publications that include Poetry and The Paris Review.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

March 9, 2008

Another Book Awards Reality Check — Coming Tomorrow

Filed under: Book Awards — 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom @ 12:57 pm
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Have you ever read a book that won a major award and thought, “Were those judges all on Class B controlled substances?” One-Minute Book Reviews deals with questions like these in its occasional “Reality Check” series that explores whether recent winners of literary prizes deserved their honors.

Tomorrow this series will focus on Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy www.graywolfpress.org, which won the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry on Thursday www.bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com. You can find other posts in the series by using the search box on this site to search for “Reality Check.”

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

March 7, 2008

National Book Critics Circle Award Reality Check: ‘Brother, I’m Dying’

Filed under: African American, Book Awards, Memoirs — 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom @ 6:53 pm
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Do literary prizes always go to deserving authors? One-Minute Book Reviews considers the question in “Reality Check,” a series of occasional posts on books shortlisted for high-profile awards. A recent installment considered Edwidge Danticat’s memoir of an uncle who died while in custody of U.S. immigration officials, Brother, I’m Dying www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/. then a finalist for a 2007 National Book Award. The book has since won the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography www.bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com. A “Reality Check” post on the NBCC poetry winner, Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy, will appear next week.

(c) Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

Junot Díaz Wins NBCC Fiction Award – Danticat Gets Autobiography Prize – Other Winners Are Ross, Bang, Jeal and Washington

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Junot Díaz has won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead). Other books that won prizes in the March 6 ceremony in Manhattan are: General nonfiction, Harriet Washington’s Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present (Doubleday); Biography, Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Yale University Press); Autobiography, Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying (Knopf); Poetry, Mary Jo Bang’s Elegy (Graywolf); and Criticism, Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).The NBCC awards are one of the top three literary honors in the U.S. along with the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes. They are given annually by the 800-member association of American book critics.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

February 8, 2008

Did Laura Amy Schlitz Deserve the 2008 Newbery Medal? Quote of the Day (Meghan Cox Gurdon)

Many people were suprised when Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From a Medieval Village won the most recent John Newbery Medal, an award that usually goes to a novel, for a collection of monologues and dialogues. Did the book deserve the honor? Meghan Cox Gurdon, the children’s book critic for the Wall Street Journal, called the collection “remarkable and poignant” and added:

“As with any prestigious award, the Newbery also brings new readers to the author’s other works, which in this case is a particularly welcome effect. Ms. Schlitz has a rich and humane style of writing, with stories that manage to be both sparkling and substantial. Better still, her storytelling is a return to the moral traditions of the greatest and most enduring tales, yet with not the slightest taste of cod liver oil nor any of the tiresome left-leaning didacticism that has characterized so much writing for children since the late 1960s.”

Meghan Cox Gurdon in “A Late-Blooming Talent in Full Flower” in the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 19-20, 2008.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

January 16, 2008

Two Children’s Classics That Didn’t Win the Newbery — What Are the Others?

This week I was going to compile a list of 10 great children’s novels that didn’t win a Newbery Medal from the American Library Association www.ala.org, similar to my list of 10 classics that didn’t get Pulitzer (”Famous Pulitzer Losers,” www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/). But I ran out of time, so I’ll just mention two:

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. A 1953 Newbery Honor Book that lost the top prize to Ann Nolan Clark’s Secret of the Andes.

Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt. Shut out of all prizes in 1976. Lost to the Newbery medalist, Susan Cooper’s The Grey King, and Honor Books The Hundred Penny Box, by Sharon Bell Mathis, and Dragonwings, by Laurence Yep.

What are the other classics – books children have enjoyed for decades — that didn’t win the Newbery?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

January 15, 2008

Why Did the American Library Association Snub Sherman Alexie?

Did Alexie’s young-adult novel finish out of the medals because it uses the word “boner” 12 times? Or because a character tells a vicious racial joke that includes the “n” word?

By Janice Harayda

Sherman Alexie never really had a shot at winning the 2008 Newbery Medal, which honors the most distinguished work of literature for children (specifically, for those under the age of 14). The material in his The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is too mature for many children in that age group.

But Alexie was a favorite for the American Library Association’s Michael L. Printz Award for young people’s literature, which honors a book for an older audience and went to Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian won a 2007 National Book Award www.nationalbook.org. And it was mentioned repeatedly in the Mock Newbery contests held by libraries in the weeks before yesterday’s awards ceremony.

So a lot of people were surprised when The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian finished out of the medals at the ALA’s midwinter meeting yesterday, receiving neither a major prize nor an honor-book designation. Did the novel lose because it uses the word “boner” 12 times? Or because a character tells a vicious racial and sexual joke that includes the “n” word and caused some students to walk out of a speech that Alexie gave at an Illinois high school in October?

Tomorrow One Minute Book Reviews will review The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian www.lb-teens.com, including comments on parts that might given pause to the ALA. Please bookmark this site or subscribe to the RSS feed to avoid missing this review. One-Minute Book Reviews normally reviews books for children and teenagers on Saturdays but may depart from this policy when books make news. Its reviews of books for adults will resume on Thursday.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

January 14, 2008

Orson Scott Card Wins Lifetime Achievement From Librarians for His Science Fiction Novels for Teenagers, ‘Ender’s Game’ and ‘Ender’s Shadow’

Orson Scott Card has won the 2008 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for “his outstanding lifetime contribution to writing for teens” for his novels Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow. The ALA said that Card “weaves the everyday experiences of adolecence into broader narratives, addressing universal questions about humanity and society.” The organization added:

Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, both published by Tor Books, present a future where a global government trains gifted young children from around the world in the art of interstellar warfare, hoping to find a leader whose skills can prevent a second attack upon humanity by the insect-like aliens descriptively nicknamed ‘buggers.’ Young Andrew ‘Ender’ Wiggin may be the savior they seek. He is not alone, as seen in the companion tale, Ender’s Shadow, where orphaned Bean relates his own Battle School experiences. Just as the stories of Ender and Bean are paralleled in the novels, their experiences echo those of teens, beginning as children navigating in an adult world and growing into a state of greater awareness of themselves, their communities and the larger universe.”

Card’s most recent novel is the Christmas tale A War of Gifts: An Ender Story www.hatrack.com, a 2007 novel that takes place during Ender’s early years at the Battle School, where students are forbidden to celebrate religious holidays.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

‘Hugo Cabret’ Wins 2008 Caldecott, ‘Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!’ Gets Newbery

[Note: Additional posts about these awards will appear later today.]

Librarians honor one of their own for the second year in a row in giving Newbery to Laura Amy Schlitz

By Janice Harayda

Brian Selznick has won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for his bestselling illustrated novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. Selznick merges the picture- and chapter-book formats in his tale of a young orphan and thief who lives in a Paris train station and tries to solve a mystery that involves a mechanical man begun by his late father. Books that win Caldecott medals typically have about 32 pages and suit 4-to-8-year-olds. The Invention of Hugo Cabret has 533 pages and may be the longest to win the award. It popular among 9-to-12-year-olds.

The American Library Association announced the award today at a meeting in Philadelphia. The Caldecott Medal honors the most distinguished American picture book for children. A review of and reading group guide to The Invention of Hugo Cabret appeared on One-Minute Book Reviews on April 21, 2007, www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/04/21/.

Laura Amy Schlitz has won the Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a collection of monologues by characters from an English village in 1255. By giving the award to Schlitz, the librarians honored one of their own for the second year in a row. The 2007 Newbery Medal went to Los Angeles librarian Susan Patron for The Higher Power of Lucky. The medal honors the most distinguished work of American literature for children published in the preceding year.

The Caldecott Honor books are Henry’s Freedom Box by Ellen Levine and Kadir Nelson, First the Egg by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain by Peter Sis and Knuffle Bunny, Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity by Mo Willems. The Newbery Honor books are: Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis, The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt and Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson.

Christopher Paul Curtis won Coretta Scott King Award for an author for Elijah of Buxton.
The Honor awards for authors went to Sharon M. Draper for November Blues and Charles R. Smith Jr. for Twelve Rounds to Glory: The Story of Muhammad Ali.
Artist Ashley Bryan won the Coretta Scott King Award for an author for Let It Shine.
The Honor awards went to illustrator Nancy Devard for The Secret Olivia Told Me and Leo and Diane Dillon for Jazz on a Saturday Night.
Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness won the Michael L. Printz Award to www.ala.org/yalsa/printz for excellence in literature for young adults.
The Printz Honor Books are Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox, One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke, Repossessed by A. M. Jenkins and Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill.
(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

January 11, 2008

Will the ALA Honor a Book About a Self-Declared ‘Chronic Masturbator’?

Is a phallic trend developing at the American Library Association?

By Janice Harayda

Will the American Library Association give an award to a book about a self-described “cronic masturbator”? Why not? The ALA gave the 2007 Newbery Medal to Susan Patron’s The Higher Power of Lucky, which has the word “scrotum” on the first page www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/02/19/. And Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian recently won the National Book Award for young people’s literature in November (”I Belong to the ‘Tribe of Chronic Masturbators,’ One-Minute Book Reviews, Nov. 16, 2007 www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/).

Alexie’s novel is the front runner for the ALA’s Michael L. Printz Award, which honors “excellence in literature written for young adults,” so a phallic trend may be developing at the ALA. (Don’t ask how many times Alexie’s book uses the word “boner.”) The ALA www.ala.org will announce the winner on Monday, when it will also award the better-known Newbery Medal (for “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children”) and Caldecott Medal (for “the most distinguished American picture book for children”).

Other questions to be resolved on Monday: Will the ALA give the Caldecott Medal to Jack Prelutsky’s picture book Good Sports, a collection of poems about sports, some of which the American Pediatrics Association doesn’t recommend for preschoolers, the usual readers of picture books www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/o5/12/? Or will ALA honor Prelutsky’s nakedly commercial The Wizard, maybe his worst book? The librarians didn’t give a medal to Prelutsky’s excellent 2006 book Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant and may try to make up for it by rewarding a less worthy book at its meeting in Philadelphia next week.

Check back Monday for the names of the winners and, possibly, commentary on them.

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

January 9, 2008

Newbery and Caldecott Medals TBA 7:45 a.m. Monday, Jan. 14

[Update: The complete list of 2008 Newbery and Caldecott winners and Honor Books has been posted on One-Minute Book Reviews www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2008/01/14/. The Coretta Scott King and Michael L. Printz winners also appear in the first post of the day on Jan. 14, 2008. Other Jan. 14 posts include a review of and reading group guide to the 2008 Caldecott medalist, Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret.]

A public service announcement for the patience-impaired …

No, you’re not the only one having trouble logging onto the American Library Association site this week. Here are the facts you may have been looking for:

The ALA will announce the winners of its annual children’s book on awards on Monday, January 14, on a free live Webcast from its midwinter meeting in Philadelphia. The Webcast http://unikron.com/clients/ala-webcast-2008/ will begin at 7:45 a.m. EST. Names of the winners will be posted on the ALA site www.ala.org by 10:30 a.m. The list will include the recipients of the John Newbery Medal for “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” and the Randolph Caldecott Medal for “the most distinguished American picture book for children.

[Note: Because it may be difficult to log onto the ALA site on Monday, I'll post the Newbery and Caldecott winners on this site as soon as I have the them. And if the librarians pick another winner with the "scrotum" on the first page, as they did last year, it's likely that I'll also have comments on the awards.]

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

January 2, 2008

National Book Awards Reality Check: Finalist Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Brother, I’m Dying’

The latest in an occasional series on winners of or finalists for major book awards and whether they deserved their honors

Title: Brother, I’m Dying. By Edwidge Danticat. Knopf, 273 pp., $23.95.

What it is: The author’s memoir of her uncle, Joseph Dantica, who died a nightmarish death while in custody of U.S. immigration officials in Miami in 2004. Danticat lived with her uncle for eight years while growing up in Haiti and interweaves his story and hers.

A finalist for … the 2007 National Book Award for nonfiction, won by Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA www.nationalbook.org.

Was this one of those literary honors that make you wonder if the judges were all on Class B controlled substances? No.

Worthy of being a finalist for a major award? A qualified yes. Danticat’s story of the brutal and medically negligent treatment of her 81-year-old uncle may be the best account in print of what can happen to an innocent visitor wrongly detained by U.S. immigration authorities. But that story unfolds in the last 100 pages, and the writing precedes it is much less interesting and more pedestrian.

Best line: “When you hear that someone has died whom you’ve not seen in a long time, it’s not too difficult to pretend that it hasn’t really happened, that the person is continuing to live just as she has before, in your absence, out of your sight.”

Worst line: No. 1: “The colorfully painted lottery stands were still selling hundreds of tickets to hopeful dreamers.” As opposed to dreamers who weren’t hopeful? (The time frame of that line is confusing, too: hundreds of tickets a day? a week?] No. 2:My father was dying and I was pregnant. Both struck me as impossibly unreal.” How does “impossibly unreal” differ from just “impossible” or “unreal”? That “impossibly” is just padding. No. 3: The stilted, “In mid-October, my husband and I learned our child’s gender from our midwife …” Who speaks that way? Wouldn’t you just say, “We learned our baby’s sex” or “We learned that we were having a girl”? Lines like these three – and Brother, I’m Dying has many – should give pause to any awards judge, no matter how worthy the subject of a book.

Published: September 2007 www.aaknopf.com

Furthermore: Danticat also wrote Breath, Eyes, Memory and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner. She lives in Miami.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

December 26, 2007

Entertainment Weekly Names 5 Worst Books of 2007

Entertainment Weekly named Mitch Albom’s For One More Day one of the five worst books of 2006, but that novel almost looks like a neglected masterwork next to some of the titles on this year’s list. They are:

  1. If I Did It (O.J. Simpson’s name was removed from the cover of this one.)
  2. The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
  3. The Mickey Mantle Novel by Peter Golenbock
  4. Celebrity Detox by Rosie O’Donnell
  5. Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell

 Jennifer Reese, the book critic for EW, tells why each book is so bad in an article on the site for the magazine that you can read here http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20167009_3,00.html.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

December 21, 2007

Find Award-Winning Children’s Authors at the Site for the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie Medals

A great place to browse if you’re looking for top authors or illustrators

By Janice Harayda

The British equivalents of the Caldecott and Newbery awards are the Kate Greenaway and Carnegie medals, awarded by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CLIP). And CLIP has a well-designed site www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/home/index.php that’s a great place to learn about some of the best children’s authors and illustrators of the past 70 years. The “Living Archive” page lists all the winners. And if you click on the link that says “Shadow Site,” you’ll go to another site that has reviews and more.

Many books that have won Greenaway or Carnegie medals are available in American libraries if not always in stores. And some of their creators have won worldwide fame and have delighted children in the U.S. for years – Quentin Blake, Raymond Briggs, Shirley Hughes, John Burningham, Helen Oxenbury, Edward Ardizzone, Jan Pienkowski and others. So if you can’t find a medal-winning book, you can often find others by the same author or illustrator. The judges of the Greenaway and Carnegie awards tend to take more risks than the American Library Association’s Newbery and Caldecott committees www.ala.org, which have to satisfy more constituences. So the British medalists often include worthy books that would have had little or no chance of an American prize.

One Greenaway winner that’s in stock on Amazon and elsewhere is Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s interactive The Jolly Christmas Postman (Little, Brown, $17.99, ages 3 and up) www.allanahlberg.com. In this sequel to The Jolly Postman, a letter-carrier calls on well-known characters from fairy tales or nursery rhymes and gives them small items tucked into pockets in the book — Humpty-Dumpty gets a get-well jigsaw puzzle – before ending with a visit to Santa. This is an ideal Christmas gift for 3-to-5-year-olds for whom getting mail is still a thrill.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

December 18, 2007

Novels by Junot Díaz and Alice Sebold Rank Among the Best and Worst of 2007, the Editors of New York Magazine Say in Year-End Wrap-Up

What’s the best novel of 2007? It’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz’s tale of “a monstrously fat, occasionally suicidal Dominican-American ‘ghetto nerd,’” the editors of New York magazine say in a Dec. 17 article written by Sam Anderson. I haven’t read the novel, but there’s room for a bit of caution here: Last year the editors’ choices included Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, second runner-up in the Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books. But New York got it right that Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon stands out for badness even in a year in which “lots of big names underwhelmed us … Amis, DeLillo, Roth, Rowling.” Anderson faults the novel’s voice, pacing and characterization. He didn’t mention the fourth-grade reading level and almost comically off-key lines like: “This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia” www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

December 9, 2007

One-Minute Book Reviews 10 Best Books of 2007 — Coming Friday

The New York Times Book Review has named its 10 best books of 2007, right after one of its 10 best of 2006 got shortlisted for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Want a list of books that don’t have writing, on sex or any other topic, that will test your gag reflex?

By Janice Harayda

Are you sore that your favorite novel didn’t make the list of the 10 best books of 2007 published in the New York Times Book Review today www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/10-best-2007.html?

Or did you give up on the Times’s list after Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children made it last year? (Memo to the editors of the NYTBR: Read this and tell us if you still think the novel deserved its spot www.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/03/16/. Maybe it’s not too late to publish a retraction?) Or are you skeptical of the NYTBR list now that another of the 10 best of 2006, Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, made the shortlist for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award for the writing you can read here http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217735,00.htm?

Okay, now you have an alternative list.

One-Minute Book Reviews will publish its first “10 Best Books of the Year” on Friday, December 14. This post is sure to be as controversial as its annual Delete Key Awards, partly because some of the best books may not even be 2007 books. (One-Minute Book Reviews didn’t begin until late last year, so I may have to grandfather in a couple of 2006 books that I didn’t get to until 2007 … and think how good those must be if they KO’d all the 2007 books.) You know how David Letterman said that traffic signals in New York are just rough guidelines? We’re applying a similar standard this year to the publication dates of the best books.

Other links: In addition to its “10 Best” list the New York Times has published a list of “100 Notable Books of 2007″ at this site www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/books/review/notable-books-2007.html

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

November 28, 2007

Read All the Passages Shortlisted for the 2007 Bad Sex in Fiction Award Here

Just found a link to all the passages shortlisted for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the U.K-based Literary Review, won Tuesday by Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest, which defeated books by Ian McEwan, Jeanette Winterson and others. The Guardian (formerly the Manchester Guardian) has them here: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2217735,00.htm

That link will take you to them, but if it doesn’t work for you, just Google “Guardian + Bad Sex Awaard Shortlisted Passages.” Still haven’t found a YouTube updload of the reading of the offending lines that preceded the announcement of the winner. The finalists included Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan, shown here.

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com

November 27, 2007

Norman Mailer Wins 2007 Bad Sex Award for ‘The Castle in the Forest’

[This post has been updated. A link to the bad-sex scene that won appears at the end of the post.]

The late Norman Mailer has won the 2007 Bad Sex in Fiction Award from the U.K.-based Literary Review for his novel The Castle in the Forest www.randomhouse.com, beating Ali Smith, David Thewlis and other finalists. I can’t get the direct link to the BBC post on the award to work from One-Minute Book Reviews. (The URL is news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7115451/.) But you can find the BBC post by Googling its headline, “Late Mailer wins ‘bad sex’ award.” (Sounds like he didn’t mail his application on time, doesn’t it?) You may also want to read the post just before this one on One-Minute Book Reviews, which has the shortlist for the Bad Sex Award and a link to a few lines from Smith’s bad writing on sex.

Update at 7:20 p.m., Eastern Time: Hooray! Just got this link from impatientreaderdotcom (see the comments section) to the lines by Mailer that won the 2007 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. (The winning passage was supposed to have been read aloud by an actress before the announcement. Anybody have a link to a YouTube or other video clip of the reading?) The following link provided by impatientreaderdotcom may look “off” but will take you right to a priceless passage from Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest that begins: “His mouth lathered with her sap …” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7115451.stm

(c) 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

 

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