National Book Award Winners

It was a good night to work for Penguin and Farrar, Straus and Giroux last night at the National Book Award ceremony. Penguin books took the honors in fiction and young adult, while FSG walked away the winner in nonfiction and poetry. All four winners are first-time recipients of the award.

Fiction:
• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)
• Lila by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Redeployment by Phil Klay (Penguin Press)
• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel (Knopf)
• An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine (Grove Press)

The Winner: Redeployment
My Pick: All the Light We Cannot See
My Runner-up: Station Eleven
Heading into the awards ceremony, I figured it was going to come down to the books by Klay, Doerr and St. John Mandel. All three are on my TBR, though I've read large chunks of the latter two and I've sampled Redeployment. Most of the social media traffic and blogs seemed to favor Doerr and St. John Mandel, though Klay had gotten a lot of attention earlier in the year. All the Light We Cannot See is written in a very lyrical style, while Station Eleven is a wonderfully descriptive take on the well-worn post-apocalyptic genre. Meanwhile, Redeployment is a jarring collection of stories that look at a soldier's life both at war and returning home. Consider the opening paragraph, "We shot dogs. Not by accident. We did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I'm a dog person, so I thought about that a lot." Quite the opener for what follows. Much like when The King's Speech won the Oscar in 2010 when I was rooting for Inception and The Social Network, I get why Klay's book won the award, despite not being my first choice. Definitely a worthy winner.

Nonfiction:
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast (Bloomsbury)
• The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson (Liveright/Norton)
• No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes by Anand Gopal (Metropolitan/Henry Holt)
• Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr (Norton)

The Winner: Age of Ambition
My Pick: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
As someone who initially read only nonfiction books when I resumed reading daily as an adult, I thought I had my finger on the pulse after reading or successfully guessing the last two winners (Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers and George Packer's The Unwinding). Apparently, the judges and I didn't see eye-to-eye on the nonfiction side at all this year. My early picks didn't make it onto the shortlist, then the book I thought would win lost out to Osnos' account of modern China. That isn't to say Age of Ambition isn't good, but that it wasn't on my radar at all until the shortlist. And even then, I thought Chast had it. Consider Age of Ambition the newest addition to my TBR list.

Other winners included Louise Gluck for Faithful and Virtuous Night (Poetry) and Jacqueline Woodson for Brown Girl Dreaming (Young People's). Both Gluck and Woodson are huge names in their respective fields, so it's great to see them finally get a National Book Award to add to their already large trophy cases.

Goodreads Choice Awards

UPDATE (12/4/14): The winners have been announced. To see the results, click here or read my take on the winners here.

This week, the annual Goodreads Choice Awards kicked off its first round of voting. There are 20 categories and 15-20 books per category and three rounds of voting. The first one ends Saturday, Nov. 8, the semifinal voting period runs from Nov. 10-15 and the final round of voting goes from Nov. 17-24. More than 825,000 votes have already been cast for the first round.

This is the second year I'll be voting in the awards. I admit, most of these books are on my TBR list because of the backlog of books I have, but more often than not, I've downloaded previews of each book onto my Kindle. Here are three of the categories and some of my picks:

1) Best Fiction
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin (Algonquin)

This category was brutal to pick a winner. Fikry, post-apocalyptic drama Station Eleven and Phil Klay's military tale Redeployment all have spots on my TBR. I've read excerpts for both Zevin and Emily St. John Mandel's novels, even going so far as to buy Station practically unseen. Both Station Eleven and Redeployment are shortlisted for the National Book Award. And yet, I'm giving my vote to Zevin's titular book store owner. The novel's line "No man is an island; every book is a world" is an apt description of the novel's key themes of loneliness, the rapidly changing book industry and a love for reading. What's not to love about that?

Outside of those three, the nomination list is stacked. Rainbow Rowell's Landline is sure to draw her legion of fans as will Jojo Moyes' One Plus One and Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies, not to mention David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks and Haruki Murakami's latest.

2) Best Memoir & Autobiography
Life, Animated by Ron Suskind (Kingswell)

I admit the chances of Suskind's book advancing to the later rounds is probably slim (other nominees are more high-profile), but I'm rooting for this one out of deeply personal interest. As someone who is a total Disney fanatic and diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, I had rapt interest in this book from the moment I read the first excerpt. Below is a Lesley Stahl piece on the Suskind family that aired on CBS Sunday Morning. If you can't see the video below, click here.

The book is up against the likes of Robin Roberts, Elizabeth Warren, Cleveland kidnapping victim Michelle Knight, Boston Marathon bombing survivor Jeff Bauman and The Princess Bride actor Cary Elwes.

3) Best Historical Fiction
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Scribner)

This was the easiest lock in the entire vote. I've read the first several chapters of this book and it is beautifully written, almost lyrically. This book is a finalist for the National Book Award and has received near universal praise from all over the literary community since its debut in the spring. I'm a sucker for World War II-era books, so this one literally had me at its description of a blind French girl and a German boy who's a whiz at the radio. Their paths eventually intersect in the French coastal town of Saint-Malo as Allied troops prepare to bomb the town.

As for the category itself, it's a good category, even taking into consideration the heavy tilt toward Doerr's novel. Other nominees in this category include Sue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings, Lisa See's China Dolls and Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist.

The Nominees Get Winnowed Down

The literary world's awards are being handed out or narrowed down this week. The Man Booker Prize was awarded Tuesday to Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Knopf). The novel is a World War II-era love story set in Burma about an Australian doctor in a Japanese POW camp as the Thailand-Burma Railway is being built. Flanagan told attendees, "I never expected to stand here before you in this grand hall in London as a writer, being so honored."

When the Man Booker shortlist was announced, I predicted Flanagan's book as the likely winner and immediately added it to my to-be-read list. For more on Flanagan's win, go here.

Stateside, the shortlists for the National Book Award were announced this morning on NPR's "Morning Edition." Three of the five fiction nominees are on my TBR, including Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner), which I've had pegged as an awards contender since reviewers started buzzing about it back in the spring. The other titles that made the cut were Phil Klay's Redeployment (Penguin Press) and Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven (Knopf) along with Marilynne Robinson's Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press). Despite literature being a subjective art form, there has been universal praise for the fiction nominees from critics and readers alike. On Goodreads, Doerr's book ranks the highest with a 4.19 rating currently with Station Eleven and Lila not far behind.

The nonfiction side was missing my two TBR picks, Ronald Rosbottom's When Paris Went Dark (Little, Brown) and Walter Isaacson's The Innovators (Simon & Schuster). Instead, other works that mostly focused on contemporary topics got the nod. John Lahr's behemoth Tennessee Williams biography (Norton), Roz Chast's memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury), Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) explores modern China, No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal (Henry Holt) looks at Afghanistan and The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson (Liveright/Norton) made it to the shortlist. I'm not surprised by Norton's dominance and at this point expect Lahr's biography to be the winner but I can't say I'd be disappointed with a Chast win.

The winners will be announced Nov. 19. For complete coverage of the award's shortlist, go here.

My sympathies to Richard Powers, whose book Orfeo did not win either the Man Booker or make it onto the shortlist for the National Book Award. It was on the longlist for both. I was also pulling for John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van, but it also did not make the National cut.

Is there a book you're rooting for? Did it make the cut?