Slog - Comments on I Just Can't Escape These Goddamned Book Awards http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book It's another book award, this time bracketed. Previous winners include are Mitchell's Cloud Atlas (definitely not the best book of the year it was released in), Smith's The Accidental (didn't read it), and McCarthy's The Road (a good choice, but it won everything short of the Nobel last year, so it's not really in keeping with the award's "We're not the big prizes" ethos). Here's the rationale behind the prize: The Tournament of Books, we vowed, would be completely transparent. The names of the judges would be known to all, and the judges would admit to their own personal biases... Copyright 2008 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:01:23 -0800 Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:11:20 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.34 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Comment by josh The Rooster is my favorite book award of the year. It's so randomly decided that sometimes you get weird outcomes, but usually a slate of good contenders. And how many good new fiction reads aren't flawed.

My money's on Denis Johnson. I haven't read it, but he seems right up the alley of the potential judges.

]]> josh http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952234 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952234 Books Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:32:01 -0800 Comment by Fnarf But WHY? Random book awards for what, exactly? It's just a marketing tool. An award should represent something, an organization with a wide currency and following, or a country, or something. This is just a magazine; why don't they just announce their best books of the year or something?

]]> Fnarf http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952265 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952265 Books Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:41:55 -0800 Comment by todd I just finished reading Then We Came to the End on the bus this morning. I highly recommend this book for anyone who works in a cubicle (especially if you're in advertising).

]]> todd http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952266 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952266 Books Fri, 29 Feb 2008 12:41:55 -0800 Comment by josh Fnarf: that's effectively what they're doing. The site picks their sixteen favorite books of the year and then runs reviews by writers that they like. Except this way you get the fun of read one reviewer's take on two books followed by some arbitrary judgement as to which one is the "best" and accompanied by funny play-by-play commentary.

Check out the tournament from previous years; I'd hardly call it a marketing tool and seriously doubt that the publishers are going to roll out another print run emblazoned with "the 2007 Rooster prize" on the cover to drum up sales.

]]> josh http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952305 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952305 Books Fri, 29 Feb 2008 13:05:30 -0800 Comment by Greg I picked up Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with Occasional Music a while back and was impressed, though not enough to bother reading any of his other books yet.

]]> Greg http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952399 http://slog.thestranger.com/2008/02/i_just_cant_escape_these_goddamned_book#c952399 Books Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:11:20 -0800