Comments on I Just Can't Escape These Goddamned Book Awards

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.

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?

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).

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.

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.