nomadreader

Tonight, the winners of this year's National Book Awards will be announced. I mostly follow the fiction category, but I'm always excited to see which authors win across the board. This year in particular, several of the young adult and non-fiction titles sound quite appealing. For the first time, the National Book Foundation is offering a live webcast of the ceremony on its website . It starts tonight at 8 p.m. New York City time. I'll be watching live (perhaps even from my Kindle Fire , which is set to arrive today!) I managed to read all five of the fiction finalists this year, and I can honestly say I would be happy if any of them win . While I certainly have my favorites (more on that soon), the five titles are incredibly diverse and represent a fascinating combination of American voices in fiction . Although I had hopes for other titles to appear on the list, I welcome reading prize lists to discover titles I likely otherwise wouldn't have. It is incredibly...

The backstory: The Soujourn, Andrew Krivak's debut novel, is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award  and won the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize . The basics: This novel opens in Pueblo, Colorado in June of 1899 when Jozef Vinich is an infant. The next section announces a location of Dardan, Pennsylvania in 1972, but the novel is really the story of Vinich's life, and in between his infanthood in Colorado and his time in Pennsylvania, he lives in his father's native Austria and fights in World War I. My thoughts: The opening chapter of The Sojourn  is among the most haunting I have read. It's beautifully written, undeniably tragic and a fascinating beginning to a life story. As the action shifts to Pennsylvania, I continued to be intrigued. How did Jozef's journey lead him here? Why 1972? The road is a winding one, and unfortunately it was often a boring one. It was unabashedly dark, and ultimately honest, about the horrors of war: "For the first ...

The five finalists for this year's National Book Award in Fiction are: The Sojourn  by Andrew Krivak The Tiger's Wife  by Tea Obreht ( my reveiew ) The Buddha in the Attic  by Julie Otsuka ( my review ) Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories  by Edith Pearlman Salvage the Bones  by Jesmyn Ward My thoughts I've read two of the books. I thoroughly enjoyed Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic , and I'm thrilled to see it honored here. Although I think Tea Obreht is brilliant, The Tiger's Wife fell flat for me as a novel. I've heard wonderful things about Salvage the Bones  from both Wendy at Caribou's Mom and Audra at Unabridged Chick . I was in the library holds line for it, but I opted to buy it for my Kindle instead. The other two titles are new to me. The Sojourn  by Andrew Krivak comes from the revered Bellevue Literary Press. Somehow it wasn't on my radar, but it looks outstanding. I ordered it for my Kindle and will li...