I've been thinking about literary awards a lot lately, mostly because so many of them have arrived on the publishing landscape in the past few weeks. I wrote the other day how much I enjoyed the Booklist Editors Choice lists. I really think this isnone of the better ways to go when it comes to awards. The editors still chose one book in each category the consensus liked the best (their "top of the list), but other than a page spread showing the covers of these books, audios and videos over two pages, the lists all placed the titles in alphabetical order. In other words, when you read the lists you didn't read them with the winner at the top. (Just so you know it was Cormac McCarthy in the lit category.) Also the lists encompassed many other subjects then just the Top of the List winner - in other words there was an overall nonfict winner (The Lemon Tree) for adults, but the lists included notable arts & literature, biography, history and social science titles.

So lots of more books to learn about.

I like this method for choosing one title (if that's what we have to do) that stands out but also giving pretty much equal billing to dozens of others. I like this because the point of all these awards should be (in my world) to share fascinating, interesting, compelling, delightful, wonderful books with the reading public. It should be about getting more people to read more books that they might not know about.

It should be about reading, period.

Now I know that awards are about selecting the best for any given category in theory, but really - they don't. (Need I even mention figure skaing here?) They are about what the judges liked the best, what they agreed on, what appealed most to them. For example, if all the judges for a literary award come from a similar ethnicity or social status or geographical location then they will likely vote a certain way. I'm not at all suggesting that happens for any award, I'm just saying that's how it could happen. So, again, in the end you are just reading what this select group of folks liked - not really the best. And that is why everyone debates awards (all awards) every year. Because we all like different things, we all think differently, and not all of us are going to believe that Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon or Richard Powers speaks to us.

And sometimes this whole award business is going to seem silly or stupid because of that.

The other thing I can't wrap my head around is how the long lists (let alone short lists) get compiled. How do the committees even know how to start? You can't possibly read every new book in any category that comes out every year so you must shorten the 50,000 fiction releases (just picking a number here) down to 20 and then 5 somehow.

How?

Who culls that initial list - who decides what publishers you will even consider, what authors need to be noted, what genres should be removed. (Am I the only one wondering why fantasy pretty much never shows up in any short lists?) Who are those people? And then after that the judges get their 30 or 40 books and get to reading. Well, what if they have already a book that year that they like better than any of them? Do they say anything or are they stuck wiith what they have been told is the short list for the best? How often do they get to weigh in with their personal opinion before they tackle the lists?

Or do they just agree not to consider books they might have found and enjoyed on their own before reading in an official capacity?

Lots of things to think about when you start considering just why awards matter.

I did nominate titles in several categories for the Cybils, the kid litosphere response to the Quills. I think they had one of the more democratic methods for getting longlists - they just opened up the categories to anyone who wanted to nominate a title for each one. Initially I thought the whole Cybils things was a good idea. But now I have to wonder. Of course I disagree with some of the choices on the short lists (it's all subjective) and I don't understand how some titles were chosen when others were not - other than that the judges don't like those type of books. For example, looking at the graphic novel (over 12) list, I see neither Pride of Baghdad nor Deogratias - which means, I don't know, the judges don't like war books as gn themes, I guess. (I don't see how you could discount these books on the writing or art, especially when compared to the titles that are short listed. There's no discernable difference in quality.) Beyond that, two of the books that are nominated are actually trades - collections of previously published individual comics, (La Perdida and Castle Waiting), and not original books published in 2006 which might just be a sticking point for comics purists, but still it always bugs me when trades and original graphic novels are lumped together. (I also don't have any idea how you can compare an anthology from multiple authors and illustrators like Flight against a cohesive single story work. But that's got nothing to do with Flight being great or not.)

In the short list for YA fiction you have lots of drama (dead mother, abusive parent, find biological mother but she's dying, and a book with death as the narrator) so the nominating judges clearly like drama, lots of drama. In both cases this is fine - that is why they are judges, to shorten the long lists into short lists for the final judging and to do it based on their own opinions. But I don't agree with them and I wonder when the Cybils are awarded and dozens of blogs recount the winners if maybe a lot of other really great books weren't short changed by all of this.

As Jenny Diski wrote last year - awards are only good really for the one who wins, and for everyone else you lost, period. (And yeah, I know all the cliches about being nominated is great and how bringing attention is always good but sorry - we've all been in second place for something at some point and with the exception of the ALA's Newberrys, Caldecotts and Printzs, where there are Honor books as well as the winner, most second placers are lost in the dust and forgotten by the general public.)

What would be better for the literary world, I think, is if the internet was used to organize huge lists - not end of year lists that tell us what we expect to hear, but lists from tons of different lit bloggers/reviewers/critics - from the folks who pretty much only cover adult lit, to comic book reviewers, to fantasy and sci fi, to kid lit, mystery, romance, etc etc etc. that are all linked together. Want to look at ten different lists of great adult fiction in 2006? Or fifteen lists for young adult books or ten lists for comic books/graphic novels - well why not? I don't agree with the NBAs or the NBCCs and while I was impressed by the ALA for choosing a Newberry winner pretty much no one had heard of, again there was a ton of tortured family circumstances in that short list. The ALA judges like family drama too it seems - especially with missing parents. Well, what else was there out there that we should hear about?

What have we, the avidly reading public been missing while buried more than once in the fabulousness of MT Anderson, Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

Those are the books I want to hear about. The ones that far too many of us never hear about and frankly, never will. I don't care if they win anything, I just want to read good books - many different good books and I don't see how all this awarding is helping me with that.