The longer I live the more I realize that I am not well read. Add to that the additional realization that the longer I live the more books accumulate in my un-read universe because books are published at a rate faster than any human can hope to read them, speed reading course notwithstanding. Can you understand why I feel woeful? Yeah. And I've probably made you blue, too, with my depressing ruminations.
Today is the big day among movie buffs -- Oscar nominations were announced this morning. But this week in book land has seen its share of major award news, especially for the best books for young readers. First, adult readers will want to know who the National Book Critics Circle announced are its finalists for the best authors/books of 2011. The Newbery Medal was given yesterday to Jack Gantos for his semi-autobiographical tale, Dead End in Norvelt. Plus, Chris Raschka has won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for A Ball for Daisy
I feel sorry for the Newbery and Caldecott audience. They're in worse position than me at a younger age. How can they ever hope to feel well read with so many great, good, and wonderful books in existence as yet unread by them and with no hope except for vastly more books of outstanding quality to populate their reading world when they're my age?
Please turn the page.
For more about Caldecott and Newberry honorees, as well as the Michael L. Printz Award winner, go here.
Here are the nominations for the NBCC prizes in two categories. The complete list of nominees can be found here.
Fiction
Teju Cole, Open City (Random House)
Jeffrey Eugenides The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger’s Child (Knopf)
Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books)
Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia (Scribner)
Nonfiction
Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (Random)
James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon)
Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (Knopf)
John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead: Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
I have read none of the above titles and only heard of two (books by Eugenides & Gleick), which I want to read but haven't got to yet. I am so far behind!
Back in the good old days before e-books, a person like me need only go to the library where a single building seemed to encompass her challenge. Somehow, the task of becoming well read didn't seem so daunting when I could confront the population of really good books in tangible form right there on the shelves and in the stacks. One (this one, anyway) lived in the hope that the librarians were doing their best to purchase the best books for a broad appeal but a deep one as well. The task of being a "polished reader" need not be faced alone. I had help from the bibliopedia person.
But now!
Now there's the library, the online libraries, and an invisible but looming universe of virtual books that only exist in electronic form and will never see the light of day as dust gatherers. I do find some small comfort in the knowledge that many (if not most) of the e-books being sold online are probably not volumes that will enhance my well readness, and so can drop off my worry wart radar with no harm done. Still. I've run across one or two high quality reads that are e-book only publications, and recognize that there are a few good ones out there. And they're adding to my anxiety. Especially when I read a statistic like this one: Over the holidays in 2011 the population of e-readers and tablets (like the Kindle Fire) doubled! That can only mean one thing -- the market for e-books alone is exploding and more such will have to be written to meet the clamor of the eager reading public.
. . .from mid-December 2011 to early January 2012, the number of Americans owning a tablet computer rose to 19% from 10%, and the growth in e-book readers jumped an identical amount, to 19% from 10%. Overall, the number of Americans owning either one of these devices jumped from 18% to 29%, meaning that nearly 1 in 3 Americans now owns a device. Pew Internet
Then I see headlines like this: "90,000 authors download Apple's new publishing tool." And I find announcements like this one: the
Spring publishing lists, featuring hundreds of brand new never before seen potentially important and great books. Woe
is me.
It would be just too dispiritng for me to list the books I consider essential to becoming well read that I haven't read. I could start with The Brothers Karamazov, move to Pulitzers I've never cracked open, to neglected Nobelists I haven't read, and slide down the chute of perdition into the slough of unread contemporary works, including Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot and James Gleick's The Information. What about you -- dare you list 5-10 works of note that you've yet to take notice of? What's on your Un-well Read TBR List?
As for me, I will emulate Sisyphus and toddle off to read Umberto Eco's Baudolino, to be followed by a nosing into Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, knowing that while I just finished and much enjoyed Timothy Brook's Vermeer's Hat: The 17th Century and the Dawn of the Global World, good as it is, I haven't read a truly great book there that will count toward my becoming that mythical well read creature I long to be.
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