Goodreads Book Awards Winners (and my challenge)

In case you haven’t noticed, the delightful website of bookish glory has announced their winners to the 2013 Book Awards. I’ve read a few of them, which is always lovely, but not the vast majority of them.

So here is the plan. My challenge (to myself) for 2014 is to read (re-read) the books that the good users of Goodreads chose as their top books of 2013. And to also read various other books that won awards this year (Costa, Waterstones, Man Booker, National etc. If you think of another one let me know and I’ll tackle the winner!)

I’ll have to come up with a list and post it here to keep myself honest.

But! Here are the winners of this year’s Goodreads book awards:

Goodreads Is Doing It Again!

The delightful Goodreads is holding their very own “Best Book of 2013” vote-athon!! This I love. I really REALLY do. Because, while I have great respect for book awards, very often they are not always the books that everyone reads over the year.

They’re generally books we all pick up after it wins or is put on the short list, but I don’t know that we all generally

go out and pick up some of these books before they make it on to  that list.

So, to have Goodreads hold an annual “Best of” for it’s members to vote in makes me all ten kinds of happy. Voting is going to last all month, with three rounds of voting:

• Opening Round – Nov. 4-9
• Semifinals- Nov. 11-16
• Finals- Nov. 18-25

Now, the initial 15 books in each category were chosen by Goodreads, but after that, we the readers! Get to pick the winners in each of the 20 categories, which is just all ten kinds of cool!

If you are a Goodreads member you should definitely go vote for your favorite. You only get to vote once in each round, but it’s so worth it to be able to be apart of choosing a book award.

Happy Voting!

❤ Alissa

National Book Awards 2013 Announced

The above are the fiction books that have been longlisted on the National Book Awards list.  And we want to congratulate those who have been nominated for this year’s list!

If you don’t know, The National Book Awards are given to a fiction, non-fiction, poetry and young readers. As with the ManBooker shortlist, we find that we haven’t actually read any of these. Which makes us feel slightly inadequate and silly. But then Alissa looked at her Goodreads shelf and realized she’d spent this year reading YA. There will have to be a challenge to do something different next year…

BUT! The NBA awards. We’re looking forward to picking up some of these books, most probably “The Flame Throwers” by Rachel Kushner.  Also (in line with Alissa’s apparent history this year) we’d like to read the YA book “Two Boys Kissing” by David Levithan, VERY good things have been heard about this book.

Here are the other books long-listed for the NBAs:

Non-fiction

• T.D. Allman, Finding Florida: The True Story of the Sunshine State (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• Gretel Ehrlich, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami (Pantheon Book/Random House, Inc.)
• Scott C. Johnson, The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, Inc. )
• Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865
  (W.W. Norton & Company)
• George Packer, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (W.W. Norton & Company)
• Terry Teachout, Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington (Gotham Books)
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief (Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, Inc. )

Poetry

• Frank Bidart, Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Roger Bonair-Agard, Bury My Clothes (Haymarket Books)
• Lucie Brock-Broido, Stay, Illusion (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Andrei Codrescu, So Recently Rent a World, New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 (Coffee House Press)
• Brenda Hillman, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press)
• Adrian Matejka, The Big Smoke (Penguin Poets/Penguin Group USA)
• Diane Raptosh, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press)
• Matt Rasmussen, Black Aperture (Louisiana State University Press)
• Martha Ronk, Transfer of Qualities (Omnidawn Publishing)
• Mary Szybist, Incarnadine: Poems (Graywolf Press)

Young People

• Kathi Appelt, The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
• Kate DiCamillo, Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures (Candlewick Press)
• Lisa Graff, A Tangle of Knots (Philomel, A division of Penguin Group USA)
• Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
• Cynthia Kadohata, The Thing About Luck (Atheneum Books for Young Readers/Simon & Schuster)
• David Levithan, Two Boys Kissing (Knopf Books for Young Readers/Random House)
• Tom McNeal, Far, Far Away (Knopf Books for Young Readers/Random House)
• Meg Rosoff, Picture Me Gone (Putnam Juvenile, a division of Penguin Group USA)
• Anne Ursu, The Real Boy (Walden Pond Press/an Imprint HarperCollinsPublishers)
• Gene Luen Yang, Boxers & Saints (First Second/an imprint of Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)