If you’re betting on book award winners—and you can; note that according to top British betting site Ladbrokes.com, odds are three to one that Turkish author Orhan Pamuk will win the Nobel Prize in literature tomorrow—don’t look at me. Okay, I was rooting hard for last year’s National Book Award winner in fiction, William Vollman’s Europe Central, and for the previous year’s poetry winner, Jean Valentine’s Door in the Mountain. But generally my favorites don’t come up winners. So it was with some trepidation that I approached the list of Quill Book Award winners—so many categories, so many opportunities for egg on the face.

First the good news. I was thrilled to see Al Gore win in the history/current events/politics caregory for An Inconvenient Truth, though I wish more people had voted for him in another, bigger race way back when. It’s good to know that people (dare I say) warm to perceptive discussions of current events; as LJ’s book-buying surveys have shown over the last few years, books in this area are trumping diet manuals and pop fiction at libraries nationwide. And, yes, I’m thrilled that John Grogan’s Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog got not one but two nods, for biography/memoir and audiobook. Among the dozens of books I have had the good fortune to introduce at FOLUSA-sponsored panels at the American Library Association convention over the years, this one remains at the top—funny, unsentimental, and a great read. Mine, by the way, is just about the world’s best dog, but I can still relate.

In my own assigning areas of fiction and poetry, alas, I came up short, though I’ll bow to the people’s choice. Winning in a fiction free-for-all is always A Dirty Job, and Christopher Moore had to do it, but now and again a literary title of historical significance captures the public’s imagination, and I was hoping that this was the year for Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. In general, this was a good list; I’m still looking hard at contender David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green and Sarah Gruen’s Water for Elephants for our best books compendium and would recommend that others look hard, too; Mitchell is a stylist with subtance who belongs up there with the best British novelists, and it’s gratifying to see an affecting tale like Gruen’s reach bestsellerdom.

A President’s poet, Maya Angelou not surprisingly was crowned people’s poet this year; it’s a diadem she already wears anyway, though I was thinking maybe Mary Oliver would be borrowing it this year. I can see why the meditative Oliver and the all-embracing Angelou would be popular, but I do wish that readers at large would get over their fear of American poetry. Edgy, lyric, and engaging, books like Jane Hirschfield’s After, Louise Gluck’s Averno, Carl Philips’s Riding Westward, and Kevin Young’s For the Confederate Dead could have been contenders. Check them out if you haven’t already, and while you’re at it, check out finalist Debra Dean in the debut category. Since nearly everyone loves to cook (just count me out), Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia did not shock as a winner, but Dean’s The Madonnas of Leningrad is at once elegent yet riveting fiction. 

Whatever anyone says, book awards are worthwhile because they make people talk about books, and they give critics one more way to spin good books at readers. The Quill Book Awards is an interesting means of expanding the literary conversation, though this year I could have done with a few less obvious choices (but, then, it’s not my choice). I wish there were more forums for promoting the little gems that aren’t so heavily marketed or don’t necessarily soar to the top of the best sellers lists. In fact, I’m working on an idea for that in LJ right now. In the meantime, in case you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Pamuk tomorrow. Just don’t bet on it.