Last week, with the announcements of the Quills, Booker, and Nobel winners (see the blogs Noble Choice and Bookered Up by Barbara Hoffert), the sky was raining awards. As each press release landed in my Outlook, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Who in this week of winningest winners are the loserest losers?” You might be mulling over the political nature of the Nobel or sampling the splendors of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, but I’m stuck on literary bombs big and small, those books that suck harder than a newborn.

Of course, “bad” is a relative term. Who am I to label a terrible book when it might be someone else’s manna? Why don’t I just get off my high horse and form a democratic committee a la Nobel or the National Book Awards to glean the worst of the worst, a kind of Golden Raspberry Awards for the book market? (I’ve heard of the J. Gordon Coogler Award for the Worst Book of the Year, but that’s limited to “liberal” books a la the Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s America: A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy.) As crazy as it sounds (books need good press, silly book review editor!), such a body may not be such a bad idea considering how much crap is issued. Maybe publishers need to be called on their more abysmal choices (Nicole Riche’s “novel,” The Truth About Diamonds, from Regan Books comes to mind). One could make the argument that since the number of readers is plummeting, not to mention the number of books sold, we don’t need as many as 175,000 books published a year (my stat comes from a 2005 Book Industry Study Group report). Quality over quantity would make my job a helluva lot easier and enjoyable, even if it wouldn’t translate to better returns.

Then again, the reality is that a good many people love to hate, so maybe, just maybe The Biggest Losers of the Book World Awards could actually generate sales. I have several friends who go to movies and even buy them on DVD because critics railed against them so vehemently. Sometimes lofty praise rubs consumers the wrong way. Sometimes bad literature makes for high entertainment.