Let everyone else nitpick about awards. (Do they really sell books? What, he won for that tripe?) For me, awards matter because they can highlight terrific reads that otherwise might get lost in the media backwash. Like most folks, I could name a dozen books I think should have been among the recently announced nominees for the National Book Awards. (Not Thomas Pynchon’s protean Against the Day? Not Olga Grushin’s exquisite and insightful The Dream Life of Sukhanov?) Yet I am happy enough with this year’s nominees in fiction and poetry, my own assigning areas, because generally they are neither boringly predictable nor aggressively obscure, as can happen with awards. The fiction list reminds me that I’ve been meaning to pick up Richard Powers’s The Echo Maker and sent me back to LJ’s reviews of Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document; I’d forgotten how strong they were. And because I tend to get exasperated when the collected works of grand old poets get nominated–how can a fresh new voice compete against a lifetime of achievement?–I am very happy to see not a single collections on this year’s poetry list.
    
Will the books chosen as National Book Award winners on November 15 really be the year’s best? Of course not; how could they be? With the number and quality of books published each year, prickling a range of tastes and interests, it’s not possible to declare anything the best—just intriguing and important enough to be the favorites of some serious readers. And that should be enough. An award winner cries out, “Get me, and let’s start talking,” which makes winning not the end of the conversation but only the beginning. Just tune in on November 16 to see whether I still agree.