As the saying goes, everyone loves a winner—except, it seems, when it comes to book awards, which can be notable for the amount of naysaying they inspire. So at this late date, having finally overseen the completion of LJ’s best books list for the January issue (check out this blog in the coming weeks for some backstory), I have the time to reflect on last month’s National Book Awards.

     No naysaying this time; I’m perfectly content with the winners. What’s more interesting to me are the criss-crossing lines among the adult trophy bearers. While Timothy Egan’s nonfiction The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl is notable for its story telling, Richard Powers’s fiction winner, The Echo Maker, is the fluid and engaging account of what happens when a story gets interrupted—when, after an accident, a young man cannot put the pieces back together correctly. And Nathaniel Mackey’s poetry winner, Splay Anthem, which blends two ongoing series to consider ancient African cosmology, is essentially social history reimagined. 

     Sometimes fiction readers can’t be persuaded to read nonfiction, and creative writing doesn’t always engage lovers of history or biography, but with this trio I can see readers crossing lines. It’s not the proverbial something for everyone but everything for everyone. In the end, my one big disappointment with this year’s NBAs came with the news coverage, which as always slighted the poetry winner; one story I read didn’t even mention Mackey. The assumption seems to be that the average reader finds poetry just too abstruse—hardly true of much poetry published today and certainly not true of Splay Anthem, a rhythmically rich work as addictive as any toe-tapping score. More readers should try it—and more cultural editors at newspapers nationwide should try giving poetry the light it deserves. Or else we’ll all be losers.