As I battle the annual spring illness, a few awards slid by that are worthy of mentioning:
- Of course, you should have heard that the 2006 Pulitzer Prizes were handed out. Geraldine Brooks won the Fiction award for March; David M. Oshinsky won the History award for Polio: An American Story; the Biography award went to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin for American Prometheus about Robert Oppenheimer (which also won in the same category last month from the National Book Critics Circle); and the General Non-Fiction award went to Caroline Elkins for Imperial Reckoning : The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya.
- Geoff Ryman’s Air won the Best Novel award from the British Science Fiction Association. It is also on the short list for the Nebula Awards to be given out the first weekend in May.
- War Surf by M.M. Buckner won the 2006 Philip K. Dick Award for “for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.” The judges also gave a “special citation” to Justina Robson for Natural History.
For what it’s worth, I have read none of these books, although Air has been on the “to read” list for quite some time.
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.
Henry Ward Beecher
