|
||||
|
Some recent monkeying around may have impacted those who subscribe to the blog via feed readers or RSS. You may need to resubscribe due to operator error on this end. Of course, if the way you read the blog is via RSS and I screwed up your subscribed feed, then you’re probably not going to be reading this anyway. There’s nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot. Dilbert, Oct. 16, 1994 As inspiration/motivation to post a bit more in the book field, I’m going to try a series of regular memes that circulate in the bookblog community. They may not appear each and every week but simply as they strike my fancy. The first is Tuesday Thingers, a kind of a round robin of Library Thing early reviewers on a different theme or question each week created by The Boston Bibliophile. So here’s this week’s question:
The book award I probably follow most closely is the Hugo Award for Best Novel. In fact, quite some time ago I made it a practice to buy a copy of that year’s winner if I did not already have it. While a couple have fallen through the gap, I have all but two or three of the 55 winners thus far. Other awards I follow but not as closely in SF include the Nebula Award, the Locus Awards, the Sidewise Awards and the Arthur C. Clarke Award. For more mainstream awards, I also at least look at the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award and, naturally, the Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize. In the last year or so, I’ve also started watching the Booker Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The book awards do occasionally prompt me to read a book. In fact, this year I bought and read Paul Verhaeghen’s Omega Minor simply because it won the 2008 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. And, as noted in prior posts, I am trying to read some of the books on the Booker Prize shortlist. It is rare, though, that I will read a book simply because it won this or that award. Equally as important is whether summaries of the book generate my interest. My favorite award-winner to date probably would be Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow. It won a number of SF awards in 1997 and 1998 but not the Hugo. It is, of course, a Desert Island Book. An award does not change the quality of a book. Chris Van Allsburg, 1986 Caldecott Medal acceptance speech Yes, it was five years and more than 1,200 posts ago that the first post appeared on this blog. A lot has changed in that time, some for the good (from a blog perspective) and perhaps more from the bad (nationally). When this blog started, it was pretty much all politics all the time. There’s a certain part of me that wants to scream “I told you so!” but even with close to 80 percent of the people recognizing the country has been on the wrong track, it’s largely the same old same old. It took about a year and a half for me to realize I wanted this blog to head in a different direction. And some of what led me to that conclusion remains today in both the general political atmosphere as well as the SD blogosphere. No doubt the lack of politics impacts how much traffic this blog gets. But I don’t really care. It’s not like the internet needs more blog cacophony when the bottom line is that “change” — this year’s political buzzword — ain’t really gonna happen. I would much rather post and talk about things that enrich our lives. So aside from occasional comments here and there (just four posts this year in the “Politics” category), this blog will continue to focus on books and other things I love. From my perspective, that is worth celebrating on a fifth anniversary. If you can get people just to think about earning and spending, earning and spending, then they are less likely to want to think for themselves. Rob Gifford, China Road |
        |
|||
|
Copyright © 2026 A Progressive on the Prairie - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
||||
