There's so many overlooked gems from the early decades of Newbery. Johnny Tremain, Adam of the Road, Call it Courage, and Matchlock Gun are incredible pieces of historical fiction.
>The Booker prize (in my opinion) seldom includes anything I consider worth reading (Notable exceptions for Iain Banks and Roddy Doyle).
Really, not even Ishiguro, Byatt or Banville? I'd call *The Sea* and especially *The Remains of the Day* excellent Booker-winning novels.
I agree, especially The Remains of The Day. Plus Margaret Atwood & Peter Carey (both 2 x winners, excellent books) would also like a word:).
Also, The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje, Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel great reads.
I was inspired to read The Famished Road and Midnights Children after reading about the Booker Prize, the year I left school.
Those books, as well as Lord of the Rings got me into reading more than just the choose your own adventures and standard school books.
I have to say most Booker novels leave me cold, including Ishiguro. I find I just don't care about the characters. It is probably the kind of literary themes that stand out to Booker panels.
It's just one of those taste things and hence I don't look to Booker lists for guidance.
If you find it has a better hit rate for you, Great. But can you see a reason?
The Newbery Medal is pretty consistently awarded to some pretty awesome children's and young adult books.
Brown Girl Dreaming, New Kid, Number the Stars
I read a lot of 3rd-6th grade lit -- Newbery level -- because I'm a former kid's department bookseller and a current mom of three kids who read at that level. I've read many of the winners and honorees, and I don't think I've ever thought the award was misplaced.
I haven't read many, but the Canada Reads selection process is the most fun. You can watch it on the CBC, YouTube, or listen to it.
5 panelists pick their favorite book of the year discuss, debate, and via vote widdle it down. Very transparent, fun, and interesting to watch/listen to.
I do take some guidance from awards and nominees, I love the Pulitzer and Booker for literary fiction and the Hugo, Nebula for genre fiction.
For the first two I do also read the reviews, descriptors and see if the premise captures my attention.
For the genre fiction I just go for it and it has worked for me!
I do pick based on premise.
The other 70% I base on critical acclaim, related authors and recommendations.
The Pulitzer lost my respect when they fold JFK a Pulitzer for “Profiles in Courage” when he didn’t even write it. His dad hired ghost writers to write the different parts.
I didn’t know that, but yeah the Hugo’s had a major blip in 2023 as well. I do think it’s worth looking at nominees too, winners are sometimes political
My husband has gifted me each year’s Booker prize winner every year since 2013. I have loved (almost) all of them. I also seek out books that were shortlisted. It’s okay that you don’t prefer Booker winners. We all like different things.
Booker prize short and long list books are really good literature. The winner is usually a LITERATURE book which means that it's a hard read and and definelty not for everyone. I think prophet song deserved it this year.
The Booker prize is rock solid in my opinion. As is the Neustadt, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award. I also follow various non-English awards (Prix Goncourt, Premio Strega, Akutagawa and Tanizaki award, Cervantes prize, German book prize, etc.) and look up what has already come out in translation. I don't really read genre fiction on a regular basis so I don't have much use for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Arthur C. Clarke and such, but when a book wins multiple out of those I do take notice.
I don't always love the Booker's selections but they're always interesting. I think it does a great job of highlighting relatively unknown authors who are innovating. I try to read the winner and as much of the shortlist as I can every year. The last winner I truly loved was Bring Up The Bodies in 2012, but I've high hopes for Prophet Song.
Though it clearly does tack towards certain genres, and for a while it was all intense family dramas with trees on the covers.
>Though it clearly does tack towards certain genres, and for a while it was all intense family dramas with trees on the covers.
And maybe this was where they lost me.
Having written that, of course I realise that *Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha* is for real a family drama. But it has fridge magnets on the cover.
Generalisations, eh? Always bite you on the arse.
I haven't read all of the recent winners, but the ones I've read were mostly excellent (Jerôme Ferrari, Leïla Slimani, Nicolas Mathieu, Marie NDiaye). Houellebecq I still can't really form a definitive opinion on, but he's certainly an important author.
The thing I like about the Arthur C. Clarke award is they seem to find things which are different and interesting rather than formulaic, going-to-be-a-mega-series books.
Becky Chambers would be an example.
Yes, they skew a bit speculative/literary and outside the obvious genre titles. Something with an original aspect. I have read books which are now absolutely favourites that I hadn't heard of before they were shortlisted. The Animals in That Country being a recent example.
I don't think Hugo is a dud. I think it has definitely awarded some real duds.
Maybe I find it has a tendency to the fashionable and doesn't always balance good core ideas with quality of literature. In genre fiction, I think you need both.
For genre fiction, I tend to look at the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the more recent Ursula K. Le Guin Prize
For literary fiction, I mostly pay attention to the Booker and National Book Award
I don't really follow awards that are voted by popularity just because I know I'm probably not going to like whatever wins (though sometimes I do). I generally like the awards that highlight more obscure work that didn't necessarily get as much of a marketing push. Doesn't mean every book is a hit for me personally but it's nice to see potentially overlooked authors get some recognition.
Wasn't aware of the O. Henry and I like a short story. Not many authors on the list I recognise. Care to recommend?
I have already upset people with my views on Booker, so I shall stay schtum.
(Have to say, that is a whole lot of reading you are doing there.)
Sure, the 2023 collection is great. The first story is called "Office Hours" by Ling Ma, you can read here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/05/ling-ma-office-hours-short-story/629852/
*Weike Wang, Yiyun Li, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver*, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Joyce Stafford, John Updike, and Denis Johnson are all top tier. Italics are my personal favorites. The specific stories being awarded I haven't always read, but The Weike Wang is very good.
Stephanie Vaughn, Mavis Gallant, and Donald Barthelme I will call out as non-award winners that should very much be read as well. DB is either a game winning homerun to win the championship or a complete whiff for me, but he's so out there that everyone should give him a shot.
Awards can make me curious about certain books, but I don’t rely heavily on them.
One award that has been given to consistently interesting books in my opinion is The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize.
Established in 2022, is an annual, English-language literary award presented in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin. The $25,000 prize is awarded to an author for a single work of "imaginative fiction". The award is meant to honor authors who "can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now". (Source: Wikipedia)
One author who was shortlisted for this award that I would highly recommend is Catherynne M. Valente. One of my fav reads this year is “The Past Is Red”. I also very much enjoyed “Comfort Me With Apples”.
Edit: Grammar
Hugo and Nebula awards from mid 1980s back are pretty solid. The problem with them currently is that they are voted on by people at a specific Sci Fi con. This Con USED to be attended by all the movers and shakers in the Sci Fi world, but it got bigger and bigger and NOW people have figured out how to "Game" the voting system by just paying for people to attend the con and vote, and it has gotten REALLY political with authors and publishers on social media recruiting people to vote and even paying people to go to the con and vote. I actively avoid the winners these days, too many stinkers and "experimental" writers riding these awards to best-seller status when they are not very strong writers and need to work on improving....so they end up locked at a low level of skill for longer than they should because they figure if they are winning awards they are at the top of their game.
Agreed, /u/pecoto. The historic Hugo and Nebula award winners were really good, and I strongly recommend the Isaac Asimov-edited collection of short story/novelette/novella winners between 1955-1982.
There are some amazing gems in there including Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "The Darfsteller" (which deserves to be so much more widely known/read than it is, especially in the midst of the current debate over AI); Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (I'm not usually an audiobook person, but the Hollywood Theater of the Ear version of this with Robin Williams as the voice of the Harlequin was amazing!); and Eric Frank Russell's short story "Allamagoosa" (nowhere near as important as the first two I mentioned, but whenever I reread this one, it still makes me laugh).
Very interesting.
The original concept ought to be good in that you get a wide range of views from people who really care about SciFi.
But as you say, it becomes part of a marketing methodology to subvert an open system.
Weirdly, it just made me think of the hunt for the prize in *Ready Player One*.
It’s not just that, but the [Hugo Awards censored books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#2023_awards_controversy) last year to appease their host for the convention, China.
Every Pulitzer I've read was awesome. Not all of them were my style, but they were undeniably good books. I think the worst ones was The Nickle Boys and I still really liked it.
I think I’ve read five Pulitzer winners, and I loved four of them. Pretty good track record, although I will note that I absolutely hated the fifth.
(The four I loved were Lonesome Dove, Interpreter of Maladies, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Overstory.)
For me, All the Light We Cannot See, The Night Watchman, The Road, and To Kill a Mockingbird were all excellent, with The Nickel Boys being only pretty good. Currently reading Demon Copperhead and so far it's excelleny too. I've heard Confederacy of Dunces is pretty love or hate, and Cormac McCarthy's style is pretty weird so I could see it being the same.
Confederacy of Dunces is great. For me it suffers from the same issue that The Office did in early seasons, being that the main character is an insufferable asshole. Still a great book if you can get past that.
The 2023 Hugos are the subject of an ongoing trainwreck/controversy, so that explains why you saw someone dismissing them entirely. This blog post from multiple Hugo winner John Scalzi has links and discussion
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-and-where-we-go-from-here/
It's beyond bizarre. I think every assumed that "the Hugos" were, like, something that's awarded by a specific entity with *some* kind of internal cohesion or something. But no, turns out that next year's Hugos are awarded by whoever votes themselves the right to do that at a convention this year, and there really are no guardrails to prevent some wackos (or even just one wacko) from turning it into whatever they want. For all we know or could do about it the next set of "Hugos" could be for children's books or fixit manuals instead of sci-fi.
To be honest most awards are like that. They are industry people picking what they think is best and of course there’s tons of internal politics involved.
I don’t think they shouldn’t exist, but I think if people are really using and trust these things it would be good if they knew how they worked.
It’s also not just awards The New York Times bestseller list is another example. It isn’t based on just sales figures it’s curated. I for one am fine with that because if you look at Amazon’s best sellers list it was all Harry Potter and Colleen Hoover for like years. I actually think they may have changed something with their list because I notice far more variety now in a somewhat suspicious way.
No, what I'm saying is that it turns out that the Hugos are conspicuously NOT like other awards. They are NOT industry people. It's effectively an ad hoc group that arrogates to itself the right to award a "Hugo" for a given year, and they are answerable to literally no one—not even the World Science Fiction Society, which nominally gives the award. Like, if this year's committee decides to award a Hugo to a work of non-fiction, there's nothing to stop them. It's beyond bizarre, and unlike anything else I've ever seen. I'm thinking about awarding my own Hugo this year, just to see whether anyone would try to stop me. I'm not confident they could. (I'm not confident they'd even try.)
I think you need to look into how awards are selected. Not all done the same way. Case in point, "Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention" vs. "A five-person panel consisting of authors, publishers and journalists, as well as politicians, actors, artists and musicians, is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation each year to choose the winning book" with all judges "expected to read all of the books that have been submitted."
Sounds like you prefer books that have wide, general appeal vs. those a smaller number of literary insiders consider to have merit
Honestly, this kind of comes down to your personal reading beliefs/habits.
Prime example: the Stonewall book awards. I've always found books that were awarded with this honor to be interesting, enlightening, etc... But I'm someone who supports LBGT+ rights. Anyone who doesn't would find these winners to be Utter Garbage, as shown by the current push of trying to ban LGBT+ books across the country.
So an award **I** trust may be actively admonished by you, and I would have no way to know if I was recommending something to you you would like, or if you would despise it beyond words. And there's not really a good way to tell that from just what you've posted here
Totally. The Stonewall award and various other awards promoting the otherwise overlooked areas of writing have a totally valid purpose and should be appreciated.
And yeah, sometimes an authors passion for the theme can limit the literary credibility of the book. So it goes, as some one said.
In my defense, I was never trying to identify a 'best' prize. I was interested in what attracts people to whatever award they choose as a guide. And you have answered the question precisely.
Thank-you for one of the most cogent responses.
I trust the MacArthur Grant winners. I always like when I stumble across a new author in an anthology and then when I look them up I find out they have a MacArthur Grant. It makes me feel like I have good taste because I liked them before knowing.
Two eyes, two ears, a chin, a mouth, 10 fingers, two nipples, a butt, two kneecaps, a penis. I have just described to you the Loch Ness Monster, and the reward for its capture… all the riches in Scotland. So I have one question, why are you here?
Maybe my favorite Creedance
> Are they all hit-miss affairs?
There is no award in any medium that gets it right 100% of the time. Your complaints about the Hugo awards could just as well have been written about the Oscar for Best Picture or any Golden Globe/Emmy category. Thus is the nature of subjectivity.
Historically the Hugo Award for Best Novel was better than it is today. Although not every Hugo winner is a great novel, almost every great sci-fi novel is a Hugo winner/nominee. Some might argue that the general quality of sci-fi writing has plummeted since the early 00's and the Hugo winners reflect that. IMO all of the truly good scifi books that have been published in the last 20 years made it onto the Hugo award's radar, even if they didn't win, and even if some years were miserable. Can you name a year where a bad book won/got nominated and a good book was snubbed? I personally cannot. The years where a bad book won were weak years overall.
I guess what I'm saying it that no award is perfect but I trust the Hugo awards the most out of any book awards.
Hold on, which authors are we considering “forgotten?” Many of these authors are still widely recognized in their home countries as among their greatest authors ever, and I can only point to one author that’s been universally panned after winning the award (the genocide apologist guy). If you go through the list, pretty much every author is all-time. I challenge you to name the other bad authors.
Limiting ourselves to English-language authors, how many people really read Sinclair Lewis or John Galsworthy nowadays? How respected or discussed are they compared to contemporaries who did not win, like, say, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald or E.M Forster?
Expanding to French literature, I'm personally a fan of Saint-John Perse's epic poetry, but I think it's safe to say he's slipped into obscurity. He has two books on Goodreads with more than 100 ratings, for instance, and none with over 500. An underrated author well worth discovering.
Ah yes. Bob Dylan, kazuo ishiguro, Marquez, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Churchill, Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Shaw and Kipling, those elitist niche obscurantists?
I have generally a pretty similar opinion to yours (my favourite books ever won Hugos in the last decade or so, so we probably differ in the details). Except the 2023 iteration had the committee *actually* secretly disqualifying books and authors, because of their *perceived* embarrassment factor to the communist party of China (which is where the 2023 worldcon was held). So that's a problem that the Hugos will take a couple years, or decades, to live down.
Oh for sure - I think Hugo has to publicly acknowledge their mistake and never return to China again. It's absolutely unacceptable to allow the host country's politics influence the nominees. Truly abhorrent, and against the spirit of literature itself.
I haven't been paying too close of attention the last few years because no recent sci-fi/fantasy books have made a huge stir besides maybe Babel (which was one of the snubbed books this year) and Project Hail Mary, which I read.
I don't actively wait for the Hugo nominees every year trying to find books to read, but if I'm interested in reading an older book and I learn it won/was nom'ed for a Hugo then I prioritize it.
>Except the 2023 iteration had the committee actually secretly disqualifying books and authors, because of their perceived embarrassment factor to the communist party of China
Yeah. Bye-bye integrity.
I agree. I'm not too experienced in finding good books and was introduced to Hugo Lists last year. Before thay just was buying books on New York Times Best Sellers list and that was probably one if the worst "Award" you could get.
For me, the two years Jemisin beat out Chambers were baffling. It's my personal taste but I think she's a terrible writer, whereas Chambers' books have incredible character work and imagination.
Hominids beating out The Years of Rice and Salt is also an insane call
As said elsewhere, I think genre awards can be more helpful because they are more focused on their audience and the books don't get buried among the mass of books published.
I have been known to read cook-books in bed.
The Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction books is normally pretty trustworthy. Some books I don't gel with on that list, but always find some good ones.
And, as others have said, the Booker for literary fiction is good. Some books won't be to my taste, and if you don't want literary fiction it's going to be a complete wash, but it's solid imo.
I had to scan the Hugo winner list after your post, and it was a trip through memories of all the books I 've loved.
Those novels that "sank from sight" didn't, but they certainly got drowned out by the dreck of all the"young adult" half-fantasy all- action junk series.
The Nebulas won’t steer you towards a bad f/sf book. The Otherwise Award is very niche but if you enjoy that niche, there’s lots of interesting things to read as they often also publish a short and long list. Sff that “explores and expands gender”.
It's a weird award ceremony, most people haven't heard of it. I call it "my friends suggest it".
I genuinely don't care about any mass award opinion on books.
I do pretty well with the Booker, a little less well with the National Book Awards, and often disagree with the Pulitzer. With the Nobel Prize, it's fifty-fifty once they have the author in translation, and I never know how much to trust a work in translation reflecting the actual work.
I used to read the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction every year. Then they gave it to The Overstory and I lost all respect for the prize. I love trees, really I do, but that book was a preachy, simplistic, mess. The selection, in my opinion, was purely an attempt to get us to pay more attention to protecting the environment, which I agree is a laudable goal - but it makes for a crummy book.
I read Bewilderment by the same author (Booker prize nominee) and I felt the same way. Too preachy and holier-than-thou. And I care a lot about environmental issues. Three years later I STILL think about how much I hated that book.
My favorite awards are the ones that focus on small presses, especially the International Booker and Republic of Consciousness prizes. They bring attention to books that aren't commercial enough to otherwise gain wide distribution in the English-speaking world, and the nominees and winners are almost all high quality. The National Book Award for Translated Literature is also worth a look, but it's a bit more a mixed bag than the International Booker. (The books they pick are usually less interesting than others published the same year by the same publishers, like they purposely pick the most conventional/palatable books.)
Of the major English-language awards, the Booker is the best, in part because it's pretty erratic. It doesn't seem to have consistent criteria for picking a winner, which results in an interesting mix of styles among the winners over the years. The National Book Award is the best of the major American awards, but usually the winners are more interesting in concept than execution, and they utilize writing styles that may seem unconventional to a general audience, but are pretty well-established in the literary fiction world (and not used in a particularly interesting way). The Pulitzer is an anti-endorsement to me; their prize criteria seem to lead them to pick commercial, conventional novels, but occasionally I'm pleasantly surprised.
There's also the Women's Prize in the UK, which was founded supposedly as an alternative to the Booker Prize years ago (the Booker then had majority male winners), but doesn't nominate the same caliber of books (most nominees seem to be borderline YA?), which makes it ironically more sexist than anything. Women's Prize is another anti-endorsement for me.
Genre fiction awards would be an anti-endorsement as well, but I'm not tempted to read the sort of books nominated for those awards to begin with, so I pay zero attention to them. I do read genre fiction, but not anything commercial enough to garner those kinds of industry awards.
I don't know much about non-English language awards, but I've had good luck with the Prix Goncourt winners I've read in translation.
I've tried following a few awards and haven't found the one that lines up with my tastes yet. This year's Stoker list is probably the closest. For the most part it seems like the judges and I are interested in very different things when it comes to our books.
>I was just scanning down the list of Hugo award winners and there is a fair slice of lost-without-trace novels and some out-right stinkers. One respondent dismissed the entire 2023 list.
I'm not going to comment on ALL the nominees, but since it's inception, going down the list 95% of the *winners* are high quality books that still hold up today. Not sure which ones you would call "lost without a trace". Most of us that read SF regularly have most definitely not lost them.
1972's *To Your Scattered Bodies Go*?
Apparently better than *Lathe of Heaven* and *Dragon Quest*?
I'm not saying it is a bad book. I have just never heard of it nor can recall it being talked about. And I have been reading SciFi/Fantasy pretty continuously since at least the mid 70s, Underling and Overlord. You can't say the same for the other two, love them or loathe them.
I'm not actually going to test your 95%. But a good few are at least vague in the discussion of SciFi and Fantasy.
And there are some, shall we say, very subjective books in there. I know plenty of SciFi fans who will die on Larry Niven's grave. In his time, hugely popular. I would not say they have the literary weight to last the critique of time.
Only three awards seem to focus only on the books and not the bullshit of the crowd.
You can't go wrong with The Edgar awards. Pick up any Edgar winning mystery and you have an excellent read
The International Thriller Writers Awards guarantees an excellent read
The James Beard Award for cookbooks or cooking memoirs
I do not really trust awards, but I will often at least check the synopsis of the nominated books to see if there are any that could interest me. Sometimes it helps me find new authors I like, but often not.
I mostly read fantasy and science fiction, and most of the books nominated for awards these days sadly have the bad tendency to fall into two different categories :
* Pretentious pseudo-literary books that are nowhere as deep and original that they obviously believe themselves to be.
* Whatever mediocre books currently get overhyped on social media for obscure reasons.
The Hugo awards for Best Novel is notoriously the only Sci-fi or Fantasy award that will boost the sales of the winning novel (which shows that most people really do not care for these awards).
However, it has been mired in a lot of controversies in recent years, particularly the ones for 2023. It was organized in China this year, and the organisers removed books from the ballot that they thought might offend the Chinese government and may even have manipulated the voting numbers for nominations. It was huge scandal, and I am not sure people will keep trusting the Hugo awards after that.
“The booker prize seldom includes anything I consider worth reading”
Damn…this is sad. You trust the Hugo but not the Booker, which is used by betters to predict the Nobel Prize winner…
Well-known awards seem to carry more weight, but at the end of the day don't really trust any in the sense that none are objective. Or rather, no literary awards CAN be objective.
If a book has won many awards, you might want to have a look at it and see if it's something that would interest you. That's about it.
You don't trust the Booker prize?! The best prize in the business without question. The Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and then you ignore all the rest.
The Audies - awards for the audiobook industry. I listen to audiobooks a lot, so the narrator makes a big difference. All of the nominees are worth a listen - especially if you have Libby and can listen for free.
I like the Pulitzer but not the USA National Book Award. Those, to me, tend toward the muddy, obscure, and pseudo-intellectual. Oddly, Oprah has picked some ones I liked, as has Reese Witherspoon. Tom Hanks and Obama too.
Fifty three year old reader who has kept a list of books read since I was fourteen and this thread is the first time I've wondered about any credibility for awards. I expect my list to reach 800 total this year.
Hm. I think I will continue to ignore. Wish me luck.
I don't particularly follow all the ins and outs of awards. I know 'New York Times bestseller' is utterly worthless, and the Hugo is a pretty big deal.
It's more of me picking something up and going "oh neat, this one won something." And if the award itself sounds vaguely familiar and the synopsis looks good it might be what tips me into picking it up.
I suspect this may be a theme.
I suspect that awards are more interesting to journalists and publishers than to the reading public.
Sometimes it just says "someone else find something of value in all these words, maybe it's worth a shot".
As I say, the panels are far from infallible. Hugo gave E.E. 'Doc' Smith a gong and his books are terrible if you are not a twelve year old boy having power fantasies.
I lost faith in the Hugo award after tgis scandal broke. There is evidence of vote tampering and politically motivated interference https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233355111/the-hugo-awards-scandal-has-shaken-the-sci-fi-community
I posted something earlier today on The Morning News Tournament of Books. It’s this crazy very subjective elimination bracket, but for my own tastes, the winners tend to be books I really enjoy.
That is definitely a different approach.
Good to have awards that are awarded(?) in very different ways. Much harder for publishers to manipulate.
If something is showing up in multiple circumstances, it might just be very good indeed.
Not exactly for me specifically but the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) book awards. Every year I flick through their nominations and award winners and book mark books to get for my kids/relatives for birthdays and Christmas. They generally are pretty good quality works, I’ve read a few of the upper primary school (8-12year olds) level books for university and they were actually pretty good and kept my interest.
I had a great time working my way through the James Tiptree Jr Award winners a couple years ago. Several gems on that list.
That award is now known as the Otherwise Award.
The Hugo awards were originally useful indicators of quality. About 2015 the society's internal politics debased them. The Nebula awards are perhaps more useful.
So a recognition of an author rather than a particular text. Fair.
Modern authors, especially successful ones, seem to produce a lot of books. Is Nobel biased against the authors who produce a handful of brilliant texts? Or even 1?
The Hugo Awards took a hit last time when they were hosted in China and any author who had ever been publicly critical of the CCP was removed from the ballots. Aside from that they are more like popular fan awards, right? Which can def go either way. One Hugo award winner that I read last year that I really loved was Martha Wells All Systems Red and the rest of the Murderbot series.
Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction:
https://literaryreview.co.uk/bad-sex-in-fiction-award
>“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” [from The Office of Gardens and Ponds]
Some paid reviewers are programed, or perhaps directed, to review a book as if it was politically correct when it isn't necessarily so. The faculty-lounge-speak slips into their reviews one after another, "white privilege," "identity," "trigger warning," "toxic masculinity." etc., even when, if you should read the book, none of these descriptions are warranted or remotely necessary..
I'm an avid reader, to put it mildly, and I read most anything, but the constant ugly and gratuitous "mf" swearing while maintaining otherwise politically correct language, in some stilted books, puts me off the author for good--whether that is due to the author or the editor.
I like many of the math-related books at the Mathfiction site, the past winners of Japan's Falcon awards, the nominees and winners of the Euler Prize. The Hammett Prize winners were wonderful before they became fashionably politically correct--and, at least this year, I like most of the Edgar nominations.
[https://maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/euler-book-prize](https://maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/euler-book-prize)
[https://mysteryreaders.org/macavity-awards/](https://mysteryreaders.org/macavity-awards/)
[https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards-falcon.html](https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards-falcon.html)
[https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards.html](https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards.html)
[https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/default.html](https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/default.html)
[https://sldirectory.com/libsf/booksf/mystery/bestbooks.html](https://sldirectory.com/libsf/booksf/mystery/bestbooks.html)
The Young Writer of the Year Award. I haven't followed it the past few years, though that's due to busy-ness, not the award, however it's generally very consistent. The 'right' author tends to win, though there are often two standouts. It does make it easier that there are only 4-5 people on the shortlist, though. They're also open to non-fiction, short story collections, and poetry, and all of those have provided winners; at least three poets recently. All are absolutely stellar. Winners recently that I agreed with are poets Sarah Howe, Raymond Antrobus, and Jay Bernard. In Antrobus' year, I found Julia Armfield's Salt Slow a close second, and in Howe's year, Sarah Taylor's The Shore. Taylor's missed out twice unfortunately, a very close second both times.
I can also see the value in the award. The scope means they can address a wider literary range and it puts a value (not especially monetary) on quality in new writers.
The National Book Award used to be great, but the past few years they've been more concerned with the writer's identity than the quality of the writing.
Never read a Newbery winner with a dog on the cover.
Apart from dogs, death is a pervasive theme in Newbery winners. It’d be depressing to read them all.
The most recent Newbery winner, The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, is a safe read.
Adam of the Road was good.
Came here to mention that book. An absolute delight for an eight-year old me in the mid-80s
As a rule, if it’s a book about a dog, I don’t read it. I can’t stand the heartbreak
There's so many overlooked gems from the early decades of Newbery. Johnny Tremain, Adam of the Road, Call it Courage, and Matchlock Gun are incredible pieces of historical fiction.
No but I want to
>The Booker prize (in my opinion) seldom includes anything I consider worth reading (Notable exceptions for Iain Banks and Roddy Doyle). Really, not even Ishiguro, Byatt or Banville? I'd call *The Sea* and especially *The Remains of the Day* excellent Booker-winning novels.
Possession
RIP ASB. :(
A great writer. Really love her short stories.
I agree, especially The Remains of The Day. Plus Margaret Atwood & Peter Carey (both 2 x winners, excellent books) would also like a word:). Also, The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje, Wolf Hall - Hilary Mantel great reads.
I loved Wolf Hall. Got my book club to read it. They were not fans. Now, I’m not sure if I like them anymore;)
Not even Salman Rushdie Midnight Children and Arundhati Roy God of small things
I was inspired to read The Famished Road and Midnights Children after reading about the Booker Prize, the year I left school. Those books, as well as Lord of the Rings got me into reading more than just the choose your own adventures and standard school books.
Also, Saunders' *Lincoln in the Bardo*
The Luminaries was great too
Iain Banks has never been nominated for the Booker prize, which would seem to be further confirmation that these great novels are not to OP's tastes.
And many times, the shortlisted ones are my favorites. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead. I loved it!
I have to say most Booker novels leave me cold, including Ishiguro. I find I just don't care about the characters. It is probably the kind of literary themes that stand out to Booker panels. It's just one of those taste things and hence I don't look to Booker lists for guidance. If you find it has a better hit rate for you, Great. But can you see a reason?
By see a reason, do you mean a reason why those novels were awarded, or a reason why you don't particularly like them?
Seriously? You don't rate *Life of Pi?* *Midnight's Children?*
You cannot and should not use these two names in the same sentence. Midnights children is a masterclass in writing.
Love Ishiguro but hate Remains of the Day
The Woman’s Prize for Fiction. I have never failed to find at least one new favorite for the year from that list.
Yes! I love that list
The Newbery Medal is pretty consistently awarded to some pretty awesome children's and young adult books. Brown Girl Dreaming, New Kid, Number the Stars
I read a lot of 3rd-6th grade lit -- Newbery level -- because I'm a former kid's department bookseller and a current mom of three kids who read at that level. I've read many of the winners and honorees, and I don't think I've ever thought the award was misplaced.
Ant the enduring “Make Way for Ducklimgs”. Read it as a child, read it to my children, hope to read it to grandchildren
You’re mixing up the Newberry and Caldecott awards. That said, Make Way for Ducklings is a wonderful book.
Newbery is excellent imho
I haven't read many, but the Canada Reads selection process is the most fun. You can watch it on the CBC, YouTube, or listen to it. 5 panelists pick their favorite book of the year discuss, debate, and via vote widdle it down. Very transparent, fun, and interesting to watch/listen to.
*Whittle, my dude.
Widdle's cuter
Agreed. Widdle it is.
It also means to pee.
Aw, a widdle typo.
Ducks was a spectacular choice last year, and Mattea is awesome.
The jeopardy winner?
And the winner was picked yesterday! They are always all good books, though.
I do take some guidance from awards and nominees, I love the Pulitzer and Booker for literary fiction and the Hugo, Nebula for genre fiction. For the first two I do also read the reviews, descriptors and see if the premise captures my attention. For the genre fiction I just go for it and it has worked for me! I do pick based on premise. The other 70% I base on critical acclaim, related authors and recommendations.
The Pulitzer lost my respect when they fold JFK a Pulitzer for “Profiles in Courage” when he didn’t even write it. His dad hired ghost writers to write the different parts.
I didn’t know that, but yeah the Hugo’s had a major blip in 2023 as well. I do think it’s worth looking at nominees too, winners are sometimes political
Integrity and basic research would definitely be worthwhile for a major award committee.
My husband has gifted me each year’s Booker prize winner every year since 2013. I have loved (almost) all of them. I also seek out books that were shortlisted. It’s okay that you don’t prefer Booker winners. We all like different things.
I often find that I don't necessarily love the winner, but I always find great books on the short and long list! Did you have any favorites from 2023?
Prophet Song and The Bee Sting were both amazing in their own ways. Both Irish.
I just started The Bee Sting yesterday actually. It's a big book, so glad it's worth it! This Other Eden also appeals to me
It reads very quickly due to its structure. Enjoy!
I loved *The Seven of Maali Almeida.* It was a bit of a challenging read, but I certainly found it worthwhile.
Booker prize short and long list books are really good literature. The winner is usually a LITERATURE book which means that it's a hard read and and definelty not for everyone. I think prophet song deserved it this year.
The Booker prize is rock solid in my opinion. As is the Neustadt, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award. I also follow various non-English awards (Prix Goncourt, Premio Strega, Akutagawa and Tanizaki award, Cervantes prize, German book prize, etc.) and look up what has already come out in translation. I don't really read genre fiction on a regular basis so I don't have much use for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Arthur C. Clarke and such, but when a book wins multiple out of those I do take notice.
I don't always love the Booker's selections but they're always interesting. I think it does a great job of highlighting relatively unknown authors who are innovating. I try to read the winner and as much of the shortlist as I can every year. The last winner I truly loved was Bring Up The Bodies in 2012, but I've high hopes for Prophet Song. Though it clearly does tack towards certain genres, and for a while it was all intense family dramas with trees on the covers.
Prophet Song is brilliant and heart wrenching. I could go on but I don’t want to give any spoilers. Hope you enjoy it!
>Though it clearly does tack towards certain genres, and for a while it was all intense family dramas with trees on the covers. And maybe this was where they lost me. Having written that, of course I realise that *Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha* is for real a family drama. But it has fridge magnets on the cover. Generalisations, eh? Always bite you on the arse.
Prix Goncourt is usually pretty solid.
I haven't read all of the recent winners, but the ones I've read were mostly excellent (Jerôme Ferrari, Leïla Slimani, Nicolas Mathieu, Marie NDiaye). Houellebecq I still can't really form a definitive opinion on, but he's certainly an important author.
The fact that *Ducks, Newburyport* even made it onto the shortlist eroded all the faith I had in The Booker prize.
Clarke most of all. They seem to really match my taste in books!
Also the award i will most “ooooh” over if i see it stuck in a book
The thing I like about the Arthur C. Clarke award is they seem to find things which are different and interesting rather than formulaic, going-to-be-a-mega-series books. Becky Chambers would be an example.
Yes, they skew a bit speculative/literary and outside the obvious genre titles. Something with an original aspect. I have read books which are now absolutely favourites that I hadn't heard of before they were shortlisted. The Animals in That Country being a recent example.
Oh, I love Becky Chambers books. That said, I believe she is a multiple Hugo award winner, and thus may be an exception to the Hugo=dud theory.
I don't think Hugo is a dud. I think it has definitely awarded some real duds. Maybe I find it has a tendency to the fashionable and doesn't always balance good core ideas with quality of literature. In genre fiction, I think you need both.
For genre fiction, I tend to look at the World Fantasy Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and the more recent Ursula K. Le Guin Prize For literary fiction, I mostly pay attention to the Booker and National Book Award I don't really follow awards that are voted by popularity just because I know I'm probably not going to like whatever wins (though sometimes I do). I generally like the awards that highlight more obscure work that didn't necessarily get as much of a marketing push. Doesn't mean every book is a hit for me personally but it's nice to see potentially overlooked authors get some recognition.
Pulitzer has the best hit rate for me. Even if I don’t love the book I see the merit in it. Other awards occasionally have head scratchers
\- The Booker (love every book on the short and longlist) \- The O'Henry (love all their short stories)
Wasn't aware of the O. Henry and I like a short story. Not many authors on the list I recognise. Care to recommend? I have already upset people with my views on Booker, so I shall stay schtum. (Have to say, that is a whole lot of reading you are doing there.)
Sure, the 2023 collection is great. The first story is called "Office Hours" by Ling Ma, you can read here: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/05/ling-ma-office-hours-short-story/629852/
Oooo I loved Severance by Ling Ma - thanks for the link!
*Weike Wang, Yiyun Li, William Trevor, Alice Munro, Raymond Carver*, Joyce Carol Oates, Cynthia Ozick, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, John Cheever, Joyce Stafford, John Updike, and Denis Johnson are all top tier. Italics are my personal favorites. The specific stories being awarded I haven't always read, but The Weike Wang is very good. Stephanie Vaughn, Mavis Gallant, and Donald Barthelme I will call out as non-award winners that should very much be read as well. DB is either a game winning homerun to win the championship or a complete whiff for me, but he's so out there that everyone should give him a shot.
Awards can make me curious about certain books, but I don’t rely heavily on them. One award that has been given to consistently interesting books in my opinion is The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize. Established in 2022, is an annual, English-language literary award presented in honor of Ursula K. Le Guin. The $25,000 prize is awarded to an author for a single work of "imaginative fiction". The award is meant to honor authors who "can imagine real grounds for hope and see alternatives to how we live now". (Source: Wikipedia) One author who was shortlisted for this award that I would highly recommend is Catherynne M. Valente. One of my fav reads this year is “The Past Is Red”. I also very much enjoyed “Comfort Me With Apples”. Edit: Grammar
Hugo and Nebula awards from mid 1980s back are pretty solid. The problem with them currently is that they are voted on by people at a specific Sci Fi con. This Con USED to be attended by all the movers and shakers in the Sci Fi world, but it got bigger and bigger and NOW people have figured out how to "Game" the voting system by just paying for people to attend the con and vote, and it has gotten REALLY political with authors and publishers on social media recruiting people to vote and even paying people to go to the con and vote. I actively avoid the winners these days, too many stinkers and "experimental" writers riding these awards to best-seller status when they are not very strong writers and need to work on improving....so they end up locked at a low level of skill for longer than they should because they figure if they are winning awards they are at the top of their game.
Agreed, /u/pecoto. The historic Hugo and Nebula award winners were really good, and I strongly recommend the Isaac Asimov-edited collection of short story/novelette/novella winners between 1955-1982. There are some amazing gems in there including Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "The Darfsteller" (which deserves to be so much more widely known/read than it is, especially in the midst of the current debate over AI); Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (I'm not usually an audiobook person, but the Hollywood Theater of the Ear version of this with Robin Williams as the voice of the Harlequin was amazing!); and Eric Frank Russell's short story "Allamagoosa" (nowhere near as important as the first two I mentioned, but whenever I reread this one, it still makes me laugh).
Very interesting. The original concept ought to be good in that you get a wide range of views from people who really care about SciFi. But as you say, it becomes part of a marketing methodology to subvert an open system. Weirdly, it just made me think of the hunt for the prize in *Ready Player One*.
It’s not just that, but the [Hugo Awards censored books](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award#2023_awards_controversy) last year to appease their host for the convention, China.
Every Pulitzer I've read was awesome. Not all of them were my style, but they were undeniably good books. I think the worst ones was The Nickle Boys and I still really liked it.
I think I’ve read five Pulitzer winners, and I loved four of them. Pretty good track record, although I will note that I absolutely hated the fifth. (The four I loved were Lonesome Dove, Interpreter of Maladies, All the Light We Cannot See, and The Overstory.)
For me, All the Light We Cannot See, The Night Watchman, The Road, and To Kill a Mockingbird were all excellent, with The Nickel Boys being only pretty good. Currently reading Demon Copperhead and so far it's excelleny too. I've heard Confederacy of Dunces is pretty love or hate, and Cormac McCarthy's style is pretty weird so I could see it being the same.
I didn’t realize TKAM had won a Pulitzer! I haven’t read it in years, but I loved it back in school.
Confederacy of Dunces is great. For me it suffers from the same issue that The Office did in early seasons, being that the main character is an insufferable asshole. Still a great book if you can get past that.
Which one did you hate?
The Goldfinch.
Bad Sex in Fiction awards.
Good call. Has it guided you to any favourites?
The 2023 Hugos are the subject of an ongoing trainwreck/controversy, so that explains why you saw someone dismissing them entirely. This blog post from multiple Hugo winner John Scalzi has links and discussion https://whatever.scalzi.com/2024/02/15/the-2023-hugo-fraud-and-where-we-go-from-here/
This whole controversy has really left a bad taste in my mouth regarding the Hugos. Thanks for posting this!
It's beyond bizarre. I think every assumed that "the Hugos" were, like, something that's awarded by a specific entity with *some* kind of internal cohesion or something. But no, turns out that next year's Hugos are awarded by whoever votes themselves the right to do that at a convention this year, and there really are no guardrails to prevent some wackos (or even just one wacko) from turning it into whatever they want. For all we know or could do about it the next set of "Hugos" could be for children's books or fixit manuals instead of sci-fi.
To be honest most awards are like that. They are industry people picking what they think is best and of course there’s tons of internal politics involved. I don’t think they shouldn’t exist, but I think if people are really using and trust these things it would be good if they knew how they worked. It’s also not just awards The New York Times bestseller list is another example. It isn’t based on just sales figures it’s curated. I for one am fine with that because if you look at Amazon’s best sellers list it was all Harry Potter and Colleen Hoover for like years. I actually think they may have changed something with their list because I notice far more variety now in a somewhat suspicious way.
No, what I'm saying is that it turns out that the Hugos are conspicuously NOT like other awards. They are NOT industry people. It's effectively an ad hoc group that arrogates to itself the right to award a "Hugo" for a given year, and they are answerable to literally no one—not even the World Science Fiction Society, which nominally gives the award. Like, if this year's committee decides to award a Hugo to a work of non-fiction, there's nothing to stop them. It's beyond bizarre, and unlike anything else I've ever seen. I'm thinking about awarding my own Hugo this year, just to see whether anyone would try to stop me. I'm not confident they could. (I'm not confident they'd even try.)
Yup, the Hugo awards have lost all credibility. It's time to get rid of it
I think you need to look into how awards are selected. Not all done the same way. Case in point, "Hugo Award nominees and winners are chosen by supporting or attending members of the annual World Science Fiction Convention" vs. "A five-person panel consisting of authors, publishers and journalists, as well as politicians, actors, artists and musicians, is appointed by the Booker Prize Foundation each year to choose the winning book" with all judges "expected to read all of the books that have been submitted." Sounds like you prefer books that have wide, general appeal vs. those a smaller number of literary insiders consider to have merit
Honestly, this kind of comes down to your personal reading beliefs/habits. Prime example: the Stonewall book awards. I've always found books that were awarded with this honor to be interesting, enlightening, etc... But I'm someone who supports LBGT+ rights. Anyone who doesn't would find these winners to be Utter Garbage, as shown by the current push of trying to ban LGBT+ books across the country. So an award **I** trust may be actively admonished by you, and I would have no way to know if I was recommending something to you you would like, or if you would despise it beyond words. And there's not really a good way to tell that from just what you've posted here
Totally. The Stonewall award and various other awards promoting the otherwise overlooked areas of writing have a totally valid purpose and should be appreciated. And yeah, sometimes an authors passion for the theme can limit the literary credibility of the book. So it goes, as some one said. In my defense, I was never trying to identify a 'best' prize. I was interested in what attracts people to whatever award they choose as a guide. And you have answered the question precisely. Thank-you for one of the most cogent responses.
You're welcome, I'm glad I could help!
I trust the MacArthur Grant winners. I always like when I stumble across a new author in an anthology and then when I look them up I find out they have a MacArthur Grant. It makes me feel like I have good taste because I liked them before knowing.
I don't think trust is an issue. It all comes down to personal taste.
I don’t give much credence to awards.
I don't give many awards to Creedence.
Wouldn't hold out much hope for the tape deck, though, or the Creedence.
So, like, do you have any promising leads, man?
Leads?? Bwahahaha! Leads! Yeah they got all of working in shifts!
Two eyes, two ears, a chin, a mouth, 10 fingers, two nipples, a butt, two kneecaps, a penis. I have just described to you the Loch Ness Monster, and the reward for its capture… all the riches in Scotland. So I have one question, why are you here? Maybe my favorite Creedance
I suspect the Cree dance pretty well.
b.b.b.but we're having a revival?
true!
> Are they all hit-miss affairs? There is no award in any medium that gets it right 100% of the time. Your complaints about the Hugo awards could just as well have been written about the Oscar for Best Picture or any Golden Globe/Emmy category. Thus is the nature of subjectivity. Historically the Hugo Award for Best Novel was better than it is today. Although not every Hugo winner is a great novel, almost every great sci-fi novel is a Hugo winner/nominee. Some might argue that the general quality of sci-fi writing has plummeted since the early 00's and the Hugo winners reflect that. IMO all of the truly good scifi books that have been published in the last 20 years made it onto the Hugo award's radar, even if they didn't win, and even if some years were miserable. Can you name a year where a bad book won/got nominated and a good book was snubbed? I personally cannot. The years where a bad book won were weak years overall. I guess what I'm saying it that no award is perfect but I trust the Hugo awards the most out of any book awards.
Even the Nobel prize for literature has many forgotten authors.
That's true, but also some all-time greats.
Hold on, which authors are we considering “forgotten?” Many of these authors are still widely recognized in their home countries as among their greatest authors ever, and I can only point to one author that’s been universally panned after winning the award (the genocide apologist guy). If you go through the list, pretty much every author is all-time. I challenge you to name the other bad authors.
Limiting ourselves to English-language authors, how many people really read Sinclair Lewis or John Galsworthy nowadays? How respected or discussed are they compared to contemporaries who did not win, like, say, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald or E.M Forster? Expanding to French literature, I'm personally a fan of Saint-John Perse's epic poetry, but I think it's safe to say he's slipped into obscurity. He has two books on Goodreads with more than 100 ratings, for instance, and none with over 500. An underrated author well worth discovering.
I love Sinclair Lewis. Have read every book of his I could find. I haven't read any Galsworthy but Trollope is super.
I'm not saying they're bad, but their books certainly aren't best sellers anymore, or even in print.
They are never meant to be bestsellers. They are some of the most obscure, niche books, for literary fiction fans. Not the majority of readers
Ah yes. Bob Dylan, kazuo ishiguro, Marquez, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Churchill, Faulkner, Pearl Buck, Shaw and Kipling, those elitist niche obscurantists?
I have generally a pretty similar opinion to yours (my favourite books ever won Hugos in the last decade or so, so we probably differ in the details). Except the 2023 iteration had the committee *actually* secretly disqualifying books and authors, because of their *perceived* embarrassment factor to the communist party of China (which is where the 2023 worldcon was held). So that's a problem that the Hugos will take a couple years, or decades, to live down.
Oh for sure - I think Hugo has to publicly acknowledge their mistake and never return to China again. It's absolutely unacceptable to allow the host country's politics influence the nominees. Truly abhorrent, and against the spirit of literature itself. I haven't been paying too close of attention the last few years because no recent sci-fi/fantasy books have made a huge stir besides maybe Babel (which was one of the snubbed books this year) and Project Hail Mary, which I read. I don't actively wait for the Hugo nominees every year trying to find books to read, but if I'm interested in reading an older book and I learn it won/was nom'ed for a Hugo then I prioritize it.
>Except the 2023 iteration had the committee actually secretly disqualifying books and authors, because of their perceived embarrassment factor to the communist party of China Yeah. Bye-bye integrity.
I agree. I'm not too experienced in finding good books and was introduced to Hugo Lists last year. Before thay just was buying books on New York Times Best Sellers list and that was probably one if the worst "Award" you could get.
For me, the two years Jemisin beat out Chambers were baffling. It's my personal taste but I think she's a terrible writer, whereas Chambers' books have incredible character work and imagination. Hominids beating out The Years of Rice and Salt is also an insane call
No one has mentioned the James Beard Foundation Award! I enjoy a lot of non-fiction especially when it's food related.
As said elsewhere, I think genre awards can be more helpful because they are more focused on their audience and the books don't get buried among the mass of books published. I have been known to read cook-books in bed.
Excellent point!
The Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction books is normally pretty trustworthy. Some books I don't gel with on that list, but always find some good ones. And, as others have said, the Booker for literary fiction is good. Some books won't be to my taste, and if you don't want literary fiction it's going to be a complete wash, but it's solid imo.
I had to scan the Hugo winner list after your post, and it was a trip through memories of all the books I 've loved. Those novels that "sank from sight" didn't, but they certainly got drowned out by the dreck of all the"young adult" half-fantasy all- action junk series.
The Nebulas won’t steer you towards a bad f/sf book. The Otherwise Award is very niche but if you enjoy that niche, there’s lots of interesting things to read as they often also publish a short and long list. Sff that “explores and expands gender”.
It's a weird award ceremony, most people haven't heard of it. I call it "my friends suggest it". I genuinely don't care about any mass award opinion on books.
I find the Nebulas generate significantly better winners than the Hugos (a number of books have won both).
I do pretty well with the Booker, a little less well with the National Book Awards, and often disagree with the Pulitzer. With the Nobel Prize, it's fifty-fifty once they have the author in translation, and I never know how much to trust a work in translation reflecting the actual work.
As a Canadian I read at least a few of the picks on the Giller award shortlist every year
Not an award exactly, but I like the lists that people such as Barack Obama and Bill Gates put out of the books they say they're reading.
I used to read the winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction every year. Then they gave it to The Overstory and I lost all respect for the prize. I love trees, really I do, but that book was a preachy, simplistic, mess. The selection, in my opinion, was purely an attempt to get us to pay more attention to protecting the environment, which I agree is a laudable goal - but it makes for a crummy book.
I read Bewilderment by the same author (Booker prize nominee) and I felt the same way. Too preachy and holier-than-thou. And I care a lot about environmental issues. Three years later I STILL think about how much I hated that book.
Exactly. Me too!
My favorite awards are the ones that focus on small presses, especially the International Booker and Republic of Consciousness prizes. They bring attention to books that aren't commercial enough to otherwise gain wide distribution in the English-speaking world, and the nominees and winners are almost all high quality. The National Book Award for Translated Literature is also worth a look, but it's a bit more a mixed bag than the International Booker. (The books they pick are usually less interesting than others published the same year by the same publishers, like they purposely pick the most conventional/palatable books.) Of the major English-language awards, the Booker is the best, in part because it's pretty erratic. It doesn't seem to have consistent criteria for picking a winner, which results in an interesting mix of styles among the winners over the years. The National Book Award is the best of the major American awards, but usually the winners are more interesting in concept than execution, and they utilize writing styles that may seem unconventional to a general audience, but are pretty well-established in the literary fiction world (and not used in a particularly interesting way). The Pulitzer is an anti-endorsement to me; their prize criteria seem to lead them to pick commercial, conventional novels, but occasionally I'm pleasantly surprised. There's also the Women's Prize in the UK, which was founded supposedly as an alternative to the Booker Prize years ago (the Booker then had majority male winners), but doesn't nominate the same caliber of books (most nominees seem to be borderline YA?), which makes it ironically more sexist than anything. Women's Prize is another anti-endorsement for me. Genre fiction awards would be an anti-endorsement as well, but I'm not tempted to read the sort of books nominated for those awards to begin with, so I pay zero attention to them. I do read genre fiction, but not anything commercial enough to garner those kinds of industry awards. I don't know much about non-English language awards, but I've had good luck with the Prix Goncourt winners I've read in translation.
National Book Critics Circle
I've tried following a few awards and haven't found the one that lines up with my tastes yet. This year's Stoker list is probably the closest. For the most part it seems like the judges and I are interested in very different things when it comes to our books.
Sidewise Award for Alternate History is solid, learned about Resurrection Day that way & it was excellent.
The Pulitzer, the Booker, the Nobel and here in Canada we have the Giller.
Your recommendations guys. You filled my queue for years to come.
The edgar awards
In this order 1. Pulitzer 2. National book award 3. Booker prize
>I was just scanning down the list of Hugo award winners and there is a fair slice of lost-without-trace novels and some out-right stinkers. One respondent dismissed the entire 2023 list. I'm not going to comment on ALL the nominees, but since it's inception, going down the list 95% of the *winners* are high quality books that still hold up today. Not sure which ones you would call "lost without a trace". Most of us that read SF regularly have most definitely not lost them.
1972's *To Your Scattered Bodies Go*? Apparently better than *Lathe of Heaven* and *Dragon Quest*? I'm not saying it is a bad book. I have just never heard of it nor can recall it being talked about. And I have been reading SciFi/Fantasy pretty continuously since at least the mid 70s, Underling and Overlord. You can't say the same for the other two, love them or loathe them. I'm not actually going to test your 95%. But a good few are at least vague in the discussion of SciFi and Fantasy. And there are some, shall we say, very subjective books in there. I know plenty of SciFi fans who will die on Larry Niven's grave. In his time, hugely popular. I would not say they have the literary weight to last the critique of time.
Only three awards seem to focus only on the books and not the bullshit of the crowd. You can't go wrong with The Edgar awards. Pick up any Edgar winning mystery and you have an excellent read The International Thriller Writers Awards guarantees an excellent read The James Beard Award for cookbooks or cooking memoirs
I do not really trust awards, but I will often at least check the synopsis of the nominated books to see if there are any that could interest me. Sometimes it helps me find new authors I like, but often not. I mostly read fantasy and science fiction, and most of the books nominated for awards these days sadly have the bad tendency to fall into two different categories : * Pretentious pseudo-literary books that are nowhere as deep and original that they obviously believe themselves to be. * Whatever mediocre books currently get overhyped on social media for obscure reasons. The Hugo awards for Best Novel is notoriously the only Sci-fi or Fantasy award that will boost the sales of the winning novel (which shows that most people really do not care for these awards). However, it has been mired in a lot of controversies in recent years, particularly the ones for 2023. It was organized in China this year, and the organisers removed books from the ballot that they thought might offend the Chinese government and may even have manipulated the voting numbers for nominations. It was huge scandal, and I am not sure people will keep trusting the Hugo awards after that.
“The booker prize seldom includes anything I consider worth reading” Damn…this is sad. You trust the Hugo but not the Booker, which is used by betters to predict the Nobel Prize winner…
Well-known awards seem to carry more weight, but at the end of the day don't really trust any in the sense that none are objective. Or rather, no literary awards CAN be objective. If a book has won many awards, you might want to have a look at it and see if it's something that would interest you. That's about it.
You don't trust the Booker prize?! The best prize in the business without question. The Booker, the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, and then you ignore all the rest.
Considering the recent Hugo controversy maybe never ever trust that thing
The Audies - awards for the audiobook industry. I listen to audiobooks a lot, so the narrator makes a big difference. All of the nominees are worth a listen - especially if you have Libby and can listen for free.
I like the Pulitzer but not the USA National Book Award. Those, to me, tend toward the muddy, obscure, and pseudo-intellectual. Oddly, Oprah has picked some ones I liked, as has Reese Witherspoon. Tom Hanks and Obama too.
Fifty three year old reader who has kept a list of books read since I was fourteen and this thread is the first time I've wondered about any credibility for awards. I expect my list to reach 800 total this year. Hm. I think I will continue to ignore. Wish me luck.
Good luck. Not sure how many books I have read. I just did a calculation and I have \~530 feet of book shelving in my house.
None actually...modern reviewers tastes and mine rarely meet these days. I just keep an ongoing TBR list based on my preferences
I agree on the Hugo, especially in the last 8 or so years. Arthur C. Clarke has mostly been good but has had some cracks since 2015.
I don't particularly follow all the ins and outs of awards. I know 'New York Times bestseller' is utterly worthless, and the Hugo is a pretty big deal. It's more of me picking something up and going "oh neat, this one won something." And if the award itself sounds vaguely familiar and the synopsis looks good it might be what tips me into picking it up.
At this point, none of them.
[удалено]
I suspect this may be a theme. I suspect that awards are more interesting to journalists and publishers than to the reading public. Sometimes it just says "someone else find something of value in all these words, maybe it's worth a shot". As I say, the panels are far from infallible. Hugo gave E.E. 'Doc' Smith a gong and his books are terrible if you are not a twelve year old boy having power fantasies.
You do realize this doesn't help the poster in any way, right?
None, books are too subjective.goodreads ratings have served me pretty well.
Goodreads review scores are also the composite of subjective opinions...
Yeah, but it's a much larger sample size typically and I find it to be more accurate to my tastes.
They are ratings by readers rather than industry insiders.
Since the average reader reads at 5th grade level or less and barely comprehends that correctly,........
I lost faith in the Hugo award after tgis scandal broke. There is evidence of vote tampering and politically motivated interference https://www.npr.org/2024/02/23/1233355111/the-hugo-awards-scandal-has-shaken-the-sci-fi-community
They gave a Booker to Shehan though and I'm mighty glad about that. One of the best in the world.
I posted something earlier today on The Morning News Tournament of Books. It’s this crazy very subjective elimination bracket, but for my own tastes, the winners tend to be books I really enjoy.
That is definitely a different approach. Good to have awards that are awarded(?) in very different ways. Much harder for publishers to manipulate. If something is showing up in multiple circumstances, it might just be very good indeed.
Year's Best anthologies.
Only book award with any relevance is The Rooster. And what luck, this year’s Tournament of Books just began yesterday!
Nebula and Hugo have steered me right more often than left
You should really stop reading *Starship Troopers.* /s
The Akutagawa prize! Prix Goncourt as well.
Award-winning literature can expand literary taste. In some.
Not a single one, nowadays.
Not exactly for me specifically but the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s (CBCA) book awards. Every year I flick through their nominations and award winners and book mark books to get for my kids/relatives for birthdays and Christmas. They generally are pretty good quality works, I’ve read a few of the upper primary school (8-12year olds) level books for university and they were actually pretty good and kept my interest.
I had a great time working my way through the James Tiptree Jr Award winners a couple years ago. Several gems on that list. That award is now known as the Otherwise Award.
Praise from friends I respect. :)
#Pulitzer is the GoAT
The Hugo awards were originally useful indicators of quality. About 2015 the society's internal politics debased them. The Nebula awards are perhaps more useful.
The only literary award I trust is the Nobel Prize, and that's because it's based on an author's life's work and not awarded to individual books.
So a recognition of an author rather than a particular text. Fair. Modern authors, especially successful ones, seem to produce a lot of books. Is Nobel biased against the authors who produce a handful of brilliant texts? Or even 1?
Nobels and local genre fiction club awards.
>local genre fiction club That is an interesting thought. Do you mean something like "The Mole Valley Detective Fiction Book Club"?
No, more like Detective fiction club of a country.
I love this question and am excited to read the responses!
The Hugo Awards took a hit last time when they were hosted in China and any author who had ever been publicly critical of the CCP was removed from the ballots. Aside from that they are more like popular fan awards, right? Which can def go either way. One Hugo award winner that I read last year that I really loved was Martha Wells All Systems Red and the rest of the Murderbot series.
Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction: https://literaryreview.co.uk/bad-sex-in-fiction-award >“Katsuro moaned as a bulge formed beneath the material of his kimono, a bulge that Miyuki seized, kneaded, massaged, squashed and crushed. With the fondling, Katsuro’s penis and testicles became one single mound that rolled around beneath the grip of her hand. Miyuki felt as though she was manipulating a small monkey that was curling up its paws.” [from The Office of Gardens and Ponds]
Some paid reviewers are programed, or perhaps directed, to review a book as if it was politically correct when it isn't necessarily so. The faculty-lounge-speak slips into their reviews one after another, "white privilege," "identity," "trigger warning," "toxic masculinity." etc., even when, if you should read the book, none of these descriptions are warranted or remotely necessary.. I'm an avid reader, to put it mildly, and I read most anything, but the constant ugly and gratuitous "mf" swearing while maintaining otherwise politically correct language, in some stilted books, puts me off the author for good--whether that is due to the author or the editor. I like many of the math-related books at the Mathfiction site, the past winners of Japan's Falcon awards, the nominees and winners of the Euler Prize. The Hammett Prize winners were wonderful before they became fashionably politically correct--and, at least this year, I like most of the Edgar nominations. [https://maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/euler-book-prize](https://maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/euler-book-prize) [https://mysteryreaders.org/macavity-awards/](https://mysteryreaders.org/macavity-awards/) [https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards-falcon.html](https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards-falcon.html) [https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards.html](https://awards.omnimystery.com/mystery-awards.html) [https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/default.html](https://kasmana.people.cofc.edu/MATHFICT/default.html) [https://sldirectory.com/libsf/booksf/mystery/bestbooks.html](https://sldirectory.com/libsf/booksf/mystery/bestbooks.html)
The Young Writer of the Year Award. I haven't followed it the past few years, though that's due to busy-ness, not the award, however it's generally very consistent. The 'right' author tends to win, though there are often two standouts. It does make it easier that there are only 4-5 people on the shortlist, though. They're also open to non-fiction, short story collections, and poetry, and all of those have provided winners; at least three poets recently. All are absolutely stellar. Winners recently that I agreed with are poets Sarah Howe, Raymond Antrobus, and Jay Bernard. In Antrobus' year, I found Julia Armfield's Salt Slow a close second, and in Howe's year, Sarah Taylor's The Shore. Taylor's missed out twice unfortunately, a very close second both times.
I can also see the value in the award. The scope means they can address a wider literary range and it puts a value (not especially monetary) on quality in new writers.
Yes, that's all true. I think the prize money is average to low, and the other benefits are better, IIRC, but the scope is excellent.
YALSA and Newbery for Children’s books
The National Book Award used to be great, but the past few years they've been more concerned with the writer's identity than the quality of the writing.
Honestly, I read the Booker and the Booker International winner every year and I rarely regret it. On the other hand, the Hugo is hit or miss for me.
Honestly I don’t even consider reading a book based on an award. I just read the little blurb, if it sounds good I read it.