NerdPerfect: Book news
October 16th, 2006 by Cooper Levey-Baker in Books
So Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize. I haven’t read Pamuk, so I can’t really comment on the justice of the award, but you gotta admire the way he stood up to his own government for his right to call genocide “genocide,” despite legal action against him. The Nobel committee cited his “quest for the melancholic soul of his native city” (Istanbul) and his discovery of “new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures” as the reasons for the award. I’ll have to add him to my to-be-read shelf. The Nobel isn’t the end-all, be-all like most people think � Vladimir Nabokov didn’t even win the thing, for crying out loud! � but it’s still the biggest literary prize going, so congrats on the win, Orhan. And thank God the thing didn’t go to one of that overrated American duo, John Updike and Philip Roth.
In other nerd fare, finalists for the National Book Award have been announced and I’m quite pleased to see Richard Powers’s name on the list. His novel The Echo Maker drops tomorrow and I can’t wait to pick it up. Taylor Branch, who visited the Suncoast earlier this year, is nominated in the nonfiction category as well.
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October 16th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
it’s important to note here that mr. levey-baker has never read roth’s american pastoral, and, therefore, doesn’t know shit.