NBCC Nominees

The list of nominees for the National Book Critics Circle awards came out a couple days ago, but I couldn't really sit and concentrate on it until now. Apparently all the other book critics got all the special books last year; the only two on the list I've even read are The Life You Save May Be Your Own,which was for my personal edification, and A Tragic Honesty, a bio of Richard Yates which I called "a great job of sorting through the facts of [his] difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject's fiction," except for "a tendency to throw in disruptive foreshadowing asides."

In fairness, since I didn't actually review any fiction last year, and my tastes there include lots of genre, it's not that surprising that I'm especially weak on that category's nominees. But I would like to get around to the Tobias Wolff and Richard Powers eventually. And I do, as longtime readers know, want to read the William T. Vollmann--which either will win because voters will be impressed by its massive scope or will not win because voters will be intimidated by its massive size--and I'd also like to get around some day to the Jonathan Edwards biography.