PEN/Galbraith: Eyes on the Prize

Is it possible to judge too many bookprizes?

It is, if this little essay from a few months back is any indication. That’s a writer and publisher, long in service to literature, made weary by his required reading. It puts in mind his remark in The New Yorker some years ago to the effect that nobody in New York reads a book just to read it anymore.

Myself, I am still a newbie prizewise. Last year I judged the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for nonfiction, and this year I was chosen as a judge for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Prize — for “a distinguished book of general nonfiction possessing notable literary merit and critical perspective and illuminating important contemporary issues.”

Last year, that is, I was reading first books of nonfiction, most of them memoirs by people in their thirties. This year it’s the whole spread of less personal nonfiction (leaving out biography and autobiography) published in the past two years: history, long-form reportage, war correspondence, political argument, and plenty of books about fresh ideas in food and health and technology.

So it is that in our small apartment, which has two bathtubs, one bathtub is brimful of current hardback nonfiction, something like a hundred and forty books haphazardly arranged.

So it is that several nights a week I am on a soccer sideline or in the driver’s seat of our parked car reading ample new nonfiction books.

And reading them carefully, I like to think. For one thing, my own first book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, was given the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction a few years back – because somebody in my current position took the trouble to read it carefully.

For another, this is prize-judging, not editing and publishing. Three years away from an editing role with FSG, I am still amazed and relieved that I can read a book and consider its strengths and weaknesses without having to figure out how to fix it and publish it.

It’s hardly service, to tell the truth. It’s more like reading books just to read them.

The recipients of the PEN Literary Awards will be announced June 8, and PEN has already been praised for the diversity of the current group of judges.

25 February 2015

#books #pen literary awards
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