Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to my (still unidentified and probably nonexistent) readers! I hope 2012 brought you happiness, blessings, and abundant books and that 2013 will bring even greater joys! Here's a link to a listing of some of literature's greatest annual awards and their recipients or the current nominees for 2012.

National Book Awards:
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2012.html#.UOHgsL-9Kc0
•From this list, the only book I picked up was This is How You Lose Her, which I neglected to finish. I may try it again soon but I lost the a lot of my interest in it several chapters in when the narrator changes without explanation, the new one lacking enough energy and wit to keep me entertained. Powerfully written in certain pockets, but woefully lagging in others.

National Book Critics Circle Award nominees:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/01/22/national-book-critics-circle-awards-_n_1221954.html
•I haven't read any of these books yet but they look interesting. Two books that particularly caught my attention from this list are Open City and The Marriage Plot, and I need to look into these further.

The Newberry and Caldecott Awards, both for young fiction:
http://trevorcairney.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-newbery-caldecott-medal-winners.html?m=1
•I haven't read either of the winners but I'm still intrigued by YA fiction so there's a good chance I'll try one of these down the road. Both have been highly acclaimed so far.

The Pulitzer Prize:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Pulitzer_Prize
•Perhaps one of the world's most renowned and coveted literature awards, the fiction Pulitzer Prize was not awarded this year because none of the three nominated works (all of which seem vastly interesting to me) won a majority of the Pulitzer panel's votes (as detailed on this Wikipedia page). I can't help but notice the recurrence of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention on award lists, which has me very curious about it.

The PEN/Faulkner award nominees:
http://litreactor.com/news/finalists-for-the-2012-penfaulkner-award-announced
•I haven't read any of these books but several sound interesting, particularly the three-part novella series by Anita Desai, whose work on Baumgartner's Bombay I enjoyed.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Chinese author Mo Yan, whose page on the Nobel Prize website can be found here:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan.html
•I have not read any of this author's work.

*The Bibliomaniac Book of the Year Award this year goes to Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. It wasn't written/released this year or even this century but I read it for the first time this year and thought it was wonderful! This is a stellar read and I hope to get its review posted here soon. This fought an extremely difficult war against The Night Circus, a new work by Erin Morgenstern, for the top spot. Other finalists for my list also included Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman and Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.


If you've read any excellent works in 2012, let me know! Post in the comments or drop me a line at YourBibliomaniac@gmail.com. Happy holidays everyone!
Always, Your Bibliomaniac