Over the last decade, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been a vocal defender of the National Book Awards; people regularly accuse the juries that select the books for the shortlists of obscurist elitism, and my feeling has been that literary prizes aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about reinforcing conventional wisdom but about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153acknowledging the power of reading.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yes, the books nominated for the National Book Award and similar prizes are touchstones, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not about, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153that whole \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcif you only read one book this year, this is the one that counts\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 thing.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Instead, literary awards can tell us: Here are books to remind you how awesome reading can be, and that will make you want to read more books.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m deeply conflicted about this year\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s longlist for nonfiction. On the one hand, I want to stay true to the principle that the selection committees, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spent nearly a year pursuing as close to a comprehensive perspective on the field as they can, have found ten books that are representative of the best of what American literature has to offer at this moment in time—ten books that will be whittled down next month to five, and then to one final selection a month after that. If I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not familiar with those books, or I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure why they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re on the list, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve long believed that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an opportunity for me to learn something.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, it can be hard to maintain that optimism when we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re presented with a nonfiction longlist populated by eight white men, an Indian-American man, and one woman. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a roster that readily persuades you it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reflecting a full and diverse spectrum of literary possibilities (and it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help that, at the broadest levels, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s some duplication of subject matter among the ten titles). And I think diversity does matter here; as literary prizes remind us of the power of reading, they can also help us recognize that there isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just one American literary tradition, or one American experience. <\/p>\n
The nonfiction nominees actually have been fairly diverse in recent years, too, making the homogeneity of this list stick out even further.<\/p>\n
This longlist looks and feels like exactly the imbalance in contemporary literary criticism that concerned writers and readers like the members of VIDA have rallied to confront, the imbalance that inspired me to start writing about a more diverse range of books here at Beacon. And though I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m reluctant to start playing the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153your list of great books is wrong, because it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have this book\u00e2\u20ac\u009d game, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll admit that this list doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t feel particularly persuasive to me right now.<\/p>\n
(That said, as I was watching the reaction to this longlist unfurl on social media, one title people kept mentioning over and over again was Leslie Jamison\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Empathy Exams<\/em>, and though I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t read it in its entirety, the title essay and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Immortal Horizon\u00e2\u20ac\u009d were both excellent, and the enthusiasm I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve seen for Jamison\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work today makes me more eager to read that book than most of the titles on the longlist.)<\/p>\n
For now, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll probably focus my attention on the other three National Book Award longlists—well, the fiction list, anyway, if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m honest with myself about what I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m likely to accomplish—and wait until the nonfiction list gets cut in half, then see which of those books seems most compelling. Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be a book so fantastic I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be able to set my misgivings aside\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 In the meantime, if you have any recommendations for an amazing nonfiction title published this year, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m all ears. <\/p>\n
(NOTE: This post originally appeared on Beacon<\/b>.)<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the last decade, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been a vocal defender of the National Book Awards; people regularly accuse the juries that select the books for the shortlists of obscurist elitism, and my feeling has been that literary prizes aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about reinforcing conventional wisdom but about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153acknowledging the power of reading.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Yes, the books nominated for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[965],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4001,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4000\/revisions\/4001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}