See All Those People Down There? They’re Reading!

Los Angeles, Hollywood

(photo source: farm9.staticflickr.com)

50 finalists for the L.A. Times’s annual Book Prizes were announced recently. Bestselling young adult novelist John Green (whose book The Fault in Our Stars I actually read) is slated to receive the Innovators Award for his “dynamic use of online media to entertain and engage.” Susan Straight, will add a lifetime achievement award to her a nice list of other prizes: the Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement, National Book Award finalists (for Highwire Moon), and the Lannan Literary Prize.

Finalists were named in 10 categories: biography, current interest, fiction, graphic novel/comics, history, mystery/thriller, poetry, science and technology, first fiction, and young adult literature. See the full list at the link above. I’ve reproduced four of the categories below. Haven’t read a one, but eager to read the highlighted ones! Winners will be announced in April.

Current Interest
Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Crown
David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy, The Penguin Press
Barry Siegel, Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom, Henry Holt & Co.
Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief, Knopf

Fiction
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, Graywolf Press
Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs, Knopf
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being, Viking
Susan Steinberg, Spectacle: Stories, Graywolf Press
Daniel Woodrell, The Maid’s Version: A Novel, Little, Brown & Co.

History
Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, FDR and the Jews, Belknap Press of Harvard University
Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, HarperCollins
Glenn Frankel, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend, Bloomsbury USA
Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, Simon & Schuster
Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, W. W. Norton & Co.

Mystery/Thriller
Richard Crompton, Hour of the Red God, Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling, Mulholland Books/Little, Brown & Co.
John Grisham, Sycamore Row, Doubleday Books
Gene Kerrigan, The Rage, Europa Editions
Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case, Viking