“My life is small,” Lisa Lucas told National Public Radio’s Lynn Neary on November 14,”and I think books are a way to make your life larger.” Neary’s interview with Lucas took place just days before the National Book Awards, which honored four works that speak to the issues on the minds of much of the nation’s populus. For Lucas, literature is more than just a means of telling a story.  In the interview, she points out that books can be bridges over divides, such as the political ones dividing the country today.

Mental Borders

Whether we intend to or not, many of us put up mental borders when we choose literature. We have our favorite genres and authors, and we often choose not to read anything other than those chosen few. I dislike many “popular fiction” authors and often don’t read them. Even writers have their own genre borders. Is it fair that I dislike these books since I honestly cannot say I’ve ever read more than two or three? Lucas would likely say it’s not. “We need to be reading across the lines we’ve drawn in our lives,” she said to Neary.

When I taught high school, I put up mental borders around certain pieces of curricula. I loved teaching The Princess Bride, but I disliked teaching Romeo and Juliet to high school freshmen because I believed that it glorified teenage suicide. In reality, astute readers see it for what it is: a cautionary tale about that very thing as well as fate, chance, even recklessness.

Mental borders are found in all aspects of our lives.  My graduate school cohort was made up almost entirely of members of the school’s affiliate church and citizens of the United States. However, there were a few international students and some like me who are not religious. The program, and the literature we read, served to motivate us to not only finish our masters degrees but seek out perspectives other than our own. For example, those of us who had mental borders about the politics and economics of China had those borders broken down by a Chinese classmate.

Some classmates had other mental borders broken down by the textbooks we read in our classes, ones they otherwise wouldn’t have read, like Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.  Admittedly, if I hadn’t been assigned the book, I likely wouldn’t have read it, though I was a former English and History teacher myself. This global perspective, one of three major trends in higher education today, was one of the keys to making a difference in how we thought as students and citizens.

Books are Eternal

Lucas encourages people to read outside the box, as it were. When referring to this year’s political climate, Lucas pointed to last year’s National Book Award nonfiction winner and one of this year’s nonfiction finalists, Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild.

The former is about what it means to be black in America, while the latter is about Tea Party members living in Louisiana’s bayou country. Lucas suggests that her New York City friends and colleagues pick up Strangers in Their Own Land and Hochschild’s subjects read Coates’ piece.

While Lucas’ message seems serious in nature, she also wants reading to be fun. She believes it will remain the dominion of the book, not social media, though she is an active social media user herself.  Lucas points to the differences between printed media and social media, and she’s not alone in preferring paper over digital.  Social media are transient, while print media are tangible.

The same comparison can be made for our mental borders when confronted with books that challenge us: those ideals become transient when met by the tangible story of another human being.

The post Reading Beyond Your Own Borders first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Le Guin, honored for her distinguished contribution to American letters, spoke stridently in defense of science fiction and of all writers and publishers, “I rejoice in accepting [this prize] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long: my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction. Later in the speech, Le Guin’s remarks became more pointed, stating, “Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.”

The profiteer in question was Amazon who, during its seven month battle over pricing with Hachette Book Group Publishers, took steps that were heavily criticized by some authors, including removing preorder buttons on Hachette titles and reputedly delaying shipment of some books. The preorders are often used as a marker for bestseller lists and orders for bookstores. By eliminating these options, Amazon was indirectly affecting the sales and promotion of these titles as well as future sales from this publisher and these authors associated with Hachette Book Group.

Some of the other highlights of the night’s awards were former Marine Phil Klay taking home top prize for fiction for Redeployment, his debut story collection, while Louise Gluck won the poetry prize for Faithful and Virtuous Night. Other awards were given to nonfiction writer Evan Osnos for Age of Ambition and young adult literature author Jacqueline Woodson for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming.

The night however, belonged to Le Guin. Amazon was in attendance at the awards ceremony but declined to comment on her speech. Nevertheless, many others cheered and applauded with admiration for her.

Cover Photo Credit: Ellen Forsyth (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The post Ursula LeGuin Stirs Things Up at National Book Awards first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

The event was hosted by Faith Salie, a national public radio host, writer, and Rhodes Scholar, who kept the evening rolling by with humor and enthusiasm for the book world. NPR host Terry Gross presented the Literarian Award to Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., publisher of The New York Times. Mr. Sulzberger accepted the award, making note of how important book reviews still are in a world of downloading and e-reading. Martin Amis presented the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Elmore Leonard. Leonard, the author of over 45 published novels, mostly thrillers, stated he was doing pretty well for someone who wrote “books about people with guns.”

The National Book Awards was established in 1950 and since then have recognized such authors as Philip Roth, William Faulkner, Elizabeth Bishop, and Alice Walker. Finalists are given a financial award as well as a medal and a citation. Winners receive a larger financial award and a bronze sculpture. And although the judges receive numerous books in the late spring and all summer, the final decision is not made until all the judges gather for lunch on the day of the awards ceremony. Although there may be a general consensus about where the judges are heading in terms of a winner before then, nothing is official until that luncheon.

This year’s event was particularly memorable for the staff of The National Book Foundation and not necessarily in a good way. Hurricane Sandy flooded the foundation’s offices, leaving staff without a home. “We piled our computer servers into a taxi and they are now ensconced in my dining room. The hotel where we put up our judges and others was flooded out and we had to re-book everyone to a midtown location,” explains Executive Director Harold Augenbraum.

But it was worth the struggle, Auguenbraum says. “The award itself is a champion for good writing.”

The post 2012 National Book Awards: A Night of Humor and Glitz in Spite of Hurricane Sandy’s Aftermath first appeared on Public Libraries Online.