There seems to be a glut of books by big named authors this Fall. Wait, haven’t we already read this before? Right, the Los Angeles Times put out an article several weeks ago and now the New York Times has a similar one. The same authors are mentioned again: Thomas Pynchon, Michael Connelly, John le Carré, Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frazier, Alice Munro, etc. Do you think the NYT cribbed from the previous article? I shouldn’t complain I suppose, since they are covering books, but it still seems sloppy to me.

Garrett County Press asked favorite artists to “color in” pages from Kevin Stone’s latest project, The Pat Robertson and Friends Coloring Book. The artists, who range from Philadelphia designers to Bangkok street artists, were given simple instructions: pick your favorite page and have fun. Here are the results. This one is my favorite:

The Autumn 2006 Read This! finalist has been announced. Keep checking for daily posts on the winner and the other finalists.

• This is pretty cool. It’s the translator’s notes on translating The Mystery Guest by Gregoire Bouillier.
• Is Hollywood going to ruin one of the books I loved this year?
• This list of dos and don’ts from the Events coordinator of Powells is both hilarious and true. Seriously people. Listen to the advice.
• I’m not sure what to say about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I finished earlier this week. It’s as good as the reviews say. I hate to use the word haunting because that seems so obvious, but it is haunting. I’m still thinking about how McCarthy takes this really horrible landscape and makes it almost beautiful at times:
  

  He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned. On the table books and papers. It had begun to rain and a cat at the corner turned and crossed the sidewalk and sat beneath the cafe awning. There was a woman at the table there with her head in her hands. Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one of the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the gray cold light.

Orhan Pamuk wins the prize this year. Some find this year’s recipient puzzling. It makes sense to me. The Nobel judges have been giving the prize to those in conflict with their government for several years. And though Pamuk might seem young, he has many good books under his belt and Gabriel Garcia Marquez was also awarded the prize at the same age.

• Pinky’s Paperhaus has a nice-looking new home.
• And Beatrice has some new roommates. Ron’s asked Scott of Slushpile, Dibs, Dj from Bookburger, and Rod Lott from Bookgasm to post on his site.
• Alex Beam shares his secrets of un-reading with Globe readers. “Books are expensive, and most of them are not very well written anyway. I have not read dozens of books in just the past few months. I am prepared to share my secrets of un-reading with you.” Don’t bother reading the new Bob Woodward he says. The contents have been all over the news for the past few months and Woodward has been everywhere in the media for the past few weeks. Woodward’s “scoop” is that the Bush administration has mishandled the war in Iraq. Wow. Really? The best line of the article has to be: “I read a book about Fiorina a few years ago, in which she was trying to convince Hewlett-Packard to pay for shipping her yacht from the East Coast to the West Coast. Tough choices indeed.”
• The Globe also ran an interesting article this Sunday on “new wave literary fabulists”, including one of my favorite writers Kelly Link.
• It’s book week at Slate.
• The Rake is full of rage again. This time, he directs his anger toward Nick Hornby. Deserving target? Quite possibly. I personally find Hornby irritating, but I know lots of people love him.
• Bud Parr has posted a nice Q&A with Laird Hunt, author of The Exquisite

The National Book Award Finalists have been announced.

Fiction

• Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions (Pantheon)
• Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (Ecco/HarperCollins)
• Richard Powers, The Echo Maker (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• Dana Spiotta, Eat the Document (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)
• Jess Walter, The Zero (Judith Regan Books/HarperCollins)

Non-Fiction

• Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster)
• Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
• Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl (Houghton Mifflin)
• Peter Hessler, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (HarperCollins)
• Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry

• Louise Glück, Averno (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
• H.L. Hix, Chromatic (Etruscan Press)
• Ben Lerner, Angle of Yaw (Copper Canyon Press)
• Nathaniel Mackey, Splay Anthem (New Directions)
• James McMichael, Capacity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Young People’s Literature

• M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
• Martine Leavitt, Keturah and Lord Death (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press)
• Patricia McCormick, Sold (Hyperion Books for Children)
• Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial/Penguin)
• Gene Luen Yang, American Born Chinese (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai.

I’ve just watched the announcement online. It seemed sort of unceremonious.

The shortlist for the Giller Award (the National Book Award of Canada if you will) has been announced:

• Rawi Hage De Niro’s Game
• Vincent Lam Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
• Pascale Quiviger The Perfect Circle
• Gaétan Soucy The Immaculate Collection
• Carol Windley Home Schooling

The winner will be announced on November 7th.

I have to admit that I am not familiar with any of these authors. Even Canadian George of Bookninja had no comment. It sounds like a repeat of the National Book Award shortlist from 2004 when five fairly unheard of women were nominated.

On a side note, I noticed a difference of word usage that I’ve never seen before in this sentence: “Moreover, a survey released Tuesday by BookNet Canada, a not-for-profit agency that tracks national book sales, among its other activities, suggests that a win can significantly goose sales.” I like the idea of “goosing” sales. Typically I think of pinching someone’s posterior as the main definition of goosing. I now have a mental image of one of those Monty Python hands pinching an animated book’s butt.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti will announce the twenty National Book Award Finalists this year on October 11th at his historic store City Lights. “The Foundation is excited to announce our Finalists from one of the country’s great bookstores in the heart of a city long associated with a passion for literature,” said Augenbraum, who will co-host the announcement at City Lights.

The award season crush is upon us already. The Man Booker prize is announced next Tuesday October 10th. The Nobel Prize for Literature will be announced sometime in the next two weeks (they’re being coy). And now National Book Award finalists next Wednesday, with the finalist in each category announced on November 15th.