
Who Cares About Literary Prizes? - Vigier
https://www.publicbooks.org/who-cares-about-literary-prizes/
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defen
> _Room_ and _The Road_ — two novels about single parents in difficult
> circumstances...

Early contender for understatement of the year.

One experiment I've been trying out for the past year or so is only reading
"old" novels (first published more than 25 years ago). That comes from the
recognition that I only have so much time for reading, and 0-5 years after
first publication is generally not enough time to determine if a book is a
true classic, or just part of a passing fad. Talking to other people about
critically acclaimed contemporary novels is not really something I do, so I
don't feel like I'm missing out on anything by only reading old books.

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aasasd
I'd care about a Rotten Tomatoes for books, if there were one. Because I can't
make sense of Goodreads' ratings: it seems the entire useful range is
compressed somewhere between 4.0 and 4.3, but at the same time quite a lot of
books randomly have too low or too high ratings.

IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes also have weird useful ranges, but they are
consistent: on IMDB, 6 is very meh, 8 is hella good, 9 is genius. On RT, 70%
is borderline rubbish, best to choose something above 80%.

Also, it's pretty clear that ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is anywhere near 4 only due to
the political theme.

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jknoepfler
Atlas shrugged is awful, from a literary-critical point of view. The prose is
thin at best. The narrative is hamfistedly didactic, at best. It's barely even
a novel in the sense intended by novelists (or readers of novels, broadly).
It's a weird example. Judged only by its artistic merits it would be down
there with cheap genre fiction or bad soap romance as essentially political
porn. Probably not a great litmus test.

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roenxi
I think I agree with you, but just to make sure it is said;

Based on Atlas Shrugged; Ayn Rand was a terrible writer. There was no reason
whatsoever to read that book apart from its political message. It wouldn't
rate an entry in the database let alone a star rating. It was still well worth
reading because it is the only representative of that political message out
there. If someone is going to take to take that message to heart Atlas
Shrugged may well be the only place to find it in the readily available canon.

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aasasd
I finally have to say it: Thelema is almost the same thing, except Crowley
wrote better and had a soul. But he didn't get to ride a red scare and drove
normies away with the mysticism.

I'm yet to put in my proper dose of hair-splitting research of the classics,
but I feel like Nietzschean themes don't vary too much over the years and
movements.

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DanBC
The Booker is interesting because it's a big deal in the UK, and winning does
seem to make a big difference to sales. But the long listed books don't sell
many copies - usually fewer than 10,000.

[https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker...](https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker-
prize-2012-winners-sales-data)

[https://www.npr.org/2015/09/19/441459103/when-it-comes-to-
bo...](https://www.npr.org/2015/09/19/441459103/when-it-comes-to-book-sales-
what-counts-as-success-might-surprise-you)

On a tangent to the article I find the UK's CILIP Carnegie and Greenaway
awards useful to find books for children.

[https://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/archive.php](https://www.carnegiegreenaway.org.uk/archive.php)

I start by buying the winners and the short-listed books, then you look at
other books written by / illustrated by those people. There are some excellent
children's books today. I mentioned this (some time ago) on HN and someone
created this lovely website, in German, to help people find great children's
books published in German. [https://www.schoene-
kinderbuecher.de/](https://www.schoene-kinderbuecher.de/)

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samirillian
> to award someone a prize is no different from pissing on him. And to receive
> a prize is no different from allowing oneself to be pissed on, because one
> is being paid for it.

\- Thomas Bernhard, _Wittgenstein's Nephew_

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stesch
I probably haven't read anything that won a "normal" prize. At least not in
the decades after school.

I've read a few old books who won Science Fiction prizes like the Hugo Award.
But today even these are a bit too political.

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jknoepfler
Then why post here?

~~~
stesch
The title of the post: Who Cares About Literary Prizes?

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VeryHacker
The winners themselves probably

