How judges chose Nat'l Book Award winners

Courtesy Publishers Marketplace, this LA Times article by novelist Marianne Wiggins, who was a judge this year for the National Book Awards for fiction, on how the judging works. She and the other fiction judges each read 258 books:

I constructed an elaborate system of piles: read, unread, couldn't get past Page 10, crap, bloated, vomitous, kill-me-now and praise God.

Non-fiction judges had it worse: they read 500 books. "One judge remarked that she came home one day to find her children had constructed a fort out of them."

By the way, the awards were awarded only two weeks ago -- seems longer than that, for some reason. Here are the winners (I had to be reminded, too).

Most interesting are the books which almost made the list of official nominees, as well as Wiggins' dismissive comments about some books. In the end it doesn't seem as if she quite cared which books made it on or off the list, she would simply like people to read more. Which is a fine thing to think, but I can't help thinking that the author of "The Law of Dreams," Peter Behrens -- which she described as an "early favorite" but which did not, in the end, even get a nomination -- cares very much whether his book was officially nominated. Well, I hope more people read it because of Wiggins' article. As for the books that were nominated due to internal politics among the judges, "Eat the Document" by Dana Spiotta and "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" by Ken Kalfus, if I were one of those authors I would feel almost as bad as Behrens. According to Wiggins, they were nominated only to make the list seem less anti-feminist. Great, what a compliment for Spiotta.