Clever Magazine, Vol. V, #3 "2002 Clever Book Awards " (www.clevermag.com)

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The Clever Magazine
Book Awards for 2002

The committee:
Diannek, editor
LaVonne Fraboni, literary editor
Carrol Chrys, literary editor

It's time once again for the Clever Magazine Book Awards. The committee has met and the tough decisions have been rendered. Throughout the year the awards committee reads lots of books and book reviews, browses through bookstores, monitors various book clubs and reading groups, and then holds several informal meetings in order to come up with our candidates.

The award winners are books that will appeal to a wide reading audience but are books that may not make it onto the best-seller lists. And the thing that makes the Clever Awards different from other awards is that there are no publication restrictions on our choices, since it's impossible for us to read everything that comes along every year. As most readers know, there are bountiful book years and drought book years, but rarely a week goes by without some interesting title that merits our attention.

Here's this year's list:

Fiction:
The Winner: Middle Age: a romance, by Joyce Carol Oates. In this book, the hero dies in the opening pages but the effect his death turns his community upside down.

The Runners-up: Bel Canto by Ann Patchett; Lovely Bones by Ann Sebold and Painted House by John Grisham.

Non-Fiction:
The Winner: Wild Swans: three daughters of China by Jung Chang, the thriller autobiography of a young woman growing up in Maoist China

The Runners-up: Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser; and The Anatomy of Greed: the unshredded truth from an Enron Insider by Brian Cruver

Biography:
The Winner: Savage Beauty: the life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford.
The Runners-up: What Kind of Nation, by Joseph Ellis; Abigail Adams, a biography, by Phyllis Lee Levin, and Churchill by Roy Jenkins

Nature Writing:
The Winner: Green Thoughts: a writer in the garden by Eleanor Perenyi
The Runners-up: The Botany of Desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan; and The Skeptical Environmentalist: measuring the real state of the world by Bjorn Lomborg

Mystery:
The Winner: Bone Mountain by Eliot Pattison, a complex literary thriller set in Tibet
Runner-up: The Collected work of Edgar Allen Poe

Travel Essay:
The Winner: The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. "De Botton's style is very thoughtful and dense; he considers events of the moment and relates them to his internal dialog, showing how experiences from the past affect the present." (so says amazon.com's review)
The Runners-up: Restaurant Confidential by Jacobson and Hurley; and Latitude Zero: tales of the Equator by Gianni Guadalupi

Cookbook:
The Winner: Endless Feasts: 60 years of writing from Gourmet by Ruth Reichl

Inspiration:
The Winner: Healing Conversations: What to say when you don't know what to say, by Nance Guilmartin, we all need this book
The Runner-up: Second Nature: a gardener's education by Michael Pollan

Best Classic (that I probably only read part of but I'm a better person for):
The Winner: The Ox-bow Incident, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, mob violence in the American frontier. A glimpse into our recent past.
Runners-up: Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlos Levi, Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

So there you have it. A round of applause for everyone, including the committee, who all deserve a new pair of reading glasses and a nice cup of tea for all their hard work.

Editor' note: Clever Magazine doesn't produce these awards as a money-making scheme, but if you are interested in buying any or all of these books through amazon.com, please remember to click through from this website and help support us! Thanks...

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