2012 National Book Award Finalists, or Why I Love My Public Library

Besides being an author, I am also an avid reader. And I use my public library A LOT. In fact, I LOVE my library. Why? Well, whenever I hear or see of a book that interests me, I usually do two things: 1) I search for it on Goodreads, where I get a summary and an idea of what people are saying about it, then 2) if it looks like something I might like to try/or read, I search for it in the online catalog of my public library, right from the comfort of home, and 9 times out of 10 they either have it in stock, or it's on order. Then, with a few simple clicks, the book will be available to me to pick up and read in short order. Sometimes, if it's a very popular book with lots of earlier holds on it, I might have to wait a while. But it's a fair trade for being able to keep up with my voracious reading/browsing/book habit. Because basically, all this is free. Aren't I lucky?

P.S. Go get a library card. Chances are, if you have a library, you can take advantage of this in your community.

But I digress. What did I do this morning? Well, I looked up all of the books that were nominated  as finalists for the 2012 National Book Awards, and ordered quite a few of them!

FICTION

FINALISTS:

Junot Díaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group USA, Inc.)
Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's Books)
Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)

NONFICTION

FINALISTS:

Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)
Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press)
Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

POETRY

FINALISTS:

David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies (Southern Illinois University Press)
Tim Seibles, Fast Animal (Etruscan Press)
Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Susan Wheeler, Meme (University of Iowa Press)
 

 YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

FINALISTS:

William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Books, an imprint of
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)
Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)
Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (Balzer+Bray, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)
Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon
(Flash Point, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press)
 

I love to sample all kinds of books, don't you?
Tell me, do you have a good library system where you live?