No, not the Malaysian National Book Awards - is there a Malaysian National Book Award anyway?
The book prize that gets the most press in Malaysia is the Popular Book Award. The reason it gets a lot of press is because the coverage tends to be paid for in the form of advertorials.
The award is named after the organiser (Popular Bookstore) and is also descriptive - the award is for popular books, not necessarily good books. But then again, "popular" in this instance isn't based on sales but votes.
You don't have to have read a book to vote for it and I think Malaysians vote for a variety of nonsensical reasons so I don't take the Popular Book Awards at all seriously.
I received an email from one of the nominees this year asking me to vote for his book. I wanted to email back, saying, "Shouldn't you be asking me to read your book instead of just voting for it?" How could he assume that I had read it? Perhaps he didn't really care. Winning is all that matters to some people. They don't give a damn if they've actually done something worthy of a prize.
Anyway, I digress. The finalists for the National Book Award (USA) 2010 for Young People's Literature are:
Paolo Bacigalupi ~ Ship Breaker
Kathryn Erskine ~ Mockingbird
Laura McNeal ~ Dark Water
Walter Dean Myers ~ Lockdown
Rita Williams-Garcia ~ One Crazy Summer.
You'll find the full list of finalists in all the categories here.
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