As one of the literary fiction judges for the 2010 Indie Lit Awards, I can honestly say that reading the shortlist was a pleasure. We had such a great list, as picked by book bloggers which makes it even more special.

In addition to the reads, working with the rest of the panel members proved to be quite rewarding. I picked up some new blogs to add to my reader and hopefully, made some lifelong bloggy buds in the process.

Enough of me…here are the results:

2010 Indie Lit Award Winners

GLBTQ

Winner: Annabel by Kathleen Winter
Runner Up: Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green, David Levithan

Literary Fiction

Winner: Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Runner Up: Great House by Nicole Krauss

Non-Fiction

Winner: The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Runner Up: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Speculative Fiction

Winner: Kraken by China Miéville
Runner Up: Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness

Congrats to all of the winners! A big “thank you” to Wallace for creating these awards. It’s been a pleasure. Oh, and a huge shout-out to Peter Geye!! We loved your book. You are a rock star in my eyes!

If you’d like to see how it all came to be, check out the award site.

If you visited me earlier in the week, you may have read this post where I expressed my ~~anxiety~~ anticipation over my book club’s yearly selection meeting. Well, we met at Border’s last night to select twelve books and let me tell you, it was hard to limit myself to two books. I came in with a stack of oh… 18 or so.

I’ve separated them into two groups.

Once the chosen books have been assigned to a month, I will post them under the Book Club tab.

The Chosen

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
A Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell
A Very Long Engagement by Sebastien Japriscot
Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pearl of China by Anchee Min
Room by Emma Donoghue
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
*The Quickening Maze by Adam Foulds
The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
*Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

*Pitched by me

The Recommended (not chosen)

A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
*Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
Candide by Voltaire
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes
Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
*Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman
The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli
The Photographer by Emannuel Guibert
The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
*The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
*We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver

*Pitched by me

What do you think of the list? Sometimes it’s hard to choose for an entire year because you just don’t know what you’ll want to read several months down the line but we’ve been choosing this way for years. It seems to work for us.

Chatting with friends about books and life…