The Bookies

The CBC Book Club is putting together a whole new kind of book award: The Bookies, which will honour books published in 2010, are to be modeled on the Oscars. What does that mean? Well, that means The Bookies might honour jacket design, typesetting, and book-flap descriptions as well as naming genre-specific winners.

The Bookies are still a work in progress, though, and the Book Club is taking suggestions for categories as well as nominees. 

My favourite thing about this is that it could draw attention to all kinds of aspects of books that go beyond their content. We pick up books for all kinds of reasons and this is a time to celebrate that. What if we decided to honour great title fonts, cover illustrations, chapter titles, etc.? I'm not a total Luddite, but I do appreciate the opportunity to think about what makes a book a book (and a novel a novel) rather than delighting in the content (which is what I do most of the time).

It's hard to know exactly where this will go, but for now, I'm pretty excited to see it develop.