Award Winning Reads

Today's Top Five Wednesday Topic is Award Winners. I decided to talk about books I read this year that won a book award. They didn't necessarily win a book award this year, but I definitely read them this year. Also, I didn't include the Goodreads Choice Awards as a criteria. That's really just a popularity contest. Here we go!

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - This won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. It is incredibly creepy and gross. It is what I have since learned is called "sporror"; basically, it's horror that gets its creepiness from biological growth of some kind. Mushrooms, fungus, mold, etc. It works. Fungus is creepy AF.

The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty - I read this because it won a book award the year I was born. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Incidentally, is that pronounced Poo-litzer or Pew-litzer? I better look that up.

Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell - This definitely deserved any and all awards it garnered. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Fiction. I can't wait to read everything else she's written.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir - Here we have another Locus Award winner. This one won Best First Novel. No argument here. It's hilarious and complicated and gnarly. I loved it.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham - This one won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction. I learned so much about this event that I barely remember from my childhood.

Just in case you were also curious, it's officially pronouces Pull-itzer. Americans tend to make it sound like other words that start with pu- like puce, or pure, etc. But the Hungarian man it is named after pronounced it pull-itzer. Now you know.

Are there any awards you watch for? I may have to start keeping an eye out for the Locus awards, since two of the books on this list won that one.