2007 Awards in Literature.

For the year 2007, I read a total of twenty four (24) books. This is a great improvement of twenty percent (20%) from my reading output for the previous year, in which I finished only twenty (20) books.

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From the lot of two dozen books ---which is an exceptional mixture of fiction and non-fiction, works from as foreign as Portugal and Indonesia, India and Hogwarts, to places as familiar as the Philippines and Narnia, and authors as beloved as Salman Rushdie and Paul Auster to new discoveries as Eric Gamalinda, Jose Saramago, James Ellroy and Elie Wiesel--- here are the best of them.

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I have been giving out awards for my readings since 1993 and this is now my fifteenth year of giving out the awards.

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Book of the Year: MY SAD REPUBLIC by Eric Gamalinda

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Silver Plate: THE END OF THE AFFAIR by Graham Greene

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Bronze Plate: SATURDAY by Ian McEwan

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Circle of Excellence:

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1. The Double - Jose Saramago

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2. All That is Gone - Pramoedya Ananta Toer

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3. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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Laurel in Non-Fiction: Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship by Scott Donaldson

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Author of the Year: IAN McEWAN

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New Writer of the Year: ERIC GAMALINDA

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Shortlist:

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1. Anita Brookner - Incidents in the Rue Laugier

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2. C.S. Lewis - The Last Battle

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3. Elie Wiesel - The Judges

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Hugo Prize for Literature: Harper Lee

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This is only the second time that a Filipino work was named Book of the Year. The first and only time was when Edgar Reyes' Laro sa Baga was so honored. Harper Lee is also only second woman to win the Hugo Prize. Lualhati Bautista took the honours a few years ago.

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First-read authors dominated the awards this year, such as Gamalinda, Saramago, Toer, Plath, Brookner and Wiesel. On the other hand, The End of the Affair is only my second Greene book, after The Ministry of Fear.

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So far this year I have finished two books. These are Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee and Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie. I have already read the first fifty pages of Peace Breaks Out by John Knowles.

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I still have about eighty (80) unread books in my shelf. I don't think I will stop reading pocketbooks and hardbounds even with the emergence, proliferation and dominance of other media forms. If at all, the printed work has proved to be a fertile ground of fresh material for the other media. This year, McEwan's Atonement (a Bronze Plate winner in my world) was made into an Oscar-nominated film. Next year, movie audiences will be treated to Disgrace and Love in the Time of Cholera, both based on the works of Noble Prize winners J.M. Coetzee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

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