The Whole National Book Awards and the Death of Genre and Stuff

(This post is for publishing nerds only. And probably not interesting for anyone other than me. But anyway, please come see me live and in person at the Main Library in Columbus, Ohio on Tuesday at 6:30. There will also be a smaller event at the Hilliard Branch of the public library at 1 PM that day. 4772 Cemetery Rd / Hilliard, OH 43026.)

So, okay. The National Book Award finalists were announced yesterday, and one of the finalists in the books for young people category, David Small's STITCHES, was not published as a children's books and arguably is not a children's book. This has led to a bit of a stir. (The stir is probably also partly due to the fact that the most heralded book of the year, WHEN YOU REACH ME, was not a finalist.)

Full disclosure: I know and really like David Small. I also really like the book STITCHES. And I know and really like some of the judges in the category. (It's a small pond.)

To be honest, I have lately become totally uninterested in the question of whether a book is or is not for children. Ultimately, I think it is kind of a how-many-angels-can-you-fit-on-the-head-of-a-pin question.

It's also a question that's starting to matter less. The main reason books are organized the way they are is that it makes it easier to sell them at bookstores and circulate them at libraries. As acquiring (and reading) books become less physical experiences, we'll have the opportunity to think differently about how we relate one book to another. (In fact, the Internet is already doing this in some interesting ways.*)

Books for teens will become books for teens because teens read them. Not to sound like a capitalist or anything, but I kind of look forward to a day when the market is free enough to tell us how many angels are on the head of each pin.



*Like, for example, my YA novels do not live in the same part of the bookstore as Katrina Vandenberg's brilliant book of poetry. But our audiences have gotten so intertwined that Amazon says we are "frequently bought together," the online equivalent of being in the same genre. These books have nothing in common except that the same people like both of them, but I would argue that "the same people like them" is the ideal definition of genre.