Thoughts of no particular interest to anyone but myself:

• No surprise here: Richard Powers won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker. Is there anyone who didn’t see this one coming?
• I predicted that Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge would win in the non-fiction category. Oops. I should look deeper into my crystal ball next time: the award went to Timothy Egan for The Worst Hard Time.
• Take a look at the other winners.
• My trip to the library yesterday netted me a nice surprise: Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. I’ve been wanting to read this book since it was released two years ago. But at 782 pages, I’ll probably have to get an extension on it.
• Then again, I’ve been known to finish massive books in relatively short periods of time. Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian weighed in at just over seven hundred pages and I finished it in less than a week. I can also finish the longer Harry Potter books in a matter of days. So it’s not impossible. I suppose it depends on how engrossing the book is.
• I also checked out Guy Burt’s A Clock Without Hands, Evan S. Connell’s Deus lo Volt!, and Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution. (I managed to read this one last night. I highly recommend it.) Since I’m going to be spending most of my reading time with Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, I don’t expect to get around to reading A Clock Without Hands and Deus lo Volt! I hadn’t planned on checking them out anyway. They just looked interesting at the time. The chances of me remembering a title after leaving a library or bookstore are pretty slim, so I grabbed them more as reminders than anything else.