Book 51: The 9/11 Commission Report

A long, long, long time ago, I made a deal with myself that I would read all of the nominees for the 2004 National Book Award (with the exception of the poetry books - I'm fairly picky when it comes to what poets I choose to read). Well, today brings the announcement of the 2005 nominees - and also the day that I finished my final book of last year's reading assignment. I had put off The 9/11 Commission Report for awhile, actually, worrying that it would just be too difficult to take. And in a lot of ways, it was a rough read, but since I spread it out over a couple of months (always reading other books at the same time), it was better than it might have been. With all that said, I don't plan to try to read all the nominees again this year. Unfortunately, the fiction selections weren't to my taste for the most part (though I loved Christine Schutt's Florida) and I just prefer novels to non-fiction in general (though all of the non-fiction titles nominated in 2004 were quite compelling). I'm looking forward to seeing if this year's nominees can come anywhere close to raising the controversy that last year's did.