Topic 1: Feel Good Story of the Year

Alex: Maybe it's just the kind of guy I am, but my "feel good" story this year was all schadenfreude. I got a real grin out of the flop of the Quills Awards.

What a stupid idea. Whatever else you want to say about literary awards, they occasionally reward merit and can raise awareness for books, and writers, that have been otherwise overlooked. And so I always like to see some big award going to a total unknown. Take a look at what happened with the new Man Booker International Award this year. When they first announced it I was totally baffled. Was there any need for such an award? What was the point of it? And then they gave it to some fellow nobody had ever heard of. Sorry Ismail, but I don't think you were even on Michael's radar.

But the Quills really were egregious. They had no intention of either rewarding merit or drawing attention to overlooked talent. Quite the opposite. It was all a big love-in for books and authors who had already triumphed in the marketplace. The whole notion of a "consumers' choice" award is totally redundant. Maybe it had something to do with giving hack authors a sense of validation, or maybe it was meant to make readers feel better about themselves for consuming so much pop trash, but either way it was a joke. And even after all the attention it got (admittedly, most of it pretty negative), it flopped completely. I guess the sight of the publishing industry trying to suck its own dick in public just wasn't something people were all that interested in. Which made me feel good.

Robert: Given cataclysmic meteorological events, a world riven by fundamentalist religious terrorism, the hijacking of the American republic by a gang of plutocrats, zealots, and their thieving corporate cronies, an inept prosecution of a misrepresented war, rising deficits that will be Sisyphean burdens to our children and grandchildren, threats of pandemic disease, a shrinking First World and burgeoning Third World (and the list goes on), schadenfreude may be the operative emotion of this moment.

Now in itself it’s not a good sign that I am using some quantitative indicator like polls as evidence, but it’s the best I can do at the moment. Which is to say that the President’s precipitously declining poll numbers may be signs of a constituency awakening to the gross, and most likely criminal inadequacies of George Bush and Dick Cheney’s F-Troop. Unfortunately, attendant to the slippage in popularity and estimations of job performance of our first court-appointed President is all manner of media blathering about what tactics must be employed to bring the numbers up. Not that much about saving the world and the country. For shame!

Maud: Hands down, the revival of Doctor Who. Not exactly on topic, but there was an oddly-paced episode featuring Charles Dickens.

Okay, seriously:  I was thrilled to see Judith Miller's shoddy reporting and handshake deals finally brought to light. Her ouster from the Times so soon after the Bush administration's bungling of Katrina relief inspires the hope that reporters will remember what the job actually entails. At least we're seeing less deference to Scott McClellan and friends than we were six months ago.

Michael: It's been a good year for translations of older titles, and that makes me feel very good indeed. A translation of the first volume of Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance has been floating around for a while, but finally found a home at Duke UP. Harry Mulisch's Criminal Case 40/61, the Trial of Adolf Eichmann finally made it into English. And there are new translations of important texts like Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet (the older translations being, incredibly (it's Flaubert!), out of print ), Otto Weininger's Sex and Character and Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption out. (Alas, only the Weiss has gotten practically any sort of review coverage.) But what really made my year was the Clay Sanskrit Library (http://www.claysanskritlibrary.org/) - a long overdue Loeb-library-type series for Sanskrit texts which has been one of my great reading and perusing pleasures for the past few months.

I was also mightily (if pettily) pleased by the failure of the British publisher's attempt to "embargo" Ian McEwan's Saturday - and then devastated by the embargo-busting newspaper's settling with the publisher instead of fighting out this ridiculous policy in the courts.

Finally, I continue to be thrilled (if a little overwhelmed) by the proliferation of literary weblogs - it's wonderful how many people continue to join the ranks, and how many different approaches can now be found.

Alex: I have a great embargo story, but I'm going to save it for a little later in the panel . . .