Do Book/eBook Awards Mean Anything To You?

As an author, I love receiving them, but as a reader, Book/eBook Awards don't encourage me to pick it over any other.

There, I said it, but does that make me a horrible person for not immediately rushing out to read that "award winning" book/ebook?

Good lord no! Remember those books you were told in school were good and you had to read them only there was no joy?  For me Jean-Paul Sartre [The Age of Reason] and Ernest Hemingway [Old Man and the Sea] were truly difficult to finish and I never wanted to explore the authors further.  Obviously they weren't bad authors or even bad books, it was all me, and the teacher in regards to the latter.

Why am I even talking about book awards and reading?  Today the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded and Mario Vargas Llosa won, Congratulations!, but he was not the one I found people were thinking would win. Curiosity had me clicking over to the prize site and looking through the list to see if any of the winners had been pleasure reads for me and I was surprised to see there were quite a few authors I'd picked up because the book sounded like a good read.

I may have read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn first as a requirement, but I fell into the picture he painted in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Fascinating and kept me watching this author until his death, and obviously beyond. Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.  In fact I still have the book on my shelves. Probably the one author on the Nobel list I have read the most of is George Bernard Shaw and my favorite play he wrote is Major Barbara.

To throw a twist into how I view book/ebook awards as a reader and their making me want to read something, last year I asked for and recieved Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the Man Booker Prize winner.  I only heard about the book because it won this award, however, it was the story itself that had me putting it on my Christmas wishlist.