Why this blog?

Bookstores and Books!!!! I lose my senses whenever I am in a bookstore...Time stops (Or does it fly)...Regret over choosing one book over another (I have but limited financial sources) .... Intoxication of the sweet smell of paper...Now all this time spent in a bookstore left me with one question...How do I really know whether the book I am picking up is good? Since I am not a very rich man, I would wish that each book that I pick up teaches and entertains me. However a lot of books bought (in preference over other books) were left midway..finished painfully slowly...opened again with great reluctance just so that I did not want to feel guilty of wasting my money!! The critical economical question came up of how to maximize the satisfaction that I got out of the books that I bought, given the fact that I cannot buy all the books that I want to.

25 years + has taught me one thing...do NOT trust the blurb on the books!! Then where do I get to know if a book is good enough to pick up or not? The staff in any bookstore (in India) will not tell you anything. The best they can do is tell you whether a book is available or not. Then what? Surely those books which have won all the awards will be good!! But my experience has been that Indian bookstores and Indian readers (by and large) know only two awards.
1. The Man Booker prize (which restricts itself to Commonwealth nations and of which, very frankly, I am not a great fan.)
2. The Nobel Prize for Literature (The works of the winners of the said awards generally does not work for me, the exceptions to which we will discuss on the way)

This is where the NET opened a huge world of opportunities to me. I came to know that there are awards for each genre of the written word (e.g.CWA Awards for Crime, Hugo and Nebula Awards for Sci Fi and Fantasy, Eisner and Harvey Awards for Graphic Novels, Orange Awards for General Fiction etc...) and started trawling the net for books shortlisted for these awards and checking for them specifically in the stores besides the generally browsing.
Going further, I got into the habit of checking the best books lists which are generally published annually (Like the NewYorkTimes Best Books List) to get a fix of my dope.
Finally I also started reading the blurbs in the books (Yes, I had warned you against trusting them!) and started checking for reviews of the books which I felt was promising, with certain sites which I have grown fond off given my experience with the books I bought based on their reviews.
I still end up giving up reading a book midway despite all these checks, but instances of the same have come down a lot. So this blog will give details of various awards other than the two mentioned above and the books shortlisted for the same. But trust me, these lists will never be comprehensive as I know barely about 4 or 5 awards of note ( I promise to find out more and post the same here). That is what you can expect from the 4th post in this blog. More of what you can expect here in the next post!