As a former National Book Critics Circle board member, Katharine Weber has also served as a chair of several awards committees. So when she saw an apparent change in the way books are put forward for consideration for these prizes, she decided to sound the alarm. Basically, the committees come up with a bunch of candidates for the list of final nominees, but NBCC members have a say in the process—if 20% of the voting membership want to put a book on the shortlist, it goes on. For years, as Weber describes it, the NBCC newsletter had a long list of recently published books members might want to consider. "This year," she says in an email making the rounds to NBCC members and other media professionals, "the advisory list in each category is short, and apparently consists of the 12-title longlist that each committee has created in anticipation of the January shortlist vote." (I've obtained a copy of those lists [pop-up image], so you can see for yourself.)

"This means that the rank and file NBCC membership is going to be very unlikely to propel a book to any shortlist without it being one that has in effect already achieved committee endorsement. Of course the board can say that any 2006 book is eligible for a vote, but the truth is that with these inexplicably narrow advisory lists, any unlisted book will be very unlikely to garner sufficient membership votes."

Now, Weber freely acknowledges that one might respond to this criticism by saying, well, this is just because that list doesn't include her recently published novel, Triangle (which, to be disclosing, I've featured on my other blog). But there's more significant oversights, she says: "The fiction list omits Emily Barton's Brookland, it omits Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind, and it omits Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes. Also missing are Richard Ford's Lay of the Land and Philip Roth's Everyman." She's concerned, she says, that "the genuine potential power of the membership vote should not be diminished to a meaningless rubber stamp of pre-selected titles." (Not that the fiction list the NBCC sent out is filled with slouches, either; it's got Booker winner Kiran Desai, David Mitchell, Dave Eggers, Edward P. Jones, among others.)

The NBCC's official response, as voiced by current president John Freeman, is that the list in the newsletter "was neither a longlist nor a shortlist, but rather simply a list meant to inspire debate, provoke discussion, and reflect a range of titles published during the year." He further emphasizes that members can still put forward any book they care to nominate. Fellow board member Rebecca Miller provides further elaboration at the Critical Mass blog, noting that "many books over the years have been added by the membership." In the discussion that follows, newsletter editor Rebecca Skloot says the lists that appear were only shortened due to "layout issues," and asserts that "the board was already discussing whether that was the right thing to do, and contemplating an email addendum to the newsletter sending the entire working list to members for their reference."