Fatigue Shmatigue

“Medal Fatigue,” A.O. Scott’s essay in the New York Times this past weekend, might be of interest to you if you care about lit prizes and have some time to kill. Neither of which should apply to me, but apparently it does, because I actually bothered to read and link to it. The only mildy interesting snippet is this (emphasis mine):

My only prediction for the coming N.B.A.’s is the same one I offer each year when, in my day job, I am asked about the Oscars. I have, at the moment, no idea who will win, and a year from now I will not be able to remember who won. I would hope, though, that in the near future English’s book wins some prize for which it is eligible. This shouldn’t be hard, given that there are now, he writes, around a hundred prizes for every thousand books published in the United States. (If he had made a movie, his chances would be even better, since, as he writes, “by the end of the 20th century, the number of film awards distributed each year exceeded the number of full-length films being produced.”)

So there. The Times could have printed these 20 words and instead devoted the other 1,300 words to writing about…books. Novel idea, I know.