Finalists Announced For The Delete Key Awards

Here's the complete list of 10 finalists for the 2008 Delete Key Awards for the year’s worst writing in books.

Winners will be announced March 15th, but in the meantime, my money is on the following:

Delete Key Awards Finalist #5 – From Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon:

“And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me.… This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia.”

Ummm...face-to-what?

My vote for runner up:

Delete Key Awards Finalist #7 – From Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian:

“ARGGHHHHHHHHSSSSSPPPPPPGGGHHHHHHHAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHAGGGGHH!”

My goodness. I don't think I can top the awards people's characterization of this passage:

Yes, Alexie won the 2007 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for this novel. And, yes, it’s possible that this line has an inner logic discernible only to teenagers. But the rest of us may wonder: Why does this line have five S’s and six P’s instead of six S’s and five P’s? Why does it have eight A’s and ten G’s instead of ten A’s and eight G’s? What, exactly, is the logic behind this manic sequence of letters? Does it help to know that it’s supposed to sound like “a 747 is landing on a runway of vomit”? Or that in the book the letters take up two lines (without punctuation) instead of one? The letters seem intended as onomatopoeia, but their arrangement is so random, you wonder if Alexie’s space bar just got stuck.

This line suggests how the language of e-mail – or perhaps Hollywood screenplays – is infecting novels for all ages. Will we someday get a novel written entirely in emoticons?