Best Translation Microsite

The folks at Rochester have put together a microsite for the Best Translation Award. Pretty nice.

In announcing the site, Chad says that:

I’m sure this happens with other awards as well, but I have to say that the experience of reading a lot of this longlist titles one after another has been pretty amazing. All of the titles that made the list are incredibly well done, and each time I finish one, I end up reordering my personal top 10 . . . Not everyone has the time or desire to do this, but if you do decide to undertake a project like this, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

I'll agree that it has been a pretty intense process, especially now that I'm in the death-march portion of events. (I think I read four books last week.) I've already meted out a four-book nonfiction buffer for after I finish the longlist.

Although I don't have quite the high opinion of the longlist that Chad does, I will say that this has been a very rewarding undertaking. On the negative side, while I haven't come across any outright dogs there is a fair amount of material that I consider overwhelmingly mediocre.

On the postivie side, there's definitely a lot of very good books here, and I'm very pleased to have been force-fed a number of them. It looks like there will be more than ten titles competing to be on my shortlist, and I do think it will be difficult to order the ten I do finally settle on.