Indie Lit Awards

The Indie Lit Awards are blogger-nominated and blogger-judged awards given out to the best books published in a given year. The nominations are over and some very smart and wonderful people (the judges on this page) have come up with the shortlists:

2010 Shortlist for GLBTQ

• Annabel by Kathleen Winter
• Jumpstart the World by Catherine Ryan Hyde
• Krakow Melt by Daniel Allen Cox
• Will Grayson, Will Grayson by David Levithan and John Green
• Scars by Cheryl Rainfield

I am on the panel for this one, and let me tell you a giant handful of excellent books have been published this year about GLBTQ characters. Some that didn't make the short list which you might be interested in are:

• London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp
• Wildthorn by Jane Eagland
• Missed Her by Ivan Coyote
• Gender Outlaws by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman
• Queer Questions, Straight Talk by Abby Dees
• Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature by Emma Donoghue
• Disturbed by Her Song by Tanith Lee
• The Cat in the Cradle by Jay Bell
• The Wolf at the Door by Jameson Currier

I am not saying that these are the best GLBTQ books of 2010; these are just the ones I've either read or have on the shelves waiting for me. If you are looking for some good reads of the GLBTQ variety for the 2011 year, the above 14 books are an excellent place to start!

Lest we forget the other categories, the short lists for them are out as well:

2010 Short List for Literary Fiction

• C by Tom McCarthy
• Great House by Nicole Krauss
• Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
• Room by Emma Donoghue
• Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye

2010 Short List for Non-Fiction

• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
• Let’s Take the Long Way Home by Gail Caldwell
• Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff
• At Home by Bill Bryson

2010 Shortlist for Speculative Fiction

• Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
• Kraken by China Mieville
• Dante’s Journey by JC Marino
• How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
• The Passage by Justin Cronin

These look like fantastic reading lists, and more than a few of them are already on my shelves waiting to be read.