As noted above, awards season brings with it a mix of emotions that makes me question all sorts of things: Why haven't I read all these titles? Why haven't I even HEARD of some of these titles?? Should I play catch up so I can make my own pre-award predictions??? Should I simply leave it to the professionals???? Of course, the lists also offer up a road map to help navigate the stacks of books that threaten to take over every surface in my home. Today we'll have a look at four on my TBR list and one that I think you should probably go ahead and pre-order because once it wins the Kirkus (bold! I know!) it will fly off the shelf.

Kicking things off, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois, currently nominated for the National Book Award, Fiction, and the Kirkus Prize. Let's get this out of the way: it is long. 816 pages long. I picked it up more than once when it arrived at the store and sheepishly, after feeling satisfied that I'd fulfilled my upper body strength workout for the day, placed it gently back on the shelf. But let me tell you something: I'm back into long these days, fantasizing it might serve as curative counter to all the social swiping. Besides — who can resist checking out a hefty tome by an author who the year before was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry?

The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice (National Book Award Nonfiction) is a historian's earnest quest to better understand the Tulsa Massacre; what kept it hidden from the history books for so long and what forces combined to bring it to the forefront of public consciousness. My interest in this historical horror was peaked by an episode of The Daily and the PBS documentary released by Emmy-winning director Jonathan Silvers on the 100 year anniversary of this tragic event. While reading this one, I urge you to pick up the Young People's Literature (National Book Award and Kirkus) nominee, Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre to read with the young ones in your life.

As I've openly disclosed in the past, I am a sucker for all things published by Europa so The Promise (Booker Prize Shortlist) is already in my house, natch. Nestled in among aspirational stacks of what I want to read, this novel takes place over four decades. The narrative follows a family saga surging around the bequeathment of belongings with the complex history of South Africa as the backdrop. I loved this interview with author Damon Galgut who notes with a dash of despair that "prize lists are problematic in all sorts of ways."

Next up, a book I admittedly had not heard of until it wound up on the National Book Award Nonfiction Longlist. Tastes Like War is a food memoir of sorts written by Professor Grace M. Cho, the product of a marriage between a white American merchant marine and a Korean bar hostess. Cho's mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia when Cho was a teen. In an effort to connect with her mother going forward, Cho delved into the culinary past learning to cook dishes from her parents' respective childhoods.

Full disclosure, I loved this last pick so much I'm planning to buy it and have on hand for sharing. It's a brilliant collection of short stories and the title track is a novella that will leave you breathless with a near future vision that terrifyingly doesn't feel so far fetched. My Monticello would make an excellent book club pick and has (as announced yesterday!) been optioned by Netflix.