Larry Prater Award for Best Read : Runner Ups
For the fifth anniversary of the Larry Prater Awards, we’re going to do things a little differently.
Maybe I’ve just seen Train Dreams and I’m feeling emo about my departed friend, but ideas and memories require to evolve if they want to survive. While year-end lists are common practice among critics, mine have always been on the thin side. I read, watch movies and listen to music in industrial quantities and I only reward the cream of the crop. If you guys want to have the short version of what to watch without spending hours scouring the site, I need to deliver here.
Also, by naming three finalist and one winner each year, I spoil my own surprise as you guys figure out in advance who has won by going over the original reviews. My enjoyment can modulate from the original score over the year, but the writing is usually on the wall. This year, I’m going to reveal my five runner ups and then dedicate an upcoming post to my Best Viewing and Best Read of the year. Because more recs and more mystery equals more fun, am I right?
One more thing: these are awards for the Best Viewing and Best Read of the 2025 and not best movie or best book of 2025. That means it doesn’t have to be from this year…but I decided that from now on, it’ll have to be from the last decade. So, for 2025, it’ll have to be from 2015 to 2025 to quality for the award. No disrespect to Thomas Pynchon, taking 15 years to review Inherent Vice is on me. Not on him. It’s a great novel, but it had all the time in the world for love and accolades.
Now, without further ado: my five runner ups for the Larry Prater Award for Best Read of 2025. Click on the title to read the original review.
Jonathan Franzen - Crossroads
It’s basically The Corrections with more Jesus and fewer professional burnouts.
Eryk Pruitt - Blood Red Summer
It’s a book about how the story you want to tell isn’t always the story that’s true and how chasing truth can make things worse, not better.
Charlene Elsby - The Organization Is Here To Support You
Captures the horror of becoming your job not through spectacle, but through vernacular, hierarchy, and the quiet violence of professionalism. If this novel doesn’t creep you out, it’s probably because you already work there.
Jenny Hval - Girls Against God
Violence, destruction, and rebellion aren’t gratuitous here. They’re symbolic acts of creation, the tools the narrator uses to tear down the old world and build a netherworld where she can thrive.
Warren Zanes - Deliver Me From Nowhere : The Making Of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska
Nebraska wasn’t intended to be an album. It was a fire drill, a solo experiment, and the sound of Bruce Springsteen reckoning with the machinery of fame, the burden of expectation, and the disorienting demand of being himself.
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