Last weekend, the Society of Professional Journalists, Oregon and Southwest Washington chapter, handed out its annual awards, and the Eugene Weekly swept the arts criticism category. My former colleague Suzi Steffen won first place for her review of the Lord Leebrick Theatre’s production of Eurydice; I came in second and third with reviews of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

It’s often far easier to write about things I don’t care for than it is to find the words to describe what’s wonderful about the things I love. Maybe, though, that’s more the case with movies than with books. Maybe the exquisite sentences and engrossing worlds of these two novels were just that much more inspiring when it came time to piece together sentences of my own.

Maybe I just got lucky. But I’ll take it.