Novel of the year
"The Complete Twitter Feed"Kim Kardashian
Above all, 2014 will go down in history as the year literature was reclaimed by the people. It was also the year in which, bizarrely, the Nobel Prize for Literature surpassed the Oscars as the worlds' most eagerly watched awards show. Some of the anticipation may have been down to the Nobel committee's decision to enlist comedian and U.S. senator Seth MacFarlane as master of ceremonies, but, at the end of the day, MacFarlane's casually racist tomfoolery was easily overshadowed by the sheer star power of the nominated literati that deservedly took centre stage at Stockholm's Konserthuset.
Tensions sure ran high as Nobel-habitué Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage faced off against, among others, Bob Dylan's Walmart Shopping List, Oct. 17 and Russell Brand's new scrotal tattoo Hello Ladies, but there was never really any doubt as to who would trod off with the highest literary accolade of all. Kim Kardashian's Twitter feed took the world by storm in 2014, daily condensing our modern society in 140 character titbits (excuse the pun) of immeasurable philosophical depth and insight.
Sore loser Murakami committed suicide shortly after the ceremony, prompting Nobel Prize jury president Kanye West's infamously hilarious #harukiriLOLZ Twitter-campaign: one could hardly come up with an apter illustration of Twitter's hard-earned position as the intellectual centrepiece of our modern society.
