Monday was a big day for book awards of various kinds. Relentlessly brilliant Cormac McCarthy will need to build a bigger trophy cabinet -- he can now add the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction to his Pulitzer, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award (not to mention the four Oscars won by No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers' film based on McCarthy's novel, and the benediction of Oprah).

The PEN American Center is an organization of writers, so McCarthy gets this nod from his peers (the judges were Claudia Roth Pierpont, Philip Roth and Benjamin Taylor). PEN/Saul Bellow is a lifetime achievement award given to an author "whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career which place him or her in the highest rank of American literature." Sounds like McCarthy to me.

For a complete list of PEN award winners, go here.

As a former food writer and lifelong foodie, I'm always interested in the book honors given as part of the James Beard Awards. At Monday night's ceremony, the prize for writing and literature about food went to the indispensible Michael Pollan for In Defense of Food, his clarion call to common sense about eating.

Jennifer McLagan won two awards -- cookbook of the year and  best single subject cookbook -- for Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient, with Recipes.  Martha Hall Foose, left, who was a featured author at last year's St. Petersburg Times Festival of Reading, won best American cooking for Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook (I can personally recommend her recipes for lemon icebox pie and mac and cheese, "a vegetable in some states"). Read 'em and eat.

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