Read all pulitzer prize winning novels

Surprise! A novel about Native Americans from the perspective of Natives. A wonderful novel.

Ooh! A Prize winner I enjoyed! I like when this happens. I had to look up the author because I was curious about having a white woman in the 1920’s write from the perspective of former slaves still living and working on a plantation.

Turns out the author’s husband owned a southern plantation in the 1920’s and the author “may” have known what she was writing about.

I really have a problem with novels written about “society” and people with money, the upper crust elite. I just find them nearly unreadable, and Early Autumn is no exception. I only made it a chapter or two. Not worth it.

A much stronger effort than the last one I read (Arrowsmith). March takes on a common literary experiment: tell an untold story of a famous novel. In this case, the absent father of Little Women (Louisa May Alcott). What was the father’s story when he went to war leaving his wife and daughters behind? Geraldine Brooks answers the question…the one I never asked.

Didn’t finish this one. Made it 140 pages and we still had not reached the central conflict of the novel. Worse, Lewis seemed to flat out dictate the story to the reader rather than have a smoothly flowing narrative.

That’s enough to count the book and no that I’m done with it.

For only the second time, I have read a Pulitzer Prize winner BEFORE it was awareded the prize. This helps me keep up as my list did not just get one book longer!

I don’t believe I have any Pulitzer novels reserved at the library, but I do own a handful I haven’t read, including:

The Stone Diaries
The Killer Angels
House Made of Dawn
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

I might own one or two more, not sure

Pearl Buck’s account of Wang Lung, a Chinese landowner who is intrinsically tied to his land and his dynasty rises and falls with his connection to the land. It is a novel about family, about the land, about money.

It’s also a really good book.

I do want to record every 5 year period of novels I finish. So, here is the record of 1921 – 1925

1921: The Age of Innocence
1922: Alice Adams
1923: One of Ours
1924: The Able McLaughlins
1925: So Big

I guess I finished this set two weeks ago with One of Ours. The only other 5 year set I am close to completing is 1996 – 2000 because I all I need there is the Michael Cunningham novel.

Cather’s story of a young Nebraska farmer’s journey to becoming a soldier in World War I is engrossing. Slow to start and Cather takes her time bringing us to war, whenever I started reading I was sucked in for another 60 pages or so.

Strangely, I had no real imperative to read. I had to make myself open the cover but when I did I was glad I did.

My only real complaint is that Cather drops several plot threads as the book goes along (the Ehrlichs, his wife) and once they are dropped they really don’t get referenced again, as if Claude did not think one moment about them.

Overall, though…good book. Not outstanding, but good.

Her novels My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop are superior works of fiction, but One of Ours…it’s good.