Read all pulitzer prize winning novels

I had hand surgery on Monday, so I won’t be typing any reviews. However, I finished The Able McLaughlins (back on the prairie :) ), Dragon’s Teeth (spoiled rich couple introduced to Nazis) and The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford (well-written, but I didn’t get the point)in the past few weeks. Thirteen more Pulitzers to go until I’m “caught up.”

Advise and Consent, Allen Drury’s 1959 Pulitzer winner, thoroughly covers the machinations of the Senate confirmation process as that august body deliberates the nomination of a controversial figure for the post of Secretary of State. Although long and sometimes exhausting, Drury’s landmark novel is a rewarding book for the patient reader.

At over 600 dense pages, this is not a quick read. The first 100 pages seem especially slow as the characters are introduced and the stage set. This behind-the-scenes look at the Senate may have been more interesting before 50 years of televised politics in general and C-SPAN in particular leached any tantalizing mystery out of Senate subcommittee hearings.

Once the story builds up steam, however, it powers right along. The candidate under consideration, peacenik Bob Leffingwell, has his avid supporters, including the somewhat Machiavellian President who nominated him. But he faces stiff opposition from those who think he will be unable to protect America on the brink of a nuclearized Cold War with an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union determined to send men to the moon to claim it as Soviet territory. While the details of the controversy seem anachronistic now, the underlying issue of diplomacy versus military might is as pertinent today as it was 50 years ago.

The rest of the review is posted on Rose City Reader.

It has been a while since I read any Pulitzer winners. To get me motivated, I even started a Battle of the Prizes challenge on my Rose City Reader blog. Since then, I am two-thirds of the way through Advise and Consent, and just finished March.

The trouble with novels about the Civil War is that they are bound to follow a requisite formula, and Geraldine Brooks’s Pulitzer-winning March is no exception. All the familiar scenes, themes, and elements are there: lonely letters home, the smoke-filled chaos of battle, stealing a dead person’s boots, whipping a slave, selling a slave’s family members, a slave revolt, Southern gentility, Northern rough manners, soldiers trashing the plantation, buildings burning, having no food but root vegetables, and the mandatory amputation of limbs with hand tools.

Civil War novels only distinguish themselves with what gets used to string together these common essentials. Brooks differentiates her book by . . .

(See the full review on Rose City Reader.)

I just bought Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. Added it to my still enormous stack of unread pulitzers. I think I am going to have some time this summer to get some good reading done. I’ll really try to read at least 6 over June July and August.

• 1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
  * 1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
  * 1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
  * 1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
  * 1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
  * 1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
  * 1954: No award given
  * 1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
  * 1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
  * 1957: No award given¹
  * 1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
  * 1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
  * 1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
  * 1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  * 1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor
  * 1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
  * 1964: No award given
  * 1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
  * 1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
  * 1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
  * 1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
  * 1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
  * 1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
  * 1971: No award given²
  * 1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
  * 1973: The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
  * 1974: No award given [3]
  * 1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
  * 1976: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
  * 1977: No award given [4]
  * 1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
  * 1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
  * 1980: The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
  * 1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  * 1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
  * 1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
  * 1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
  * 1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
  * 1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
  * 1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
  * 1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
  * 1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
  * 1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
  * 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
  * 1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
  * 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
  * 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
  * 1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
  * 1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
  * 1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
  * 1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
  * 1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
  * 2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
  * 2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
  * 2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
  * 2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  * 2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
  * 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
  * 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
  * 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  * 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
  * 2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

I’ll start this weekend. I have to go to the library first to stock up on books. I hope there aren’t any terrible ones that I have to force myself to read. I’d like to be able to say I’ve read them all. Then I can move on to Nobel Prize winners…

http://www.listsofbests.com/list/28/compare/jeanine567

My last two Pulitzers read were Advise and Consent and Scarlet Sister Mary. Who would have thought a 600+ page novel about a Senate confirmation hearing shortly after WWII could be so interesting. Political junkies will especially be interested, but it also tells about the toll politics can take on individuals and families.

Scarlet Sister Mary is about an African American woman and her life on a plantation community following the Civil War. At times, the racism of the times the books was written made me flinch (Blacks often being compared to animals and having animal-like behaviour), but it was a well-told story. It was also told in a dialect that was easy to follow. Whereas Advise and Consent was a rather “masculine” story, with the major characters being male and the roughness of the arguments, SSM was a more feminine story, highlighting the struggles of a single woman and women in general at the same time.

I have finally made it to 39 pulitzers read. I am not listing them though. Too much aggravation. I do still plan to finish out the books :)

I thought once I became an adult, and wasn’t forced to read Faulkner in English class, I might appreciate him more. Unfortunately, I don’t, and I really had to struggle through A Fable. This book was probably not only the worst book on the Pulitzer list, but comes pretty close to being the worst book I’ve ever read (although I don’t think any book will pass Atlas Shrugged, if only because so many people list AS as a book that changed their lives…ugh).

But, I digress… as does Faulkner in this novel that is supposed to be an allegory of the Passion Week, about thirteen French soldiers about to be executed for not charging the German trenches in World War I. I’m glad an inside label on the book spelled that out for me before I started it. For half the book, I had no idea what was going on due to his full-page stream of consciousness ramblings that transcended time and space. Some of the metaphors he used were base and meaningless. For example, ”... a six and a half foot Basque with the face of a murderer of female children.” Huh? Do murderers of female children have certain faces? Are those faces different from murderers of male children, or is Faulkner’s misogyny rearing its ugly head?

It could have been a decent story if written by someone else. I’m officially done with Faulkner.

Lonesome Dove is a cowboy story for people who think they don’t like cowboy stories. It containted just the right amount of characters with intertwining histories, the kind of folks you grow to care about despite their flaws. They engage in the kind of soul-searching that one might expect of people whose day is mainly taken up with the hard work of staying alive; while their thoughts were not of the deep navel-gazing variety about the meaning of life, they more honestly (in my opinion) struggled with the choices they made throughout their lives. Oh, and plenty of the action you would expect on a cattle drive – crossing snake-filled rivers, horse thievery, hangings, Indian attacks, sandstorms, etc. Would highly recommend this book.