Read all pulitzer prize winning novels

Grounded in outmoded attitudes about class and distractingly highlighted by outmoded attitudes about race, Alice Adams has not aged well. In his 1922 Pulitzer winner, Booth Tarkington presents a heroine striving to climb the short social ladder of her Midwestern city using only her charms and well-rehearsed mannerisms.

Watching Alice struggle is painful. She has self-awareness sufficient to know she is doing things wrong, but lacks the tools to do them right. And it never seems that the game is worth the candle.

Finally, after watching Alice dither for most of the book, circumstances force her to face reality and make some difficult but intelligent decisions. The book ends on a gloriously hopeful note, which is the most redeeming feature of the story.

Also posted on Rose City Reader.

Yesterday I finished The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, about the struggles of a Dominican family under the brutal rule of Trujillo; the storyline and characters were great, but the slipping in and out of Spanish colloquialisms, and the footnotes about Dominican history grew tiresome.

In the past few weeks, I’ve finished Honey in the Horn – about the settling of Oregon – and The Store – about post-Reconstructionist Alabama.

If I never read another novel set in the late 19th century, I’ll be a happy girl.

And with “The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters” completed, I’m down to the final ten. Boy, am I excited to see the finish line :)

Some have compared “The Travels” to Mark Twain’s work, but I think it reads more like Lonesome Dove, which I enjoyed slightly better. “The Travels” follows a 13-year old boy, his sometimes-drunk, gambling father and their wagon train west to San Francisco, where they hope to discover gold and make it rich. Of course, they encounter Indians, Mormons, starvation, gunfights and sword duels, and many more adventures. Not a politically correct book, but then, it’s supposed to be through the eyes of a young boy.

I’m remaining in the “settling of the West” days with my next novel, “Honey in the Horn”.

I just finished Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow. It took forever. I simply lost interest when the main character started name-dropping and babbling his pseudophilosophical gobblydygook about art and the meaning of life. I have a hard time believing that anybody goes through life with this stuff constantly running through his/her head. It was kind of funny to read more than one character in the novel tell Charlie, in effect, “I can’t relate to you when you start talking like this.” Amen.

Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin was an easier read about a small-town boy who “pulls himself up by his bootstraps” to become a business success, but he never can pull his love life together. The interesting and diverse story lines about his siblings were not overwhelming, but filled in information about the Braden family life.

Eleven more to go…

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble. . . .

(Read the rest of this review on Rose City Reader.)

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.