The Color Purple by Alice Walker

The Color Purple by Alice Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was shocked by how wonderful this book is because I'd actually read it before as a teenager and I didn't remember it being this phenomenal. I think as a teen, I was so mired down in the horror and sadness of the beginning that that's what stood out for me the most. Plus, having no life or significant literary reading experience, I failed to get most of the brilliance of the book. But what a beautiful perfect book. Amazing characters, amazing sentences, amazing everything. Favorite favorite.

View all my reviews

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Great plotting, great sentences, and (unlike some of the other readers) I did feel for Ginny and Rose. I was surprised that this novel about feminine rage was written and acknowledged in the 1990s, though of course, everything we're talking about now in the #metoo is a great deal older that. But it was the palpable anger that seemed different than a lot of other novels I've read, giving it a completely different aspect, which feels very modern now. We all know Larry Cooks now, even if we don't always know their secrets. One thing which makes me unable to properly view this book though is that it's based on King Lear and I haven't read King Lear yet, so that's my next task.

View all my reviews

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the kind of masterpiece that sends me back to my 5-star reviews to demote as many as possible to a humble 4.

“Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers....”

“He was contemptuous of the great persons who, for all their education and usage, exhibited no care nor astonishment before the miracles of word order in Calderon and Cervantes.”

"... that ghost of a passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream."

View all my reviews

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A few authors sit down to try to say something about the experience of life and some try to capture a little bit of what God is in their writing. For me, very few succeed in both endeavors. So far, I've only found The End of the Affair, Gilead, and The Road. (My other favorite book is The Death of Ivan Ilyich, but it's not about God.) Please let me know if you know of other books in this class.

View all my reviews

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn’t a novel. This is a short story collection. While many of the stories revolve around Olive, some of them have no real link to her or the important people in Olive’s life.

There are beautiful sentences, and a little bit of light humor, but there’s a lot of desperation threaded through the stories that make this collection difficult to enjoy. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more when I was sadder myself, but now it feels like an undertow trying to drag me back.

View all my reviews

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I actually liked the character of Ignacious. He's pompous and super weird and very likely mentally ill but he's so ... himself. I also liked his sweet patient mother. Nonetheless, reading this book was a huge chore. I gave it an extra star because I interpreted the ending as a happy ending.

View all my reviews

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I wish the author had put the "About This Project" at the beginning of the book, and I recommend that if you read this book you start with that section. When I began the book I had the expectation that the book would have a lot of history, politics, policy, with some personal examples, as many nonfiction books focusing on a particular legal or policy issue typically do. This book is not like that, it's an ethnography. It is more of a biography of several people going through evictions - and the one landlord that was willing to participate. The distance between my expectations of the book and the actual substance of it made it made it difficult to finish. Another thing that made it very difficult to finish the book was how deeply depressing the subject is (granted it's important that it feel depressing but it makes it very difficult). That said, I am very glad I finished it, despite- or because of- all the tears.

View all my reviews

Pulitzer Prize Update

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

2017) The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (read)
2016) The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
2015) All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
2014) The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
2013) The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
2012) No award... Finalists:

          Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (read it and love it!)

          Swamplandia! by Karen Russell
          The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

2011) A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (read)
2010) Tinkers by Paul Harding (read)
2009) Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
2008) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (read it and love it)
2007) The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006) March by Geraldine Brooks
2005) Gilead by Marilynne Robinson  (read it and love it!)
2004) The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003) Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (read)
2002) Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (read)
1998) American Pastoral by Philip Roth (read)
1974) Did not get the prize but: Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (read)
1961) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (read)
1957) The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (read)

Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction:

2017) Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond
2016) Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS by Joby Warrick
2015) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert (read)
2014) Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation by Dan Fagin
2013) Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King
2012) The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2011) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee (read)
2010) The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman
2005) Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden ... by Steve Coll (read)
1998) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (read)
1974) The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker (read)


Other Pulitizer Prizes:
2010) Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed (read)
2002) John Adams by David McCullough (read)
1998) Personal History by Katharine Graham (read)
1992) Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman (read)
1957) Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy (read)

John Adams by David McCullough

John Adams by David McCullough
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, the author, and the subjects John Adams and his wife Abigail. It might have benefited from a little editing for greater brevity but otherwise a perfect book. My favorite parts were all the beautiful quotes about morality from Adam's personal journals.

View all my reviews

Tinkers by Paul Harding

Tinkers by Paul Harding
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a sad, beautiful, weird little book this is.

"... and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love...."

View all my reviews

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just reread this, and I'm impressed by how nearly perfect it is. It's amazing that I read this for the first time as a teen and that it's also perfect to read as an adult.

It's upsetting that we haven't come further than we have in 50 years. Progress is too slow.

View all my reviews

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll

Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 by Steve Coll
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There was a lot of really interesting information in this book that I was excited to read about. However, it was buried in a ton of information that while it did add a little color here and there, it largely bogged down my overall understanding of the topic. The main players in this narrative are the CIA, Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, President Reagan, the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, Bin Laden, Pakistan, President Clinton, the Taliban, and arguably the drones. However, there are thousands of individuals in this book with all sorts of personal details about them such as what sports their children played. I think an abridged version of this book would be great, but the full version was just too much. I finished it out of sheer stubbornness.

Having recently read The Black Swan and the related series of books, the thing that stands out about this narrative to me it how impossible it was to predict the long-term consequences of US action in Afghanistan during the Cold War. So if you're looking for answers or the ability to assign blame, there might be none to be found. The most likely cause as far as I can determine is fanatical religion itself.

View all my reviews

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I updated my review after thinking about the book for 2 years, so clearly, it inspired some soul-searching and for that reason alone might be a great book to read. Apologies that my previous review was badly worded.

This book just won the National Book Award this week [and subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction], so I was expecting good things. It was well-written and beautiful in some parts, but I didn't enjoy it though for the conjunction of these two reasons:

1) It was boring. At no point did the story become more interesting to me. What happened to Cora was horrible and dispiriting and Cora was dispirited, and as a result, I, as the reader, also felt dispirited to continue the book. I get that the brutal treatment of slaves happened in just this way, but for example, I never felt like I wanted to put down a book by Frederick Douglass who also described the very real horror of slavery. On the contrary, I was riveted by his writing and found myself wanting to scream or cheer him on, or sometimes to put a bookmark in, go out and fight for equality. TUR made me want to crawl under the covers.

2) For me, inserting an actual train into the story didn't work. The novel is historical fiction and was hyper-realistic throughout, so what why a (fake) real train? It didn't appear to save any narrative room, nor was the train itself in any way fantastical, magical, or otherwise interesting to me. The current day importance of a book like this seems harmed by the addition of this train. It makes an otherwise realistic account of slavery seem false rather than fiction, especially to people who might not have read widely on the topic. I find that worrisome.

View all my reviews

Personal History by Katharine Graham

Personal History by Katharine Graham
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I liked the feminist story here. It's rare that you hear about all the self-doubt and hardship that afflicts even the most successful women. Particularly surprising because she started out wealthy. She comes off as a very thoughtful person that considers each person and decision very carefully, and I think that's very admirable.

View all my reviews

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Why did I force myself to read this book when I hated nearly every minute of it? It was my dad's favorite book. Quitting just wasn't an option. This does however raise a number of questions about my dad's psyche.

Reading this book is like being inside the brain of a sadistic genius who has completely lost his sanity. Also it takes place during the bombings of World War II so there's good cause to lose one's sanity.

I liked the way the end of the book came back to many of the things at the beginning, especially the dodos, haha. I appreciated Pynchon's contemplation of death. Still, I wish the entire "Part 3: In the Zone" section of the book were just cut. Reading the book was painful enough with the unnecessary meanderings of Part 3.

I am giving three stars, but in this one case it does not mean that I liked the book. If I were adhering to the star system suggested by Goodreads I would give it 1 star. I can't give it one star because obviously Pynchon is a genius. He might be an evil genius though. Would that I could un-read certain sections of the book, I think I would.


View all my reviews

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I know this is a the Pulitzer Prize fiction winner for 2000, but let's pretend for a moment that I don't know that. I think this was a solid collection, but not quite up to 5 stars.

I think the short stories "A Temporary Matter" and "This Blessed House," which were both short stories about married couples were my favorite. I would have enjoyed reading more about either couple in a full-length novel, which is maybe more of a complaint than praise when it comes to short stories.

I also really liked "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar," which was a little messed up if you take a feminist reading of it, but real life isn't always very feminist either.

View all my reviews

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I'm pretty clear on the ongoing sixth extinction and am totally horrified by it, one thing that irked me the whole time was wondering what the other five extinctions were. Though she covered some of the others in the book as well, since nothing was in chronological order, I felt a little confused at the end. So here they are:

1. Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. About 75% of all species became extinct. In the seas all the ammonites, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs disappeared. Kolbert talks at length about the ammonites. All non-avian dinosaurs became extinct during that time. This is the one that was probably caused by a huge asteroid hitting the earth. Kolbert talks about the asteroid idea in an earlier chapter than the ammonite chapter which is confusing.

2. Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (End Triassic): About 70% to 75% of all species became extinct.
It was between the Triassic and Jurassic, but I don't really understand this one, and scientists don't really know what caused it.

3. Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian): Earth's largest extinction killed about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species, including insects. It's called the "Great Dying" and apparently it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles? Not sure what those were? Furry reptiles that took care of their young? Scientists also don't know what caused it, but possibly a climate change event.

4. Late Devonian extinction: A prolonged series of extinctions eliminated about 70% of all species. This extinction event lasted maybe 20 million years, with a series of "extinction pulses." Maybe because of more climate change?

5. Ordovician–Silurian extinction events which occurred 443.8 million years ago. Two events occurred that killed off 60% to 70% of all species. Together they are ranked by many scientists as the second largest of the five major extinctions in Earth's history in terms of percentage of genera that became extinct. Not sure what caused this one either. Possibly a combination of climate changes including some freezing.

6. Holocene- 10,000 BCE — now, not even sure yet how many species have been killed off. Caused by humans. Kolbert discusses the American mastodon, Auk, rainforest frogs, coral, bats worldwide, and some other species.

These extinctions are especially terrifying because we're destroying entire areas, changing the climate, destroying food chains, spreading weird diseases. Attempts to stop the damage have largely failed so far. Even if we manage to survive what we're doing the earth might be a really bad place to live for a long time. So... not exactly beac reading.

View all my reviews

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A father and son (the author, Art Spiegelman) discuss the father's experience as a Jewish Polish citizen during the Holocaust. The first book deals with the father and mother successfully avoiding the concentration camps until 1944. This part is really stressful and upsetting, and we haven't even gotten to the concentration camp yet (Part II).

It also deals with the father and son's current day relationship as the Spiegelman interviews his father for the book. It's meta.

View all my reviews

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is amazing. It's informative: even with all I know about cancer (unfortunately) I still learned so much. It's interesting: I was eager to go back to this long book and learn more about the disease and the people who changed the landscape of the battle against cancer. I was afraid to read it because I thought I would find it horribly depressing (especially after reading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande) but it wasn't. It was hopeful in a practical realistic way, explaining what is being done currently all that remains to be done.

My only critique is that the book rambled on at the end quite a bit. It should have had a shorter tighter ending. The ending seems to have dragged on from Chapters 46-49, and an epilogue.

View all my reviews

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this novel. Despite the fact that the book is a Pulitizer Prize winner, I had heard some negative things, and I wasn't expecting to like it that much. I love it. Junot Diaz is amazing and I refuse to even debate that with anyone until he or she reads this book. Not only are the characters completely formed people but the way they relate to each other is totally real. The story itself operates on so many levels, the real, the political, the magical, and the spiritual. Did I mention I love this novel? Also... I suspect "fuku".... bad language alert... is just "fuck you" with a Spanish accent.

View all my reviews