Pulitzer 2022 Reading Update!
I am still reading lots of books trying to guess who might win this year’s Pulitzer. My list so far:
1. The Five Wounds by Kirstin Valdez Quade – The Pulitzer has never gone to a Latina, will this be the year? In fact, only Latinos that ever won here Oscar Hijuelos in 1990 for Mambo Kings and Junot Diaz for Oscar Wao, so perhaps a Mexican-American debut novel would be a fantastic choice?
2. The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles – This is an excellent book, but honestly I preferred A Gentleman in Moscow which I think got ripped off in 2017 when an inferior Underground Railroad won instead. This one is great regardless.
3. Zorrie by Laird Hunt – this was a poetic life story about the Great Depression in the midwest seen through the eyes of a woman in Indiana who goes through a Willa Cather-style set of challenges and growth spurts. The prose is beautiful and measured without being overbearing or overly sentimental. It is a book which you will not soon forget.
4. Hell of a Book by Jason Mott – Funny, thought-provoking and powerful, this book surprised me and underlined many of the reasons why I respect Enimem’s kneel at the halftime show. ‘Nuf said. It was indeed a helluva book!
5. My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson – a great little collection of short stories, the best of which is the eponymous final one about a speculative ending to the Charlottesville violence during the first year of TFG.
6. My Year Abroad by Chang-rae Lee – while this is not as strong a book as The Surrendered, it is better than On Such a Full Sea or Native Speaker. One thing for sure, Chang-rae Lee does NOT stick to any one genre for very long. This book reminded me of the best parts of The Goldfinch. Probably not a Pulitzer winner, but a fun and interesting read.
7. Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour – this book’s tone and sense of biting irony reminded me a lot of Paul Beatty’s excellent (and alas un-Pulitzered) The Sellout. It talks about racism and counter-racism in terms of the vicious world of sales. Very, very entertaining.
8. The Love Songs of W.E.B. Dubois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers – this is a coming of age book which also explores the issue of skin tone and racism in academia so in a sense it reminded me of the poetry of Tar Baby by Toni Morrison and The Human Stain by Philip Roth. It is a long, but beautiful read.
9. The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen – the sequel to 2016 winning The Sympathizer is another fun first-person ride into the Vietnamese psyche with all its complexities and contradictions but taking place in my own Paris of the 70s. A great read, but probably not worthy of a second PP.
10. The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. – this was an interesting book about slavery with a gay slave couple. Well-written, but not nearly as powerful as, say, Beloved by Toni Morrison (Pulitzer 1987, Nobel Prize 1993) or as detailed as Roots by Alex Haley. A gripping tale, but not a perfect one.
11. Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenridge – an interesting tale taking place in New Jersey post-Civil War and later in Haïti, it tells the fictionalized story of the first black female surgeon in the states, but takes a few twists and turns and maybe loses some readers along the way.
12. Foregone by Russell Banks – I haven’t read his Pulitzer-runnerup Cloudsplitter yet, but this one did not blow me away. The deathbed confessions of this documentary filmmaker intended to come clean to his soon-to-be widow reads as overwritten (using a $5 word when a nickel word would do) and just isn’t that entertaining.
13. Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout – this could arguably be higher up in the list because I actually enjoyed it more than her Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge (2009), but I am just not a huge fan of Strout’s writing. We get the love story of a widow and her ex-husband and it has its moments, but maybe I need to read this again when I reread Rabbit at Rest or another geriatric novel of this sort.
14. Bewilderment by Richard Powers – the followup to his excellent Pulitzer winner The Overstory (2019), this is another ecological fairy tale, but less violent. Similar to The Bear by Andrew Krivak, it is a father-son post-apocalypse story with some beauty, but it nonetheless left me wanting.
15. Infinite Country by Patricia Engel – this is a well-written but very, very depressing book about Columbian refugees which reminded me somewhat of The Mambo Kings Play the Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (Pulitzer 1990), because of the undeserved sympathy the author tries to make us feel for an undeserving male protagonist. I think that the work of Edwige Dandicott and Valerie Luiselli to which this is often compared is superior. There is possibly also a comparison that could be made to the über-popular American Dirt by Jeannine Cummins, but personally, I was as disappointed by that one as by this one.
16. The War for Gloria by Atticus Lish – I really did not like this coming-of-age book with characters that were each creepier and less likable than the others. I never built any sympathy for the protagonist or his awful mom or terrifying stepdad and I felt the novel left way too many questions unanswered. It was a stultifyingly frustrating book.
17. The Archivist by Rex Pickett – I really loved the movie Sideways and assumed it was based on a great book, so I thought I’d give this one a shot by its author. Pretentious, overbearing, and hopelessly ignorant of computers, it tries to build suspense on some rather flimsy intrigue and uses some lame sex scenes to cobble together a sensual aspect to the plot. Not great.
18. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead – it probably is not fair to this ok book by double whammy Pulitzer winner (Underground Railroad 2017 and The Nickel Boys 2020), but the story just wasn’t tall that well put together. There is an interesting but not passionate depiction of Harlem and New York in the late 50s early 60s, but the characters just were not all that interesting and I felt that there were some things that were just off in the book. Probably not a triple crown winner.
19. Abundance by Jakob Guanzon – depression central, this book has an original structure naming chapters by the net worth of its loser protagonist, but it loses the reader with all the time shifts and the extremely unlikable characters throughout. It was like watching a cheapo paperback about Badger and Skinny Pete from Breaking Bad who had an unfortunate kid they drug around. Just, too depressing and not that well written.
20. Harrow by Joy Williams – and very last, this awful little apocalyptic mess. No plot, no characters, no sense in this weird, colorless world. I could not wait to get this one out of my head because I felt it was just awful and poorly written.
Still on my Pulitzer 2022 TBR in order of likelihood to read:
– Late City by Pulitzer Laureate (1993) Robert Olen Butler
– The Book of Emptiness Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
– Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen
– The Sentence by Pulitzer Laureate (2020) Louise Erdrich
– Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby
– Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
– Clock Cuckoo Land by Pulitzer Laureate (2015) Anthony Doerr
– Appleseed by Matt Bell
– Matrix by Lauren Goff
– Rovers by Richard Lange
– Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
– A Calling for Charlies Barnes by Joshua Ferris
– Whereabouts by Pulitzer Laureate (2000) Jhumpa Lahiri
– Mercy Street by Jennifer Haigh
– The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
– Fugitives of the Heart (posthumous) by William Gay
– Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin
– The Mysteries by Marisa Solver
– The Night Always Comes by Willy Vlautin
– Secrets of Happiness by Joan Silber
– Intimacies by Katie Kitamura
– How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue
– No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
– Wayward by Dana Spiotta
– The Days of Afrekete by Asali Solomon
– Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King
Vote for your favorites here: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/171938.2022_Pulitzer_for_Fiction_Who_will_win_
