The National Book Award Project

I told you once I started with the challenges I would find it hard to stop! The National Book Award Project is another ongoing challenge with no time limit. I’ve found the National Book Award to be a good list to mine for reads in the past. I plan on reading the winners, and many of the shortlisted books, although there are some writers on here I’ve successfully avoided like the plague (I’m looking at you, Ayn Rand), and I don’t know that I’m going to change that.

Books from the list I’ve read so far:

1952 Nominee – The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
1952 Nominee – Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron
1953 WINNER – Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
1953 Nominee – The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1957 Nominee – Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
1959 Nominee – Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
1961 Nominee – A Separate Peace by John Knowles
1961 Nominee – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1962 Nominee – Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
1979 Nominee – The World According to Garp by John Irving
1980 WINNER – Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
1980 Nominee – Endless Love by Scott Spencer
1982 Nominee – The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
1983 WINNER – The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1986 Nominee – A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1987 Nominee – Beloved by Toni Morrison
1989 Nominee – Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
1990 WINNER – Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
1992 WINNER – All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
1992 Nominee – Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
1993 WINNER – The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1994 Nominee – The Bird Artist by Howard Norman
1995 WINNER – Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
1995 Nominee – All Souls’ Rising by Madison Smartt Bell
1995 Nominee – The House on the Lagoon by Rosario Ferre
1996 WINNER – Ship Fever and other Stories by Andrea Barrett
1996 Nominee – The Giant’s House by Elizabeth McCracken
1996 Nominee – Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Stephen Millhauser
1997 WINNER – Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
1997 Nominee – Underworld by Don DeLillo
1998 WINNER – Charming Billy by Alice McDermott
1998 Nominee – Kaaterskill Falls by Allegra Goodman
1998 Nominee – A Man in Full by Thomas Wolfe
1999 WINNER – Waiting by Ha Jin
2000 WINNER – In America by Susan Sontag
2000 Nominee – The Feast of Love by Charles Baxter
2000 Nominee – Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates
2001 WINNER – The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
2002 Nominee – The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson
2003 Nominee – Drop City by T.C. Boyle
2007 Nominee – Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

I haven’t written any reviews of these. I was going to mention some of my favorites, but it turned out that I love many of these books, and it was too hard to narrow it down to a meaningful list. The only ones I wouldn’t recommend are Cold Mountain (worst ending of a book I can remember) and A Man in Full. I think my gap from 1962 to 1979 is interesting. I was born in 1966 and started reading “adult” books probably around 1981, and I wonder if I stayed away from books in that time period because they were too new to be “classic,” but I wouldn’t have come across them as they were published?

I’ll be tracking my progress at right under The National Book Award Project, and I’ll be crossposting my reviews at the challenge website National Book Award Project. This is a loooong list. If you look at some of the years on the page at right, you’ll see that the committee must have had a hard time dropping some of their choices–1960 has 18 books on the list!

Housekeeping

Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to put html in my sidebar, so I can’t put in the nifty LibraryThing widget I wanted. But I’ve decided to tidy up my reviews, so from now on my progress meters will only appear on my 2008 Book List page above. I was having trouble before editing code, but I think I’ve figured out my problem. (Fingers crossed!)

Ingenious Pursuits

Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution by Lisa Jardine (science history, 392 pages)

Over the past several years, I’ve read and truly enjoyed a number of novels set in Restoration England, and through these I have developed an interest in the Royal Society–it ties in so well with one of my nonfiction interests, which is the history of science. I had been looking for some time for a history of the Royal Society, and when I mentioned this to some of my LibraryThing friends, one of them recommended Lisa Jardine and in particular Ingenious Pursuits which, while not a history of the Royal Society, touches on many of their experiments and discoveries early in their creation.

The theme of Jardine’s Ingenious Pursuits is that scientific study and discovery most often occurs collaboratively or competitively, with information or theory or partial discovery by one person touching off experimentation or discovery by another. She focuses in this book on the late 17th and early 18th century in Europe, which saw an explosion of interest in science and the development of rigorous hypothesis and testing, with demonstrable, independently verified results.

Much like the wide-reaching interests of the Royal Society itself, Jardine ranges through an astonishing variety of subjects in this book–astronomy, microscopy, blood circulation, respiration, cellular structure, botany, air pressure, deep-sea diving–the list goes on and on. At times, I really wanted to wave my hands and beg her to slow down, so I could get more detail. This was what I found frustrating about the book, and it’s certainly not the author’s fault. It is by its nature an overview, so she couldn’t get too in-depth about anything. However, I do fault her for bringing up the longitude problem several times, and various scientists’ attempts to solve it, but never touching on John Harrison, who actually did invent a working marine chronometer.

The methods used by these scientists were fascinating and often crude, and in some instances stomach churning. The faint-of-heart should probably avoid the chapter that discusses circulation and respiration, since the studies on these were largely done via dog vivisection. Animal cruelty abounds in these pages, but the scientists also did quite a bit of study on themselves, particularly when they were testing medications.

As I said earlier, I’ve read a lot of fiction set in this time period, and I was delighted to read about the real-life work of some (mostly) minor characters from those books, including Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and John Wilkins (all of whom appeared in Neal Stephenson’s wonderful Baroque Cycle); Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon, and Nevil Maskelyne (from Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon); and many others. Robert Hooke holds a particular fascination for me, and I will be seeking out Jardine’s biography of him, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London.

I would highly recommend Ingenious Pursuits to anyone with an interest in modern science as an essential look at its roots.

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi (graphic memoir, 187 pages)

Persepolis 2 picks up where Persepolis left off, with teenaged Marjane newly arrived in Vienna to go to school. Although her parents had arranged for her to stay with friends, after 10 days she is packed off to a boarding house run by nuns. Marjane bounces from place to place and identity to identity, eventually ending up homeless on the streets of Vienna. When she finally returns home to Iran, she finds that her country has changed as much as she has.

Satrapi is as hard on herself as she is on those she feels wronged her throughout her teen and young adult years, including some shameful incidents she could have glossed over. In one story, Satrapi is out on the streets in Iran wearing lipstick, and when a carful of Guardians of the Revolution arrive, she fears they will arrest her for it. To distract them, she accuses a man on the street of saying something indecent to her, and they arrest him instead. She finds this funny, and shares the story with her boyfriend and then with her grandmother. It isn’t until her grandmother yells at her and storms out that Satrapi really thinks about what she has done.

I have almost no experience with the graphic format–aside from Persepolis and Persepolis 2 I have read a few short pieces–so I’m not able to judge this book against others of its type. But if they work as well as Satrapi’s does, I will be looking for more graphic works. In Persepolis 2, Satrapi uses the words to get across her story and her pictures to do the real talking. Satrapi’s story as a troubled teen trying to find herself is compelling, but it is her images of life in Iran after the revolution that haunt.

(A minor note for parents: While I had purchased Persepolis, Tom and I took this volume out of the library, where it was shelved under YA (as were all their graphic-format books, apparently). Satrapi depicts sex and drug use frankly in this work, and I would hesitate to call it YA.)

Villain in Training

I read Owen two books tonight and tucked him into bed. As I kissed him good night, he wrapped his arms around my neck and said, “You can’t get away!” “Oh, no,” I replied, “I can’t get away.” And a little voice in my ear said, “Mwa ha ha ha ha!”

Lost and Found

Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst (fiction, 292 pages)

“You’ve lost the race, but what have you found?”

In Carolyn Parkhurt’s imagined reality show “Lost and Found,” two-person teams travel the globe, solving clues and finding “lost” objects that they must keep with them for the duration of the game. The last team to find the object and get to the final destination of each week’s episode is eliminated. As the game progresses and the number of objects (a ski pole, a parrot, an aviator helmet, etc) increases, carrying them around gets harder and harder.

The five contestants we get to know, through first-person narration, have each suffered losses: Laura and Cassie, a mother-and-daughter team, have lost each other (Laura’s idea in joining the show was to bring them closer together) and the baby that Cassie carried in secret and then gave away for adoption, as well as Cassie’s father, who died when she was one. Cassie lost her best friend (and secret crush) Mia. Justin and Abby, a married couple, are from an “ex-gay” religious group (they joined the show primarily because Justin wanted to show the world that God can help gay people become straight) and have of course lost their sexual identity, and because of that really their sense of self. Carl, who is on the show with his brother Jeff, has lost his marriage and is missing his sick son. Juliet, a former child actress who has been paired up with a former child actor, has lost her career (and a bit of her soul). As you could expect from the title, as the book progresses the characters either find what they lost or find acceptable (or even better) substitutes.

Parkhurst’s characters are well drawn, and the reader finds herself rooting for certain outcomes (just like when watching a reality show). In an interview at the end of my copy of the book, Parhurst spends some time talking about her love of television, and in particular of reality shows. This really came through in Lost and Found–it could have been a complete skewering of reality shows, and she certainly took cracks at them, but it was more loving than scathing, and the reader was able to get caught up in the show. Because we don’t get the perspective of all the contestants on the show, it’s fairly clear who will be eliminated early on, which I thought was a bit of a flaw in the structure, but of course as we narrow down to our main characters it gets harder to predict the finale.

I read Lost and Found with my book group, and as you can tell from the cover above it is being pushed heavily as a book-club read. The original cover is the one at right, which has a very different feel and I think comes closer to the attitude of the book. For me, this book probably suffered from unfortunate timing. I picked it up by necessity right after I finished The Quincunx (because we were meeting in a mere five days), and I was still reveling in the dense, intricate plotting of that book and my joy over having read it. Also, it had been a few years since I’d read Parkhurt’s previous novel, The Dogs of Babel, but I remembered enough of the strange, elliptical nature of that book to be expecting something similar. Lost and Found is a perfectly fine book, but it’s more of an easy vacation book. I breezed through it in a day and found myself wanting more meat. The rest of my group loved it, and we had a lively discussion despite that (I don’t know about your book groups, but in mine we find that the hardest discussions are of books everyone really likes–what do you say beyond “I really liked the part when . . . “?). Their enthusiasm for it really did help me, in retrospect, see some of the appeal of the book, and I found myself wishing I’d read it in a different time and place.

4013 / 36600 words. 11% done!

6 / 10 owned prior to 2008. 60%!

2 / 25 nonfiction. 8%!

3 / 10 global/translation. 30%!

Under Review

I am woefully behind in writing reviews. I have read three books in the past week (Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst, Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi and Ingenious Pursuits by Lisa Jardine) that I have yet to review. The truth is, I’d rather be reading.

The Costa Book Award

The Costa Book Award Project is another ongoing challenge with no time limit. The Costa Book Awards consist of a total of 6 awards: Novel Award, First Novel Award, Biography Award, Poetry Award and Children’s Book Award. One of those winners is then given the Book of the Year Award. The category award winners by year are listed below. The Book of the Year is noted by 3 asterisks (***). Prior to 2006, the Costa Book Awards were known as the Whitbread Book Awards.

This is going to be a difficult one for me–I can’t remember the last time I voluntarily read poetry. Interesting trivia about the Whitbread/Costa Awards–Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin are a married couple and were in direct competition in 2002 for the Book of the Year award (he for novel, she for biography). Tomalin won. I’ve read both, and I much preferred her book that year.

I have read 11 Costa/Whitbread Award winners prior to 2008. I’d like to try to read another six this year, probably from among the following:

Costa Award Winners I Plan on Reading in 2008 

First Novel Award – The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney (2006)***
Novel Award – Restless by William Boyd (2006)
First Novel Award – Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (2003)
Children’s Book Award – The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman*** (2001)
Novel Award – Music and Silence by Rose Tremain (1999)
Poetry Award – Beowulf by Seamus Heaney (1999)***
Biography Award – Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman (1998)
Novel Award – Quarantine by Jim Crace (1997)
Novel Award – An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)***
First Novel Award – Oranges are not the only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (1985)
Novel Award – Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (1985)
First Book Award – The Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin (1974)

Costa Award Winners I Have Read

Novel Award – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (2003)***
Novel Award – Spies by Michael Frayn (2002)
Biography Award – Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin (2002)***
First Novel Award – White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000)
Novel Award – English Passengers by Matthew Kneale(2000)***
Children’s Book Award – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling (1999)
First Novel Award – Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (1995)***
Novel Award – The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie (1995)
Novel Award – Felicia’s Journey by William Trevor (1994)***
Novel Award – The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (1988)
Children’s Book Award – The Witches by Roald Dahl (1983)

I’ll be tracking my progress at right under Costa Book Award Project, and I’ll be crossposting my reviews at the challenge website Costa Book Award Project.

The Orange Prize Project

The Orange Prize is another excellent list to mine for reading choices, and I’m happy to be participating in The Orange Prize Project. Coming into 2008, I have read 14 books from the Fiction winners and shortlist (possibly 15–I read an Amy Tan book once, and it may have been The Hundred Secret Senses, but I couldn’t swear to it), and 1 from the New Writers winners and shortlist. In 2008, I plan on reading reading another 6.

Orange Prize Winners and Shortlisted Books I Have Read
2007
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie – WINNER
The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Xiaolu Guo
The Lizard Cage, by Karen Connelly – NEW WRITERS WINNER

2006
On Beauty, by Zadie Smith – WINNER
The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss

2005
We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver – WINNER

2002
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett- WINNER
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

2001
The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood

2000
White Teeth, by Zadie Smith

1999
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
Paradise, by Toni Morrison

1997
Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood
I Was Amelia Earhart, by Jane Mendelsohn

I’ll be tracking my progress at the right under The Orange Prize Project, and I’ll be crossposting my reviews at the challenge website The Orange Prize Project.

The Complete Booker

I was a bit nervous about starting challenges, because I do better with reading when I don’t really plan ahead, but challenges like The Complete Booker are right up my alley, since they have no time limit and they are books I would read anyway.

I have used the Booker shortlist and winners for many years to guide my reading–coming into 2008 I have read 19 Booker winners, and I plan to read 8 this year from among the following:

Booker Winners I plan to read in 2008
2007 – The Gathering (Enright)
2005 – The Sea (Banville)
2004 – The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)
1994 – How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1991 – The Famished Road (Okri)
1989 – The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
1987 – Moon Tiger (Lively)
1985 – The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 – Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1972 – G. (Berger)
1970 – The Elected Member (Rubens)

Booker Winners I Have Read
2006 – The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2002 – Life of Pi (Martel)
2001 – True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey)
2000 – The Blind Assassin (Atwood)
1999 – Disgrace (Coetzee)
1998 – Amsterdam: A Novel (McEwan)
1997 – The God of Small Things (Roy)
1996 – Last Orders (Swift)
1995 – The Ghost Road (Barker)
1993 – Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)
1992 – The English Patient (Ondaatje)
1992 – Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1990 – Possession: A Romance (Byatt)
1988 – Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)
1982 – Schindler’s Ark (Keneally)
1981 – Midnight’s Children (Rushdie)
1979 – Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1975 – Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1973 – The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)

I’ll be tracking my progress to the right under The Complete Booker, and I’ll be crossposting my reviews at the website The Complete Booker.