Battle of the Prizes - American Version - Wrap Up

This is the second year I've participated in Rose City Reader's Battle of the Prizes.  This year she added a British version, to go along with American version and I'm reading for that one, too.  This is the wrap-up post for the American version.

The idea is simple - read one Pulitzer Prize winner, one National Book Award winner, and one double-dipper (a book that won both prizes in the same year - there are more of these than you think).  My book choices for this year and links to my reviews are here:

National Book Award - World's Fair by E.L. Doctorow (review)
Pulitzer Prize - Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (review)
Double-Dipper - The Color Purple by Alice Walker (review)

I was surprised to look at the list and realize that I hadn't read either Lonesome Dove or The Color Purple both of which were massively popular books that were turned into a massively popular mini-series and a massively popular movie and then a musical (respectively).  At the time I chose my three books for this I had just finished reading Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow and absolutely loved it, so I wanted to read more of him.

I loved World's Fair.  It was such a beautifully written book and such a wonderful reminiscence of childhood.  It reminded me a lot of the Maurice Sendak exhibit that I saw at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.  Sendak has used his neighborhood, his family and neighbors, his dog, and the stories he heard growing up to fuel his storytelling throughout his career in much the way Doctorow used his memories for this book.  It's wonderful and opened up a world to me that is so far from my own that it could almost be speculative fiction.  I savored every word and image and was blown away (again) by Doctorow's writing.

Then I slogged through Lonesome Dove.  I know everyone on the planet thinks it's great.  I know everyone on the planet watched the miniseries.  I think I'm off the planet.  I didn't hate this book, but I really didn't love it, either.  It was a real slog through the swamp in hip waders.  I didn't really like any of the characters.  I found the ways their paths crossed throughout the book across a very large expanse of geography completely contrived.  I loathed the fact that every single female character in the book was calculating and relatively inhuman (but really beautiful!).  I was bothered by the handling of the character of Deets who serves as a magical Negro moving the plot forward for the white heroes.  He's soft, he's warm, he's fuzzy, his life exists only inasmuch as he must serve his master's epic journey.  Ish.

Next was The Color Purple which I also didn't love.  This was another book that was just okay.  My reading experience was badly colored by the author's Preface to the edition I have - I wish I'd never read it.  In her Preface Walker comes off as unbelievably preachy and spends a number of pages telling her reader what to believe, how to live, and what her book is all about.  I found this hugely off-putting and it definitely impacted my reading of her book. 

I appreciate the voice she's created and I appreciate the story and I appreciate the book's quality and place in feminist and African American writing, but I don't love the book and won't read it again.  I wonder if the classification of the book is also a problem for me - not that it's feminist or African American, but that it's so easy to decide what shelves it goes on.  It reminds me of when Borders first opened and I found that they classified their fiction somewhat demographically - African American writers, Lesbian writers, Hispanic writers, etc.  They did not, by the way, have an Old Dead White Guy's section which, if you're going to classify in this manner you really ought to have for consistency.  In any event, I want to read books by everybody and I want them all mixed up together - the old dead white guys rubbing up against the Chinese and Japanese and all the other kinds of people that make up our world.  By the same token I want a book that's less easily classified - not whitewashed, not all male, not necessarily universal - a book that's written to tell me a story, not to deliver a message.  We've all got preferences in reading and this happens to be mine.

Rose City Reader asks us to compare the prizes and I'm not feeling any more eloquent about them this year than I was last year.  My experience with these books was again that the Pulitzer Prize winners seemed more in the popular fiction vein and the National Book Award seems more in the good writing vein and winning both is pretty exceptional.  I like this challenge because it makes me read things I probably wouldn't read otherwise and that's always good.  Reading is all about expanding your horizons and thinking about your world and this challenge made me do that.