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Booker/Pulitzer/award books you have read?

Liam

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Liam

Liam

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With the 2016 Booker Prize winner having been announced on Tuesday, just thought this might be an interesting topic to throw up. Find the Booker and Pulitzer prize lists below (I appreciate there are other awards, but these are the two that I tend to think about when it comes to UK and US fiction). Which books have you read? Thoughts? Etc.

I do understand that a prize is not a sign of quality necessarily, but most people would have at least read a couple of these books by happenstance as much as anything else.

 

Booker prize winners

Spoiler

2016 - The Sellout (Beatty)

2015 - A Brief History of Seven Killings (James)

2014 - The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Flanagan)

2013 - The Luminaries (Catton)

2012 - Bringing up the Bodies (Mantel)

2011 - The Sense of an Ending (Barnes)
2010 - The Finkler Question (Jacobson)
2009 - Wolf Hall (Mantel)
2008 - The White Tiger (Adiga)
2007 - The Gathering (Enright)
2006 - The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2005 - The Sea (Banville)
2004 - The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst)
2003 - Vernon God Little (Pierre)
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)
1994 - How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1993 - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)
1992 - The English Patient (Ondaatje)
1992 - Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1991 - The Famished Road (Okri)
1990 - Possession: A Romance (Byatt)
1989 - The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
1988 - Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)
1987 - Moon Tiger (Lively)
1986 - The Old Devils (Amis)
1985 - The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 - Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1983 - Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee)
1982 - Schindler's Ark (Keneally)
1981 - Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
1980 - Rites of Passage (Golding)
1979 - Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1978 - The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch)
1977 - Staying on (Scott)
1976 - Saville (Storey)
1975 - Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1974 - The Conservationist (Gordimer)
1974 - Holiday (Middleton)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)
1972 - G. (Berger)
1971 - In a Free State (Naipaul)
1970 - The Elected Member (Rubens)
1969 - Something to Answer For (Newby)

Troubles (Farrell) also won the 'lost' Booker award for when changes to the admission process meant some books never had a chance to get nominated[

 

Pulitzer Prize winners

Spoiler

 

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Liam

Liam

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Meant to put my thoughts in a lot earlier, but just haven't found the time.

I plan - I think - to try and read all of the Booker Prize books at some point in the next few years. I've already read books like The Sense of An Ending, which was amazing, and Life of Pi and Disgrace, which were also really good. Hotel Du Lac was boring, boring, boring. Vernon God Little is fun and has an interesting narrator, though the ending is all just a bit too convenient.

In my actual collection at the moment, I have quite a few of the other ones. I'm currently slogging my way through Rites of Passage - Golding doesn't really know how to do pithy.

I've not read as many Pulitzer winners. A Visit from the Goon Squad was an excellent book with an interesting structure, whilst the Road was a harrowing, yet brilliant read. I own 'The Brief Life....', 'The Shipping News' and '...Kavalier and Clay' and perhaps a couple others.

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Liam

Liam

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17 minutes ago, Cliff Hanger said:

Bookers I've read: Life of Pi, Midnight's Children

 

Pulitzers: The Age of Innocence, Arrowsmith, Old Man and the Sea, TKAM, Confederacy of Dunces, and I've started but never finished Grapes of Wrath, Kavalier and Clay, The Pale King

Thoughts on Midnight's Children? Never read it, but it was given the Booker's Booker award, effectively.

Tried to read The Old Man and the Sea, but it just bored me for some reason.

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Liam

Liam

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10 hours ago, Control said:

16 Pulitzers (if I count ones named in the "no award given" years), but just four Bookers. A little embarrassing on both counts, given that I'm an English professor.

I'm an English teacher and my record isn't great either. Award winning doesn't necessarily make something worth reading or even good.

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OSJ

OSJ

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Just looked at this for the first time in forever and was surprised to see that I have read a dozen or so Pulitzers and about half as many Bookers. Even more interesting to me is that I started another dozen and decided they were rubbish before reaching my ninety-page mark. (See, if I make it to ninety pages, you've got me intrigued enough that I'll stay for the ride, on the other hand, if you can't captivate me within ninety pages, either our tastes differ greatly or you can't write for shit.) There are a number of famous books that don't make the ninety page cut, notably a couple by Ayn Rand, mostly everything David Foster Wallace ever wrote and tons of literary jackoffery by Hemingway, Updike and others. Now, ask me about Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Bram Stoker winners and you'll get a completely different number of reads by me. 

Pretty sure I've read all the Hugo and Nebula winners, (even the crap by Orson Scott Card), and most of the World Fantasy and Stokers. The genre awards have actually done a much better job of not having laughably bad winners than you would expect. Doesn't mean that the right book always won, but there are very, very few WTF? were people thinking choices. I can even defend the oft-maligned They'd Rather Be Right by Clifton and Riley as a logical (if not the the right choice).

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OSJ

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3 hours ago, Kuetsar said:

In the non-fiction categories, I've read 12, and own at least 6 more. . . .

That does not surprise me in the least. I suspect that your non-fiction library is every bit the equal of my sf/horror/fantasy collection.

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Contentious C

Contentious C

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Huh. I'm necro'ing this bad boy because, well, I'm a terrible person. I'm surprised the only Booker winner I've read is The English Patient - in equal parts because I haven't read some of the other "name" ones on the list like Midnight's Children or The Remains of the Day despite meaning to read them, and also because I'm surprised THAT won a Booker prize. I enjoyed it a great deal, but if I had to list the best books I've read from the last 25-30 years, I'm not sure I'd even remember it. And I've read, like, 20 non-scifi/fantasy books that have come out in my lifetime.

The Pulitzers are the same old "stuff they showed us in school" everyone else has named...but the only one off that entire list I'd go back and re-read at the drop of a hat is All the King's Men.

Mostly I bumped this because Ishiguro won the last Nobel, and I was surprised to find he did it off of, what, 6 novels? That said, the film versions of Remains and Never Let Me Go are two of the most heart-wrenching works I've ever seen, so I finally bought myself a copy of the latter to read and see what they left out of the film. I suspect I'll want to jump off a building by the end. Or perhaps in the middle, I don't know.

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Surprisingly Sincere Man

Surprisingly Sincere Man

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2 Booker Prize winners - The Sense of an Ending, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (really enjoyed both)

3 Pulitzer Prize winners - The Age of Innocence, The Old Man and The Sea, The Road (preferred the Wharton over the others)

Not a prize winner list, but the list I prefer to judge myself against is a 100 English language novels from The Guardian a couple of years ago - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list

There I've got 7 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dracula, Heart of Darkness, The Age of Innocence, Brave New World, The Big Sleep, Lord of the Flies) Not as many as I'd like, but I own about 40% of the books on there so will look to remedy that over time.

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Liam

Liam

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1 hour ago, Surprisingly Sincere Man said:

2 Booker Prize winners - The Sense of an Ending, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (really enjoyed both)

3 Pulitzer Prize winners - The Age of Innocence, The Old Man and The Sea, The Road (preferred the Wharton over the others)

Not a prize winner list, but the list I prefer to judge myself against is a 100 English language novels from The Guardian a couple of years ago - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/17/the-100-best-novels-written-in-english-the-full-list

There I've got 7 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Dracula, Heart of Darkness, The Age of Innocence, Brave New World, The Big Sleep, Lord of the Flies) Not as many as I'd like, but I own about 40% of the books on there so will look to remedy that over time.

Using that one:

Frankenstein

The Sign of Four

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Great Gatsby

Brave New World

1984

The Catcher in the Rye

Lord of the Flies

To Kill a Mockingbird

Catch-22

Portnoy's Complaint

Disgrace

I own several others. Favourite one is probably Brave New World - didn't care much for The Sign of Four personally.

 

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Contentious C

Contentious C

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I think I've read something like a quarter of that. Seems like whoever was doing the picking was trying to avoid having more than one work from a single author, else there might be more than one Nabokov or Faulkner on there (I didn't check the criteria, but I'm guessing that's part of it). And if Dracula is one of the 100 best novels written in English, I'm a goddamned romper-wearing pelican working a jackhammer. "Important"? I suppose. "Good"? Uhhhhhhhhhhhh.

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