Crappy Prize Winning Books

Cafe Society
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I notice that Pulitzers seem to favor family oriented books. If you ask me, there are some really shitty Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winning books.

Midnight’s Child won the Booker of Bookers Prize for the best Booker Prize winner of the first 25 years. I thought it sucked. It started out with an interesting premise and was intertwined with the partition of India and Pakistan. It was an educational and informative read initially about politics in India. However, it dragged on and on. I lugged that friggen’ book through Africa and South America for 5 months trying to read the damn thing. It was torture. I was on a bunch of 10 hour bus rides and still struggled to read that pile of crap. I got within 20 pages of finishing the damn thing, then I forgot it on a bus in Chile somewhere.

Richard Ford’s Independence Day was a boring book about the sadness of divorce and a father trying to connect with his loser son. How this book ever won a Pulitzer is completely beyond me. Fuck, I just realized it also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction also. WTF?

Which prize winning books do you think suck?

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Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society.

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The Shipping News by Annie Proulx – won the Pulitzer. I won’t say I thought it was “crappy”, but I didn’t think it was all that special.

I just looked at the Pulitzer list. I didn’t know that Gone With the Wind was a winner. Does that surprise anybody else? How often do popular, best selling books win a Pulitzer? I’m seeing maybe four or five winners that I saw people reading and that I remember as best sellers.

Here’s the list from Wiki:

2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
2006: March by Geraldine Brooks
2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
2004: The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998: American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997: Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996: Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995: The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 1994: The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx 1993: A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992: A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, 1991: Rabbit At Rest by John Updike
1990: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
1989: Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988: Beloved by Toni Morrison
1987: A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1986: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1985: Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
1984: Ironweed by William Kennedy
1983: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1982: Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
1981: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1980: The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer
1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
1977: no award given
1976: Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow
1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1974: no award given
1973: The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty
1972: Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1971: no award given
1970: The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford
1969: House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1968: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1967: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1966: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter
1965: The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
1964: no award given
1963: The Reivers by William Faulkner
1962: The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor
1961: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1960: Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
1959: The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
1958: A Death in the Family by James Agee
1957: no award given
1956: Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
1955: A Fable by William Faulkner
1954: no award given
1953: The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1952: The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1951: The Town by Conrad Richter
1950: The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
1949: Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
1948: Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener

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[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx – won the Pulitzer. I won’t say I thought it was “crappy”, but I didn’t think it was all that special.

[/QUOTE]

Disagree – I thought it was crappy. I couldn’t get past the first 40 pages.

Of the others, that I’ve read (only 2 of the winners since '91 – then we get back to Mambo Kings, which I also thought was overrated) – eh. Some good books, some okay books.

What’s with the spurt of “no awards” in the '70s?

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That’s a puzzlement. Cheever published Falconer in 1977 – shouldn’t he have been a shoe-in? Critics love Cheever.

We also had The Thorn Birds in 1977. I’m not saying Thorn Birds is Pulitzer material, but it’s at least as good as GWTW.

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[QUOTE=AuntiePam]
That’s a puzzlement. Cheever published Falconer in 1977 – shouldn’t he have been a shoe-in? Critics love Cheever.

We also had The Thorn Birds in 1977. I’m not saying Thorn Birds is Pulitzer material, but it’s at least as good as GWTW.
[/QUOTE]

Colleen McCullough may not have been American yet when that book was published. I dunno.

ETA I don’t even know if she ever became American. so her work would not be eligible for a Pulitzer, I believe.

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Midnight’s Children is absolutely brilliant, start to finish.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on the other hand… I wouldn’t have made it past the first page if I didn’t know it was supposed to be fantastic. I struggled for, I dunno, maybe that magic 40 pages, before giving up. There was not a single line, page, scene, or description I thought worth reading.

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It would be interesting on the Pulitzer list to research each one and see how popular each was before winning the Pulitzer. (I don’t have sufficient time or interest but I’m sure it could be done.)

The thing about a Pulitzer is this: while George & Mable Public couldn’t care much less what wins the Pulitzers and it’s not exactly like the Oscars as far as excitement and anticipation, when a book wins a Pulitzer it’s automatically going to be purchased by every major and most minor academic and public libraries. That alone is enough to boost it’s sale by the tens of thousands of copies, which in turn shoots it up the “bestseller” lists if only temporarily, and that puts it into more bookstores in the bestsellers racks, and so it’s a major ripple effect. (The Pulitzer Prize was recently raised to $10,000, a nice chunk of change but far from life-changing in and of itself, but the prestige and publicity is worth many times more dollar wise.)

The Nobel, which is for an author rather than a particular work (though usually there’s a particular work that pushes them over) is life-changing (currently $1.4 million and somehow that’s tax free in most countries) but doesn’t seem to do as much for an author’s commercial success ironically than the Pulitzer does. Toni Morrison was liberated from teaching by her Nobel prize but it was Oprah who made her a major bestselling author.

For the OP, my least favorite major award winners that I’ve read (and many will disagree) include Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (which I could barely finish), Susan Sontag’s In America (heavy handed “racism and sexism are bad, m’kay!” without a single well drawn believable character, including the historical figures), and Cold Mountain which I thought was trite, derivative (not just because it was very loosely based on The Odyssey but the war novel clichés and grotesques straight out of O’Connor and Faulkner but less believable). All won National Book Awards. Allan Gurganus’s Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which won several critics awards and was a Book-of-the-Month-Club main selection (also a significant award) and I thought it was a great premise but didn’t do anywhere near enough with it, plus it visited stale territory (grand planter mansion class- yawn- and magical Negro [which in light of recent high interest I link because I was surprised how many had never heard the term]) and left TONS of questions unanswered (among them: the main character, Lucy Marsden, is 99 in the 1980s- she bore 9 children and all of them are dead- we’re never told why {it’s unusual all would die when only a couple are said to have died in childhood- the youngest would only be in its 60s after all} and that she has no grandchildren (again, that’s very odd- when you have 7 kids chances are there’ll be at least some reproduction) and other flaws I won’t indulge in an OP of this length.

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I honestly did not think Inheritance of Loss was that great a book. I also found out that Kiran Desai is Anita Desai’s daughter which makes me :rolleyes:

Don’t get me wrong-it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. “Hummus-soft darkness”??? I laughed out loud at some of the prose. Same for Jhumpha Lahiri’s “The Namesake” but that’s mostly because Gogol is one of the most self-indulgent characters to walk the pages of books.

Midnight’s Children, otoh, was a fan-fucking-tastic book.

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[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
Richard Ford’s Independence Day was a boring book about the sadness of divorce and a father trying to connect with his loser son. How this book ever won a Pulitzer is completely beyond me. Fuck, I just realized it also won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction also. WTF?
[/QUOTE]

I thought Independence Day was utterly brilliant. It engaged me in every possible way.

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[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Midnight’s Children is absolutely brilliant, start to finish.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on the other hand… I wouldn’t have made it past the first page if I didn’t know it was supposed to be fantastic. I struggled for, I dunno, maybe that magic 40 pages, before giving up. There was not a single line, page, scene, or description I thought worth reading.
[/QUOTE]

McCarthy hasn’t written anything worth reading since The Orchard Keeper, which was actually really good.

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[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Midnight’s Children is absolutely brilliant, start to finish.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on the other hand… I wouldn’t have made it past the first page if I didn’t know it was supposed to be fantastic. I struggled for, I dunno, maybe that magic 40 pages, before giving up. There was not a single line, page, scene, or description I thought worth reading.
[/QUOTE]

Cormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors. I’m only at the beginning of The Road, so I can’t pass judgement just yet.

[QUOTE=neorxnawange]
McCarthy hasn’t written anything worth reading since The Orchard Keeper, which was actually really good.
[/QUOTE]

I really didn’t care for the Border Trilogy at all. But, I really love creepy brutal incestuous southern novels. I thoought Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God were all terrific. I always figured that if I had grown up in the south with a brutal child molesting father and meek terrorized mother, I could have been a successful novelist. Not that this describes his life, but I think Sampiro has huge potential as a writer because of his life experience (and terrific writing style).

I do wonder if Cormac McCarthy makes up words and definitions. Normally, I see a lot of words that I don’t know the definition of, but with Cormac, I’ve never even seen them before.

[QUOTE=Key Lime Guy]
I thought Independence Day was utterly brilliant. It engaged me in every possible way.
[/QUOTE]

Can you give me some more data points just to see where you are coming from? Do you think any of the Pulitzer Prize winners sucked? If not, which was your least favorite, and on a scale of 1 to 10(good) how would you rate it?

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Soul of a New Machine won a Pulitzer in 1981, and I’m barely slogging through it. Has not aged well.

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I guess I’d have to go with Beloved. I really don’t get all the love for Toni Morrison and there’s something about her writing that really puts me off. Maybe I find it too manipulative, but I like some things other people consider manipulative.

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[QUOTE=Key Lime Guy]
I thought Independence Day was utterly brilliant. It engaged me in every possible way.
[/QUOTE]

Especially when Randy Quaid blasts that one alien ship, sacrificing himself for the good of Earth! That was AWESOME!

:smiley:

Joe

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[QUOTE=Darryl Lict]
I notice that Pulitzers seem to favor family oriented books. If you ask me, there are some really shitty Pulitzer and Man Booker Prize winning books.

Which prize winning books do you think suck?
[/QUOTE]

For shitty and obscure you have to go for the Nobel prize in Lit, which hasn’t been awarded in over two decades to an author I have either read or even recognize (other than their name for the Prize itself).

Prizes seem awarded based upon PCness.

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[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Midnight’s Children is absolutely brilliant, start to finish.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on the other hand… I wouldn’t have made it past the first page if I didn’t know it was supposed to be fantastic. I struggled for, I dunno, maybe that magic 40 pages, before giving up. There was not a single line, page, scene, or description I thought worth reading.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with you, I bought the book specifically because it won the Pulitzer. I, unfortunately, read the whole durn thing all the while hoping it would “get good”.
I personally thought it sucked.

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Hoot won a Newberry a couple years ago and was turned into a movie. I’m teaching it this fall, and I can barely get through it. It’s such a trite, crappy example of adolescent lit. The writing sucks, the story is slow, and the message is pretty heavy handed (corporate America doesn’t care about the environment!). I have no idea how I’m going to present this to my students.
Edit: Oh, and Euginides’ Middlesex was brilliantly written, IMO.

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[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, on the other hand… I wouldn’t have made it past the first page if I didn’t know it was supposed to be fantastic. I struggled for, I dunno, maybe that magic 40 pages, before giving up. There was not a single line, page, scene, or description I thought worth reading.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I read this Thursday afternoon, based on reviews here on the dope. Gah, it was the worst ever. Redundant, stupid, plotless, pointless. It was a short story stretched into a novel by big print and creative type-setting. The only reason I finished it was because I was on pain medication and it was mindless.

20

I tried to read March, by Geraldine Brooks, and only got half-way through. I had a complete failure to suspend disbelief over what she was doing to the characters in Little Women. It’s supposed to be a retelling of the courtship and Civil War experiences of Mr. March, and I somehow fail to believe he was an agnostic adulterer, and his wife was an Underground Railroad conductress plus extreme feminist.

It doesn’t fly.