# Crappy Prize Winning Books **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [May 19, 2007, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687 "2007-05-19T03:33:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Darryl\_Lict](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7cd45c/32.png) [@Darryl\_Lict](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darryl_Lict)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 3:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/1 "2007-05-19T03:33:47Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/2 "2007-05-19T04:52:28Z")
Moving thread from IMHO to Cafe Society. ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/3 "2007-05-19T13:05:48Z")
**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 ---
**Author:** ![twickster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ec9cab/32.png) [@twickster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twickster)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/4 "2007-05-19T13:21:17Z")
[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? ---
**Author:** ![AuntiePam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/f19dbf/32.png) [@AuntiePam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AuntiePam)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/5 "2007-05-19T13:35:39Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![MoodIndigo1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e8c25b/32.png) [@MoodIndigo1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MoodIndigo1)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/6 "2007-05-19T15:38:12Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/7 "2007-05-19T15:52:59Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Sampiro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/2acd7d/32.png) [@Sampiro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sampiro)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/8 "2007-05-19T16:05:35Z")
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](http://www.nationalbook.org/). 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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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. ---
**Author:** ![anu-la1979](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/47e85d/32.png) [@anu-la1979](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anu-la1979)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/9 "2007-05-19T16:56:16Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Key\_Lime\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/48db29/32.png) [@Key\_Lime\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Key_Lime_Guy)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 5:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/10 "2007-05-19T17:28:34Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![neorxnawange](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/f4b2a3/32.png) [@neorxnawange](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neorxnawange)\ **Post date:** [May 19, 2007, 6:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/11 "2007-05-19T18:28:49Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![Darryl\_Lict](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7cd45c/32.png) [@Darryl\_Lict](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darryl_Lict)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/12 "2007-05-20T01:18:54Z")
[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? ---
**Author:** ![SmackFu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/53a042/32.png) [@SmackFu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmackFu)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/13 "2007-05-20T02:09:46Z")
**Soul of a New Machine** won a Pulitzer in 1981, and I’m barely slogging through it. Has not aged well. ---
**Author:** ![Talon\_Karrde](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Talon\_Karrde](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Talon_Karrde)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 4:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/14 "2007-05-20T04:32:51Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Yorikke](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yorikke/32/4335_2.png) [@Yorikke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yorikke)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/15 "2007-05-20T05:54:46Z")
[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!** 😃 Joe ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 6:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/16 "2007-05-20T06:39:33Z")
[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). > **[Nobel Prize in Literature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Literature)** > > The Nobel Prize in Literature (Swedish: Nobelpriset i litteratur), is a Swedish literature prize that is awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words of Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction". Though individual works are sometimes cited as being particularly noteworthy, the award is based on an author's body of work as a whole. The Swedish Academy decides who, if anyone, will receive the prize. The academ... Prizes seem awarded based upon PCness. ---
**Author:** ![bigdfrombigd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/df705f/32.png) [@bigdfrombigd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bigdfrombigd)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/17 "2007-05-20T15:32:17Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![DadWagonDriver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/edb3f5/32.png) [@DadWagonDriver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DadWagonDriver)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/18 "2007-05-20T15:52:01Z")
**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. ---
**Author:** ![sinjin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@sinjin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sinjin)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 4:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/19 "2007-05-20T16:23:55Z")
[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. ---
**Author:** ![Lissla\_Lissar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8491ac/32.png) [@Lissla\_Lissar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lissla_Lissar)\ **Post date:** [May 20, 2007, 7:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687/20 "2007-05-20T19:33:36Z")
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. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/crappy-prize-winning-books/404687.md?page=2)