July 8, 2010

Summertime means lots of reading. I've read 27 books this year so far. I'll finish 28 and 29 by tonight and 30 probably by Sunday. My summer goal is to read 20 books in the next 2 months, including articles and books for classes in the fall semester. That might sound super nerdy...It is.

I don't know what my total at the end of the year will be but it will certainly far surpass last years total of 39. Part of that goal is to read the Pulitzer winners for Fiction and Poetry in the last 10 years. I've read 1 of the winners for poetry and 3 of the winners for fiction and I'll finish another tonight.

The 2006 winner for fiction was Geraldine Brooks' March, an almost boring read for the first 200 pages but which leaps in intensity in the last 80. I'm not convinced it deserved a Pulitzer, but it turned out to be a thoughtful read, if not the most entertaining.

Mr. March, the main character, joins the Union side of the civil war as a chaplain, leaving his wife and four girls at home. Initially a highly idealistic man, the war shatters his optimism and his body, leaving him wracked with disease and broken hope. Where the book becomes interesting is when those ideals collide with the reality of war and the evil it produces. March watches friends die and feels the weight of his cowardice. You can almost feel his soul crack under the weight as the champion of equality and conscience we see in the first part of the book is lost forever.

March is almost frustrating at first but then flares into life when March's world falls apart. It's a worthwhile read for the emotion of the last third, if for nothing else. And hey, if it won a Pulitzer, I think most people would disagree with me that it wasn't all I hoped it would be. So maybe you should check it out.

The other Pulitzer I'm presently in the middle of is Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies. And it's gooooodddd. More on that some other day.