A Word About Awards

ACCORDING TO MARK by Penelope Lively   Nomination: Booker Finalist 1984   Date Read: January 30, 2021   Mark is a biographer, researching a biography about Gilbert Strong, an essayist, novelist and fellow biographer. Through Mark’s research and efforts to piece together this complex man, we can see the challenges biographers face in examining the lives of the departed. Foresight can be a blessing and a curse. Each of the subjects interviewed can only provide one glimpse of a man and when joined together can seem to describe five different people all rolled into one.   Mark is also in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Upon meeting Strong’s granddaughter, Mark becomes smitten with her unusual lifestyle, beguiling looks and aloofness. I was shocked when he actually came out and told her that he had fallen in love with her. I found this direct approach refreshing. Carrie, however, does not share Mark’s sentiment.   During a drive across France to meet Hermione, Carrie’s mother and Strong’s

THE DARK CIRCLE by Linda Grant   Nomination: Women's Prize Finalist 2017   Date Read: January 29, 2021   Brother and sister Lenny and Miriam are two teenagers on their own in an ever changing world. They become grievously ill with TB, but in their youth and naivete don’t fully understand how ill until much later. Sent to a sanatorium to heal, they are required to learn new rules in order to adapt and survive.   In the course of their stay, they are required to tamp down their youth and vitality and find quiet activities to occupy their days. Seemingly endless, these days are filled with an eclectic mix of figures – military officers, a German woman, an elite woman who turns out shouldn’t have been there and an American merchant marine named Persky. All this time leaves them to wonder whether they will walk out alive or succumb to this disease that so little is known about.   Lenny and Maureen, along with their new friend and Maureen’s lover, Persky, they soon realize that there is

A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN by Robert Olen Butler   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1993   Nomination: PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1993   Dates Read: September 6, 2012 & January 27, 2021   From the get-go, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with a white man assuming a Vietnamese refugee’s voice. Some things are better left to the people who experienced them first-hand. But, I have to admit he did an amazing job.   Open Arms The narrator is a Buddhist and served as an interpreter for the Australians during the war. Open Arms refers to accepting Viet Cong into the Australian army. The narrator is tasked with interviewing a recent convert, Thap. While the narrator does not trust that he has fully rejected the Communists, a film shown in high spirits ultimately shows that everything Thap was told to believe about the West was fundamentally true.   Mr. Green Mr. Green refers to the narrator’s grandfather’s parrot. In Vietnamese culture, worshipping one’s ancestors is a tradition that is inviol

A THOUSAND ACRES by Jane Smiley   Awards: National Book Critics Circle Winner 1991, Pulitzer Winner 1992 Nomination: LA Times Finalist 1992   Dates Read: May 13, 2007 & January 25, 2021   For the first time, my tongue is tied and I don’t know what I can write about this novel that hasn’t been written before. My own personal opinions cannot add to or detract from the general consensus already shared.    Reading this for a second time is an experience, rather than an action. Being dragged through the spectacular implosion of a family who lives a well-ordered life to having it all crash and burn around them. It is brutal. It is honest. It is personally resonating.   I will cherish this book forever as a treasure that I want to keep close and whisper to myself about when alone. I am overcome.   Looking Forward: Moo, Some Luck, Ten Days In The Hills

ANDERSONVILLE by MacKinley Kantor   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1956   Nomination: National Book Finalist 1956   Date Read: January 22, 2021   Andersonville took my breath away. Don’t get me wrong. It was gruesome, bleak and, at times, tedious. But the overall magnitude and scope Kantor presents here is awe-inspiring. That’s saying a lot since I am not a war book kind of girl, especially the Civil War.   This tome begins with the Claffey plantation and ends there as well. The first 100 pages or so paint a somewhat idyllic picture of wartime life in the South. The plantation is struggling with wartime deprivations, but not direly so. All the slaves are treated well. The Claffey family is slowly coming apart as they lose one son after another to the war. Yet, Veronica, Ira’s wife, and Lucy, their daughter, remain.   As they are made aware of their last son dying in the war, Veronica slowly goes mad and ultimately takes her own life. Her grief proves too impossible a burden to bear. I’ll give

ALL MY PUNY SORROWS by Miriam Toews   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2015, Dublin Longlist 2016, Rathbones Folio Finalist 2015   Date Read: January 15, 2021   Sisters Elf and Yoli are sisters who were raised in a Mennonite household. On the surface, their lives could not be more disparate. Elf has an enviable life on the surface – beauty, a marriage in which her husband adores her. She is wildly talented and in every surface appearance, she is a success. Yoli, on the other hand, is deeply in debt. She is the mother of two teenagers, born of two different fathers, who challenge her in every way. For all that should separate them and drive them apart, they are fiercely close.   The biggest challenge to their relationship is that Elf has been, continues to be, and will always be alienated from life. Not just alienated, but seems to know in her marrow that this life is not for her. She wants, more than anything, to end her life.    Elf’s mother and sister have been through these paces befo

ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT by Gilbert Sorrentino   Nomination: PEN/Faulkner Finalist 1981   Date Read: January 13, 2021   Aberration Of Starlight follows four people on a vacation in a boardinghouse during the Depression. Through various literary devices, Sorrentino shows us their inner and outer worlds as they struggle with past relationships, future relationships and what it means to be family.   John is the father of Marie and she is the mother to Billy. John’s wife has recently died and neither John nor Marie are shedding very many tears as she was an unfriendly soul. Marie is also dealing with the loss of her ex-husband who left her for another woman. Instead of turning to each other for comfort and support, father and daughter seem to be at odds as they both confront their grief.   At the boardinghouse is another guest, Tom, who instantly falls for Marie. While all outward appearances paint Tom as a successful, potential suitor to Marie, her father definitively does not approve of T

MARTIN DRESSLER by Steven Millhauser   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1997   Nomination: Dublin Longlist 1998, National Book Finalist 1996   Dates Read: April 15, 2009 & January 10, 2021   Martin is an ambitious young man in 1890’s New York, with a singular gift of vision and the belief that progress is constant and inevitable. He has worked in his father’s tobacco shop since the tender age of 14 and never ceases to contemplate his future and how to increase business at his father’s shop.   In short order, Martin is offered a bell boy position at a nearby hotel at which he quickly advances to clerk and owner of a cigar stand in the lobby. In a couple more years, Martin has the idea and the means to open a combination lunchroom and billiard room in a nearby neighborhood building.   After moving out on his own to the exurbs, Martin meets and begins spending considerable time with the Vernon ladies – Margaret the mother and her two daughters Emmeline and Caroline. While Emmeline is not as pre

ADVISE & CONSENT by Allen Drury   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1960   Date Read: January 8, 2021   Bob Munson’s Book “… it would always come, renewed again and again to infinity, the same conviction that he was somehow personally responsible for the well-being of it all, that some overriding trust and obligation had been placed upon him to see that it was kept safe and its people protected.”    I find it terribly interesting that for all the maneuvering and deals being made, the distinction of party affiliation is completely missing. In present politics, it seems your party identity is the end-all be-all of politics. Party affiliation can almost immediately allow someone to be sized up in their beliefs and intellect.    I also find it fascinating that not much has changed in politics in the last 60 years since this book was written. The same posturing and maneuvering still occurs, although it has become much more brutal.   Seab Cooley’s Book Seab is a terse man, having eschewed love and

AFTER THIS by Alice McDermott   Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2008, Pulitzer Finalist 2007   Date Read: January 3, 2021   After This is a lovely novel about the Keane family – white, American, middle class. I cannot exactly pinpoint what is so compelling about this but I loved it. Four siblings, Michael, Annie, Jacob and Clare grow up in the 60’s and navigate the treacherous waters of a shifting society. Nothing extraordinary happens here except life being lived and the beauty and sadness that come with it.   While Michael and Annie explore the sexual revolution and are able to view sex and themselves through the paradigm of an increasingly liberal society, Jacob finds himself off to Vietnam never to return. Clare, being the youngest, is left behind at home and is determined to live a virtuous life until her heart is captured by a boy and she follows her heart’s and body’s desires.   What is extraordinary about this journey is McDermott’s writing. She has the ability to capture beauty i