A Word About Awards

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver   Awards: BookTube Winner 2023, James Tait Black Winner 2022, Oprah Book Club 2022, Pulitzer Winner 2023, Women’s Prize Winner 2023   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2023, Dublin Longlist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2022   Date Read: September 2, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “Inspired by  David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of...

IMPERIAL CAESAR by Rex Warner   Award: James Tait Black Winner 1960   Date Read: March 4, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ When The Young Caesar was reviewed back in 1958 and commended as biographical historical fiction of a high order, we expressed the hope that there would be a sequel, since the story stopped with the Gallic Wars. Here is the sequel, which carries on the record through the conquest of the Germans, his invasion of Britain, the crossing of the Rubicon, the Battle of Pharsalia against Pompey, the amorous affair with Cleopatra, his campaigns in Africa and Spain -- up to the Ides of March, when, sleepless, he knew forebodings of death. The story is set in the frame of his reassessment of these years, his memory sharpened by insomnia. And the style holds closely to the mood and expression of Caesar's own writings of his campaigns. It has the same terse style, concern with facts, ruthless self criticism- all recognized as Caesar's outstanding literary qualities, ...

THE CHILDREN’S BOOK by A.S. Byatt   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2009   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2009, Dublin Longlist 2011   Date Read: October 4, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “Byatt ( A Whistling Woman , 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.   The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods’ progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists’ lives. Three of the children Ol...

ACT OF DESTRUCTION by Ronald Hardy   Award: James Tait Black Winner 1962   Date Read: December 30, 2023   From Kirkus Review: “A  vista of a clanging Africa, physical than political, is distinguished by some spectacular scenery and it tells its story of one man's attempt to stem a world he never with a savage effectiveness. This is Hardy's fourth book (Kampong is the best remembered) his most political but his most impassioned- and through Harry Sloan he defends the view, or rather vision, of an untouched land man now challenges and civilization threatens to disfigure. Harry, who had grown up in this country ""wild enough to knock you flat"" had learned to kill hunting with his father, then later in the war, but now is a deputy game warden, defending the plains and the animals as the last sanctuaries of freedom. Harry is a loner, a rogue (i.e. the animal who sets himself apart from the herd) and his attempt to keep his valley inviolate leads to more than one...

DARKNESS VISIBLE by William Golding   Awards: James Tait Black Winner 1979, Nobel Winner 1979   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 1980   Date Read: October 1, 2023   Based on the premise that some people just want to be “…weird, to be on the other side,” Golding creates a bizarre intersection between morally bankrupt twins, a disfigured nut, two men seeking something missing from their lives and a middle aged pedophile. Sticking to the darkness so prevalent in most of his work, Golding’s take on the motivations of humans to a very dark place indeed.   While I agree that most humans have dark thoughts, it’s only a very small minority who actually act on those thoughts. Few people are willing to actually go through with attempting to kidnap a child for ransom. Few people would actually molest small children again and again and again. Yet we find Golding going down that road as if it’s quite natural.   I didn’t quite understand the role of Matty, the disfigured r...

DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT by Lucy Ellmann   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2019   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2019, Carnegie Longlist 2020   Date Read: August 12, 2023   I don’t even know where to start with this book. It took me so long to read and I usually plow through books like butter. This is an incredible accomplishment and a definitively unique voice and style. I am shocked it didn’t garner more attention but perhaps that’s because it’s so damned long.   The stream of consciousness about the world crumbling around our ears, gun violence, the environment, and the treatment of animals, to name a few of the terrors afflicting America right now; these obsessive thoughts are couched in a homey kitchen where our narrator bakes pies to try to add to the family’s income. They have four kids that She cannot believe are all hers because there are just so many.   In between the rants about the evils of the world, we also follow a mountain lion that has wandered into...

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE by Sebastian Barry   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2008 Nominations: Booker Finalist 2008, Dublin Longlist 2010, LA Times Finalist 2008   Date Read: January 28, 2022   What a rich and nuanced novel from Sebastian Barry, exploring madness, religion, and family. Taking place during Ireland’s upheaval with the IRA and then into World War II, The Secret Scripture follows Roseanne, a young girl that finds her life nearly over at the age of 18 yet manages to survive until a centenarian. This novel shows how the brutal application of religion without mercy can render a life nearly meaningless.   We meet Roseanne through an accounting of her own life from a mental institution that is about to be shut down. She has been there so long, the doctor in charge is unsure whether she has any family and the circumstances of her commitment are all too vague. Through her self-accounting of her own life and Dr. Grene’s research into Roseanne’s past, the reader is a...

THE CORRECTIONS by Jonathan Franzen Award: James Tait Black Winner 2002, National Book Winner 2001 Nominations: Dublin Finalist 2003, LA Times Finalist 2001, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2001, NY Times Finalist 2001, Oprah Book Club 2001, PEN/Faulkner Finalist 2002, Pulitzer Finalist 2002 Dates Read: May 28, 2006 & February 17, 2020 The Corrections is a difficult read for me because Franzen so skillfully lays bare the brutal details of the human existence. I don't find much about the human experience to celebrate here. I am left to watch a very flawed family muddle through the intricacies of life, making poor decisions along the way and culminating in a disastrous Christmas reunion that collides each of these imperfect humans' needs. On the positive side, Franzen is a master narrator of the nuances of relationships, behavior and inner turmoil that just about anyone can relate to and simultaneously made me absolutely terrified of growing old. Well done, ...

G. by John Berger Awards: Booker Winner 1972, James Tait Black Winner 1972 Date Read: May 16, 2019 Wow! 336 pages has never felt so long. Amidst the background of a failed revolution and loose comparisons to Garibaldi, Berger has forged the character of G. (perhaps to further signify the Garibaldi association or as a pained reference to a G-spot. Who knows?). Sometimes novel, sometimes philosophical and political manifesto, G. missed the mark with me. "Why does writing about sexual experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of literature in relation to aspects of all experience?" so muses Beger in a narrator's voice. The remainder of the novel is an attempt to answer this question in one form or another. I suppose one could argue this work is daring since Berger lays bare (pun intended) his deepest mediations and opinions on sex, making him vulnerable to critique. Yet, for all his musings and analysis of women, I can only conclude that h...

SATURDAY by Ian McEwan   Award: James Tait Black Winner 2005 Nomination: Booker Longlist 2005, Dublin Longlist 2007, NY Times Finalist 2005   Date Read: June 6, 2008   “Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day off. He is as at ease here as he is in the operating room. Outside the hospital, the world is not so easy or predictable. There is an impending war against Iraq, and a general darkening and gathering pessimism since the New York and Washington attacks two years before.   On this particular Saturday morning, Perowne's day moves through the ordinary to the extraordinary. After an unusual sighting in the early morning sky, he makes his way to his regular squash game with his anaesthetist, trying to avoid the h...

THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy Award: James Tait Black Winner 2006, Pulitzer Winner 2007 Nominations: Dublin Longlist 2008, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2006, Oprah Book Club 2007 Date Read: April 17, 2008 This is the first work I had ever read by Cormac McCarthy and oh, boy, was I in for a treat. I have to wonder what soul-crushing experiences have to occur to someone to come up with the ideas for his novels.  The Road is by far the most despairing and bereft of the three novels I have read by McCarthy. This novel is the story of a father and son, notably unnamed, and their journey through a ravaged world that has befallen some unknown disaster. The father and son are everything to each other - "each the other's world entire." The Road is a heartbreaking exploration of the best and worst that humanity has to offer. The one take-away that has always haunted me about this novel is the  mother's surrender to despair. She is unwilling and unable to ...