Chapter 1: In which I Reveal more of my Anal Retentive Personality than I Originally Planned to

Once I had decided on the project—and even before I’d tracked down a copy of Honey in the Horn—I needed to get organized. For me, “organized” is a euphemism for creating lists, making plans, and overthinking every possible obstacle, working myself into a lather over the smallest and most irrelevant details. (How “organized” can I get? I once created a Gantt chart for my own wedding just so I’d know to avoid the critical path. It turned out to be getting the rings on time.)

I googled over to the PulitzerPrize site and downloaded the complete list of winners, dropping the cut-and-paste into a Word document. I also took the time to insert the Pulitzer Prize page header, not because it provided any useful addition, but simply because it looked impressive. I then began a sequence of steps to see what I was getting myself into.

Step one involved figuring out the height of my virtual book pile. The awards were established in 1917, with the “Novel” category one of the original eight, along with Editorial Writing, Reporting, Public Service, History, Drama, Biography/ Autobiography, and the unclearly named Special Awards and Citations. However, there was no award given in 1917. So it all really began in 1918, at least as far as fiction goes. That gave me a 97-year span to cover. (There were some awards in 1917—a biography of Julia Ward Howe won, for example, as did New York World reporter Herbert Bayard Swope for his series on the German Empire.)

It turns out that 1917 wasn’t the only year in which “No Award” took home the prize. Only two years later, in 1920, emptiness won again: no Pulitzer praise for anything Novel. Then all is good until 1940, after which several more blanks appear, eleven in all. This discovery leaves me torn. On the one hand, I find it hard to believe that on eleven separate occasions not one single American fictional work merited kudos from the Pulitzer team. Looking at 2012 alone—the last year for which No Award earned the preferred majority of votes—it seems there were quite a few rather excellent candidates  Among those possibly considered? The highly praised The Art of Fielding, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, and Karen Russel’s Swamplandia, to name just a few. With all the books published each year (and a measly $50 entry fee), how could there ever be a year in which not one submission is deemed worthy of the Pulitzer?

On the other hand, that’s eleven fewer books I need to read. I’m now looking at only eight-seven. I already feel just a tad bit on my way.

The obvious second step was to determine how many of these books I had already consumed. My reading habits, voracious as they are, mean that I’m never without a couple of books underway, nor without a couple of more on order. My iPad is filled with dozens of books unread, and I too often travel to one or more of my local bookstores, visits I find simultaneously exciting and depressing: I love browsing the shelves, but am constantly frustrated by the vast number of books I still want to read, yet likely never will.

Unlike my foray into the works of Nobel Prize winners (in which I could choose any book I wanted from each author), the Pulitzer project is far more specific. The books that won are the books that won, and make up the reading list. No substitutions allowed. Still, I expected that a goodly chunk would have crossed my path at some point, making the to-read list noticeably shorter. I found, however, that my step-two list was quite a bit shorter than I’d hoped. These are the few I could cross off:

·         A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2011)

·         The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx (1994)

·         A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (1992)

·         Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler (1989)

·         Beloved, Toni Morrison (1988)

·         A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (1981)

·         To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (1961)

·         The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (1940)

Damn. I was sure it was going to be more than that. Eight lousy volumes. That leaves me with seventy-nine books to read. Or, as I was beginning to think of it, seventy-eight, plus Honey in the Horn.

It was clearly time to get to work. Step three, then, was to figure out how many unread books I already owned. Back to the list for a detailed perusal, and this is what I found:

·         The Hours, Michael Cunningham (1999)

·         Empire Falls, Richard Russo (2002)

 

So much for all those trips to the bookstore. I’m beginning to wonder if I read more crap than I would like to admit.

My final step—the one that feels more like a compulsion than any of the others—is to color-code everything on my list. Bold and black for everything already read. Blue for everything owned but not read. Green for every unread volume that’s been ordered, but has not yet arrived. And above it all a series of counters: how many left to acquire, how many left to read, how many already read.

With the pre-work complete, I was ready to begin. Though I’d found and ordered Honey, it hadn’t yet arrived. So even though I had planned to begin with Gillian’s plate of limas, there was time to kill, and miles to read before I slept. Might as well get started. 

 *****

Copyright laws, like many things, evolve.  With origins in Britain’s 1710’s Statute of Anne, copyright laws now extend not only nationally, but internationally. Here in the United States our first federal copyright act hit the books in 1790, allowing for fourteen years of protection. An 1831 law extended that term to twenty-eight years which, after a 1909 change, could be renewed for an additional twenty-eight-year period. It wasn’t until 1976 that a serious and significant change arrived, extending copyright protection to seventy-five years, or fifty years beyond the author’s demise. Those that predate the latest law were in the public domain.

Years ago, while still back in high school, I used to reserve summers for catching up on the classics. Let that sink in for a moment, if you will: a teenage boy, still sporting a bit of acne and wondering what he wanted to be when he grew up, voluntarily chose to read books that most others considered, at best, annoying English assignments. Those summers are where I first encountered Dostoevsky and Shaw and Cervantes, where I lost myself in Dickens and Verne and Eliot. I went after them because I felt they were books I should read. I soon discovered they were quite good. Excellent, in fact.

As a compulsion it continues to this day, though no longer confined to summertime. I constantly dive in and out of the classics, floating from Austen to Zola and back again. (Except for Proust. I can’t read Proust. I’ve tried four times and have never gotten past the first thirty pages of Swann’s Way.)

When e-books came along and I found myself gifted a first-generation iPad, finding and reading even more of these books became incredibly easy. Thanks to the aforementioned copyright laws, I could download them for free from the iStore. So I did. With this project now before me, back to the iStore I went, where I found what I’d hoped for: a whole host of early Pulitzered titled were available for nothing. I had the list. I had the iStore. I had copyright law on my side.

Let the downloading begin.

I began with Booth Tarkington’s two entries, Alice Adams and The Magnificent Ambersons. I had never read anything by Tarkington before, probably because I thought he was Sinclair Lewis. They both write about early twentieth century Midwestiness, so it’s understandable that one would get them confused. Plus, they both have bizarre names.

Tarkington, it turns out, had quite a bit of talent, even if Alice Adams has a somewhat forced and too-happy ending. Ambersons, though, is pure brilliance. The slow and steady dissolution of a once-stately legacy (as seen through the eyes of a main character alternately enviable and despicable) reminds me of today’s Mad Men, the brilliant television drama addressing similar themes as generations shift across the 1960s.

The same iStore freebie technique got me the 1918 winner, Ernest Poole’s His Family, and Edith Wharton’s much better The Age of Innocence (1921).  I settled in and devoured them easily. Four books knocked off in less than two weeks. Not bad. Nothing feels as sweet as progress toward a goal, even when said goal is both silly and self-imposed.

At about this time Honey in the Horn arrived. The weathered paperback was longer than I’d hoped, logging in at over 500 pages of densely packed type. While I didn’t anticipate enjoying it, I did assumed that, despite Ms. Flynn’s dire warnings, I’d whip right through the purpled prose, moving quickly on to better fare. But it was even worse than I expected….

 

*****

 

Read since last post:

·         His Family, Ernest Poole (1918)

·         The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton (1921)

·         Alice Adams, Booth Tarkington (1922)

·         The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington (1919)

Currently Reading:

·         The Optimist’s Daughter, Eudora Welty (1973)

Still Gathering Dust in the Corner:

·         Honey in the Horn, H. L. Davis (1936)

COUNT: 13 read, 74 to go

Missed the previous posts? Start here....

Prologue: It's Gillian Flynn's Fault

I remember, somewhere around the age of six or seven, sitting at a faux-wooden dining table, oval-shaped with seating for four, and dinner almost concluded. My older sister had already been excused, and my stepfather had retired to the living room where, comfortably entrenched in a recently purchased Naugahyde recliner, he settled in to watch The Huntley-Brinkley Report. I, with a nauseating portion of canned lima beans still littering my otherwise empty plate, sat across from my mother, who was damn well going to make sure that I finished every last one. 

 *****

 

I’ve just read several chapters of a book that made me feel exactly the same way. 

Honey in the Horn won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in the “Novel” category (later renamed “Fiction”). It’s the story of Clay Calvery, “a hard-mouthed young hellfry” and takes place in Southern Oregon back in the homesteading days of the early twentieth century. The New York Times Book Review lauded it as “honey in the literary horn,” and described it as a “gallery of frontier Americana like none other on earth.” 

That last I’ll agree with. I certainly find it “like none other on earth.” I’ve read some bad novels in my day and this one’s up there near the top—despite having one Joseph Pulitzer’s venerated Prize.

So, you may ask: Why am I reading it?  Because of Gillian Flynn.

 *****

Perhaps a bit of explanation is in order.

I am a self-described “serial obsessionist,” someone who lives a life of sequential immersions, moving from topic to topic based on whim, fancy, and serendipity. I have a compelling need for projects, something to which I can attach a goal, an achievement. When I don’t have one I get fidgety (my wife would say “cranky”) and I find it difficult to relax over even the simplest of tasks.

Case in point: Not long ago I spent a couple of days recovering from some minor surgery. I faced, briefly, a mostly sedentary existence. My wife suggested I just try to relax. Read a bit. Watch some television. Do some writing. 

Said recovery conveniently occurred right around the time of Doctor Who’s 50^th birthday party. I had never seen a great deal of Doctor Who, but knew it as a cult classic and recently popular revival. As a science fiction fan I had always meant to get around to it and, since great celebratory gobs of the Doctor and his companions were now available OnDemand from BBC America, the opportunity seemed rather fortuitous.

I sat down to watch a couple of episodes and was quickly hooked. (Don’t ask why; when it comes to the Doctor, you either get it or you don’t.) I then proceeded to devour all ninety or so available episodes (the full seven seasons of the revival, along with the various specials that had aired during that time), then realized there was even more. I nestled in and watched the two-hour retrospectives of all the earlier Doctors (there have been quite a few of them since, as many know, the Doctor “regenerates” into a new form every few years, allowing one actor to replace another actor rather easily). 

By this time, obviously, I was well recovered. But no matter: the obsession was in full flight. Soon, the available On Demand episodes weren’t enough. I headed over to Amazon, where my “Prime” account gave me access to many, many more episodes for free. I watched Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) with his long scarf and jelly babies, then screened a few episodes of the 7^th Doctor with his odd hat and anti-hero companion. I tracked down the 8^th Doctor’s single appearance—a TV movie with Eric Roberts apparently meant as a pilot for an American version. Then I found the spin-offs. I watched every episode of Torchwood and several of The Sara Jane Adventures. And the spoofs (including an absolutely hilarious one with Rowan Atkinson). 

My surgery now lay well in the past, but not so my new obsession with all things Doctor; I headed over to Barnes and Noble and began buying a few Doctor Who books. Then I joined several Facebook groups dedicated to him. I even wrote a small poem in the style of Dr. Seuss. I titled it “Horton Hears a Doctor Who.” My fellow Facebook fanatics deemed it well-“liked.”
 

Etcetera, etcetera.

Lest anyone think that my obsessions are always so frivolous (though I’m not saying that Doctor Who is frivolous!), here’s a more substantive example. 

I once spent about two years immersed in Christian theology. That particular journey began when my wife asked me to attend church with her, something I had never done. (My only previous church appearances were for the obligatory rituals: weddings, baptisms, and funerals.) I agreed but knew (without ever consciously thinking about it) that if I was going, I was going all in. In this case that meant books. Lots of them.

I started with the basics, reading the Bible twice through, along with a few exegeses and an analysis of the Synoptic Gospels. Then I really got going. I read Iraneus, Tertullian, Origen, Arius, and the Cappadocian Fathers. I read Saints Anselm and Augustine. I read Ambrose and Cyril and Jerome and Gregory and Hildegard and Hugh.  I even read Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a man whose very name included words I didn’t understand. 

I went forward in time a bit and devoured Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna and Julian of Norwich before slipping forward toward Luther and Calvin—and then further forward into Barth and Bultmann, Neibuhr and C.S. Lewis, Chesterton and L’Engle. I scheduled time with my wife’s pastor (by now mine as well) to discuss various theological dilemmas.  All the while my wife looked on in awe: “I just wanted someone to sit next to me and sing the hymns,” I believe she muttered.

But those examples pale next to my biggest, most energetic obsession, the one that informs the effort now beginning. 

That one began a few years back at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel where, about to embark on a ten-hour flight and realizing I had nothing to read, I picked up a copy of Seeing by the Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. I’d never heard of Saramago, but the airport bookstore’s selection of English-language books was pretty thin, and since I wasn’t much into bodice-rippers or Dan Brown, only a slight number of books were potentially interesting. I figured that I probably couldn’t go wrong with someone who’d won the Nobel Prize.

As I turned the last page somewhere over Newfoundland, those very special neurons fired and it occurred to me that there were many works of great literature I would never get around to reading, would perhaps never even know about.  I decided right then that it might be fun to read a book by anyone who had ever won the Nobel Prize in Literature.  And I did. All one-hundred-and-something of them.

By now you can probably see where this is heading.

*****

So where does Gillian Flynn fit into all of this? Why is it her fault that I’m slogging through Honey in the Horn?

A few years back The New York Times Book Review, in an effort to respond to its readership (though some might say “in an effort to pander to its readership”) introduced a column entitled “By the Book” in which famous authors are asked facile questions like “Who is your favorite author?” and “You’re hosting a literary dinner party. What three writers are invited?” In the May 11, 2014 column the interviewee was one Gillian Flynn, the noted author of Gone Girl. In the interview we learned that Ms. Flynn is overly fond of Flowers in the Attic and is absolutely (some might say “annoyingly”) over the top about Joyce Carol Oates.

But what struck my attention was a quote from her answer to this question: “What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?” 

“Several years back,” she replied, “(and by several, I probably mean 12), I decided to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in chronological order.”

Gillian Flynn, I love you. No, truly. I love you. You may be the only person in the universe who truly understands me.

So there you have it; a new obsession triggered.

 *****

I’m not going to worry, though, about chronological order. Instead, the first thing I’m going to do is tackle Gillian Flynn’s plate of lima beans. I've found myself an old, used, two-dollar copy of Honey in the Horn, ordered it up, and now I'm diving right in. Might as well just get it out of the way. After that, the rest will seem easy.

So thanks, Gillian. (Can I call you Gillian?) It’s all your fault.