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

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