Next Up

I've decided to read Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington next. I know absolutely nothing about this book or story.  It won the Pulitzer in 1922. He won the Pulitzer twice, first in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons (which I've not read yet) and then again in '22 for this book.

I also found this book on the Gutenberg website.

His Family

Long overdue review of His Family by Ernest Poole

First, apologies for not reviewing the book sooner. I could come up with a list of excuses, but in truth I feel excuses are lame and that you can find time for the things that you really want to do if you make a conscious effort. 

This book is a story about Roger and his family, primarily his three daughters Ethel, Deborah and Laura. Roger's wife has been dead for some time and he keeps remembering her words that they would always live on in their family, in their posterity.

I could not help but read and experience this book through the lens of what is happening in my own life, namely the addition of a son in law and daughter in law, the birth of my first grandchild and the death of my last living grandparent. This book seemed very much about the passage of time to me, and the evidence of that in my own life colored my reading of this book. Not that I feel there was anything negative in that coloring, all books are experienced through the lens of the reader. I just wonder if it would have been a different book if I had read it 10 years ago...

The backdrop for this book is the rapidly changing world of Roger, living in New York right before World War One. The influx of immigrants, the changing of social mores, these things are both troublesome and intriguing to Roger. As the story progresses these things, along with the First World War, impact his family and he needs to make emotional and intellectual adjustments to deal with their impact.

Roger's daughters personify the different types of women that the day offered- the traditional wife and mother, the career woman and the party girl.

Ethel is the traditional wife and mother, pregnant with her fifth child. Ethel is concerned with the outside world only so far as it might effect her children. She truly believes her chosen way of life is far superior to that of her sisters and that they will only be happy once they are married with children of their own. I'll leave my own feelings (highly charged and biased) out of this post and just talk about how this attitude of Ethel's both holds her back and holds her together. She seems to miss out on much of the richness of life because of her myopic view. She dreams for her children, but those dreams are limited by her own prejudices and lack of vision. However, when she is widowed soon after her fifth child is born this fervent belief in the rightness of her choices and her love for her children is what gives her the necessary strength to push forward.

Deborah is a public school principal concerned with furthering the opportunities of all of the children in her schools. She is particularly concerned with the plight of the poor immigrant children and their families and is committed to trying to change their lot in life through programs provided by the schools. Roger seems to not really understand Deborah's career at the beginning of the book, he thinks she is a teacher of one class not the principal overseeing three schools. He decides to learn more about her work and it is through her that he begins to really see that the changes to the city bring positive things with them as well as the shifts in the familiar that disturb him.

Laura is the party girl, the social butterfly only interested in dancing and fun and nightlife. It is difficult to like Laura, and were it not for Roger's love of her it would be hard to see anything redeeming in her. She very much reminded me F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gloria, from The Beautiful and the Damned. Selfish and driven only by pleasure. This comes back to haunt Laura, and therefore Roger.

As time passes and the family deals with all of the turmoil life presents, Roger seems to gain a deeper understanding of both his personal mortality and the immortality of his posterity. This could have been the story of many families living in New York at the time. It was deeply personal and global at the same time.

I read this book online at the Gutenberg Project website, a wonderful resource for older books and for anyone without a budget to buy books.

This book was the first to win the Pulitzer. I am glad that I chose to read it at the time I did, as it truly enriched my life.

His Family- Beautiful Sentences and Passages

I finished His Family by Ernest Poole last night. As mentioned in an earlier post, I have been keeping track of some of the passages in the book that have particularly struck a coard with me. This post will share those.

Chapter 5
As he listened to his daughter he kept wondering if she were so sure. Had she felt no uneasiness? She must have, he decided, for all her gay excitement. One Laura in that smiling face; another Laura deep inside, doubting and uncertain, reaching for her happiness, now elated, now dismayed, exclaiming, "Now at last I'm starting!" Oh, what an ignorant child she was. He wanted to cry out to her, "You'll always be just starting! You'll never be sure, you'll never be happy, you'll always be just beginning to be! And the happier you are, the more you will feel it is only a start!... And then-"

From Chapter 7: a very descriptive passage
A plump little fool of a woman, her skirt so tight she could barely walk, tripped by on high-heeled slippers. That was it, he told himself, the whole city was high-heeled! No solid footing anywhere!

Chapter 8
But even those old memories were no longer here to hearten him. They had all been swept away when Bruce had made him move out of his office in a dark creaky edifice down close under Brooklyn Bridge, and come up to this new building, this [72]steel-ribbed caravansary for all kinds of business ventures, this place of varnished woodwork, floods of daylight, concrete floors, this building fireproof throughout. That expressed it exactly, Roger thought. Nothing could take fire here, not even a man's imagination, even though he did not feel old.


I found this in Chapter 14
"I was once a child." To most of us these are mere words. To few is it ever given to attain so much as even a glimpse into the warm and quivering soul of that little stranger of long ago. We do not know how we were made.


Chapter 28

Dead and wounded by the
thousands, famine, bombs and shrapnel, hideous atrocities, submarines and
floating mines, words once remote but now familiar, always there on the
front page and penetrating into his soul, becoming a part of Roger Gale, so
that never again when the war was done would he be the same man he was
before. For he had forever lost his faith in the sanity and steadiness of
the great mind of humanity. Roger had thought of mankind as mature, but
there had come to him of late the same feeling he had had before in the
bosom of his family. Mankind had suddenly unmasked and shown itself for
what it was--still only a precocious child, with a terrible precocity. For
its growth had been one sided. Its strength was growing at a speed
breathless and astounding. But its vision and its poise, its sense of human
justice, of kindliness and tolerance and of generous brotherly love, these
had been neglected and were being left behind.

and also:  

But Edith was not old-fashioned, nor was she alive to this modern age. In short, she was neither here nor there!

Chapter 36
"I look into my family back and back, and I see how it has been made of many generations. Certain figures stand out in my mind—they cover over a hundred years. And I see how much they've meant to me. I see that I've been one of them—a link in a long chain of lives—all inter-bound and reaching on. In my life they have all been here—as I shall be in lives to come.

Another Pulitzer Goal

I found a great blog written by someone else with the same goal, to read all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Check out the great observations here at What Is Reading But Silent Conversation

Keepers Of The House

I DID finish Keepers of the House, almost immediately after I wrote the post saying I was reading it. I really enjoyed the book. I had never read anything by Shirley Ann Grau before. Her writing style was easy for me to read, it did not interfere with the story. I hate that when it happens, when the writing overwhelms the story.

I had a hard time sympathizing with any of the characters, and I did n't much like them. That's ok, neither thing is necessary for me to enjoy a book.

It has been so long since I read it that I must admit I need to go back and skim through it in order to review it properly.

However, rather than do that what I think I will do is just pick the next book and go forward.

Reading...

So I have been reading "The Keepers of the House" I should be able to finish before the weekend and then I will write my thoughts, my "review" as it were. I am loving this book.

List of Pulitzer Prize Winners

I was able to find a list of Pulitzer Prize Winners from 1917 until the present. I've not yet been able to find from 1904 to 1917. Here it is:


2008 The Brief Wonderful Life of Oscar Waoby Junot Diaz
2007 The Roadby Cormac McCarthy
2006 Marchby Geraldine Brooks
2005 Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth
1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford
1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
1994 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler
1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
1991 Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
1990 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos
1989 Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
1988 Beloved by Toni Morrison
1987 A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor
1986 Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
1985 Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
1984 Ironweed by William Kennedy
1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike,
1981 A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
1980 The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
1979 The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
1978 Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson
1977 (No Award)
1976 Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
1975 The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara
1974 (No Award)
1973 The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
1972 Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
1971 (No Award)
1970 Collected Stories by Jean Stafford
1969 House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
1968 The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
1966 Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter
1965 The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau
1964 (No Award)
1963 The Reivers by William Faulkner
1962 The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
1961 To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
1960 Advise and Consent by Allen Drury
1959 The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters by Robert Lewis Taylor
1958 A Death In The Family by James Agee
1957 (No Award)
1956 Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor
1955 A Fable by William Faulkner
1954 (No Award)
1953 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
1952 The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
1951 The Town by Conrad Richter
1950 The Way West by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.
1949 Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens
1948 Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener
1947 All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
1946 (No Award)
1945 A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
1944 Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin
1943 Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair
1942 In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow
1941 (No Award)
1940 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
1939 The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
1938 The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand
1937 Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
1936 Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis
1935 Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson
1934 Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller
1933 The Store by T. S. Stribling
1932 The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
1931 Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes
1930 Laughing Boy by Oliver Lafarge
1929 Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin
1928 The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
1927 Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield
1926 Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis
1925 So Big by Edna Ferber
1924 The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson
1923 One of Ours by Willa Cather
1922 Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington
1921 Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
1920 (No Award)
1919 The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington
1918 His Family by Ernest Poole
1917 (No Award)

Looked up the list of Pulitzer Prize Winners

So I looked up a list of all of the winners of the Pulitzer Prize. I was dismayed to see how few of them I have actually read. However, the ones that I have read I loved, so I think this is a good idea for me.

I have read:
Edith Wharton won for Age of Innocence in 1921. This is one of my all time favorite books, so I will thoroughly enjoy writing a review of sorts about it in another post.

1953- Ernest Hemingway won the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea. Well, this is my favorite Hemingway novel (there are some short stories that I love more) so again, writing a post about it will be fun.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" won in 1961- of course this would be on my list of books I've read and loved.

"The Executioner's Song" won in 1980- Being as I live in Utah and remember when Gary Gilmore was executed, this one fascinated me. So again, writing a post about it will be enjoyable.

I've decided to read first:
The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau. Why? Because it won for 1965, the year I was born. So I ordered it from Amazon and will begin to read it as soon as I have it.

I hope that others reading this post will want to tackle this project with me.

Read all of the Pulitzer winners?

So if I decided to let my review of Breaking Dawn rest, what should be the next book I review? I'm thinking about reading Three Cups of Tea , I've heard some good things about that. I also have been wanting to get back on track with my goal for reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners since the inception of the award. Maybe that's what I'll do. That actually sounds like a great deal of fun.