Earlier this year, I discovered that I might not hate Pulitzer Prize winners. For years, I had been reacting to The Goldfinch, which I reviewed here and am not a fan of. Also, I don’t get people’s love of it. So I had written off the Pulitzer. (Maybe there was more to that emotional decision, but I don’t recall it now.) I enjoy looking at lists of award winners, and I was scrolling through the Pulitzer winners when I realized that every book on the list that I had read (not that there are that many), I had liked. (Minus The Goldfinch.) James. Demon Copperhead. All the Light We Cannot See. Olive Kitteridge. Beloved. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Old Man and the Sea. Gone with the Wind.

Okay, maybe I didn’t look at the list all the way back to The Bridge of San Luis Rey (another book I didn’t really appreciate the way others do). Or maybe that’s why I rejected the Pulitzer. And now I see it: The Underground Railroad and even Trust. While I do have an appreciation for Trust, it’s not big enough to concur with a Pulitzer. But Railroad has the same issues for me that Goldfinch and San Luis have. I just don’t get the accolades. They’re okay. But the best? No way. (And they all kinda have a similar flavor.)

But we’re actually here to talk about the Booker Prize. I was looking through this year’s prize winners with a co-worker (making sure that all were stocked for the holidays at the bookstore), when we started talking about our relationship to certain prizes. He said something about the Booker and I pulled up the list, started reading off winners. And I was like, Wait a sec. I like these books. Perhaps the Pulitzer had made me feel that there were real winners and losers (for my experience) among a prize. But the Bookers? Full of my faves. What a pleasant surprise.

Orbital. (Okay, I have a little pause here. It’s not a novel.) Prophet Song. (I have made many people read this book because it’s awesome.) Lincoln in the Bardo. Life of Pi. Midnight’s Children. The sad thing here is that I’ve read so few. But from that little smattering, I may have found my book prize vibe. The Bookers. Which means that next year, instead of concentrating on all the prize winners (okay, maybe just the ones for 2025), I should start reading back into the Bookers. For me, this might be a great place to find books that I actually appreciate. Books that I love.

Which means that maybe each of us have a prize list that vibes with us. (Alright, that’s too much to ask, but perhaps many of us do.) I would encourage you to look up a list of prize winners and scroll through. Have you read any of the books? What did you think of them? Despite what must surely change about a prize through time, there is also a type of book that repeats on each of these lists. The Pulitzer type is often an enigma to me. The Booker is (from what I’ve read) the kind that I end up calling a favorite and pushing into your hands.

Go ahead. Look up the Pulitzer, Booker, International Booker, National Book Award, Nobel Prize for Literature, Women’s Prize (formerly the Orange Prize), National Book Critics’, Pen/Faulkner, Kirkus, Hugo, Nebula, Newberry, Caldecott, even the Nibbies and the Goodreads Choice in a specific category. What books have you loved? Where are they listed?

For my sake, I’m going to list the Booker prize-winners through the years. They began in 1969.:

• Something to Answer For, P. H. Newby
• The Elected Member, Bernice Rubens
• In a Free State, V. S. Naipaul
• G., John Berger
• The Seige of Krishnapur, J. G. Farrell
• Holiday, Stanley Middleton and The Conservationist, Nadine Gordimer
• Heat and Dust, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
• Saville, David Storey
• Staying On, Paul Scott
• The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch
• Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
• Rites of Passage, William Golding
• Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
• Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally
• Life & Times of Michael K., J. M Coetzee
• Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner
• The Bone People, Keri Hulme
• The Old Devils, Kinglsey Amis
• Moon Tiger, Penelope Lively
• Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
• The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
• Possession, A. S. Byatt
• The Famished Road, Ben Okri
• Sacred Hunger, Barry Unsworth and The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
• Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, Roddy Doyle
• How Late It Was, How Late, James Kelman
• The Ghost Road, Pat Barker
• Last Orders, Graham Swift
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Amsterdam, Ian McEwan
• Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee
• The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood
• True History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
• Life of Pi, Yann Martel
• Vernon God Little, D. B. C. Pierre
• The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
• The Sea, John Banville
• The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
• The Gathering, Anne Enright
• The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
• Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
• The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson
• The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes
• Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel
• The Luminaries, Elanor Catton
• A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James
• The Sellout, Paul Beatty
• Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders
• Milkman, Anna Burns
• The Testaments, Margaret Atwood and Girl, Woman, Other, Bernadine Evaristo
• Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stewart
• The Promist, Damon Galgut
• The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka
• Prophet Song, Paul Lynch
• Orbital, Samantha Harvey
• Flesh, David Szalay

Alright, so maybe I won’t like all of them. But readers are always looking for a way to narrow down the TBR to books they’re going to actually enjoy. Perhaps finding my (and your) prize vibe is one way of getting a little closer.