Not to be confused with Night Watch (Discworld #29) by Terry Pratchett. Night Watch by Jayne Anne Phillips won the Pulitzer Prize in 2024, which was how it caught my attention as a giant doorstop of a hardcover book. Then it caught my attention again when it went to paperback, because what the heck?—it was…
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,…
Trust by Hernan Diaz took home the Pulitzer Prize, landing it on my TBR. And with all the mystery behind its structure? It’s a “literary puzzle?” Cool. But it was the subject matter that killed it for me: Wallstreet and finance in New York City in the 1920s-1940s or something. But also the characters and…
There is a list of reasons why readers think Stay True by Hua Hsu should not have won the Pulitzer (memoir). I think the most compelling (if also backwards) of those reasons is that the award builds expectations that this book cannot live up to. If it didn’t have that Pulitzer hanging over its head,…
For all the amazing-ness of All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr made some nontraditional choices: he went with present tense (mostly?), chopped his behemoth up into hundreds of few-page chapters (often even one page), told the story from two different perspectives (which was doubled in strangeness by being omniscient while being, as I…
I very, very rarely review a book without finishing it. The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, is going to be one of those exceptions. There are two reasons for this exception: it’s really long and I simply don’t want to spend that much more time finishing it. And I have found so many people out there…
Is it a novel? Is it a book of short stories? Personally, I have it filed on my bookshelves in the short stories section, but you could really go either way with this Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout. I came across this book several years ago, when it won the Pulitzer and landed on…
the starving artist 