In early 2020, when we were all stuck inside and expecting to stay there for a while, I made myself a reading list. The idea was that I would read all of the books that won Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards in the decade from 2010 – 2019. I called the list “Books from the Teens,” and wrote a blog post about it here. I focused only on certain categories: for the Pulitzers: Fiction, General Nonfiction and Biography/Autobiography; and for the National Book Award: Fiction and Nonfiction. Five categories, 10 years, and I had a nice list of 50 books to read. I set a goal to finish the list by the end of the 2020s.
Now, six years later, I’ve just completed the fiction part of the list, so I thought I’d post an update.
There were 20 books in my list, but only 18 of them won prizes. That’s because one of them, The Underground Railroad, won both the NBA and the Pulitzer. Meanwhile, the Pulitzer committee inexplicably did not award a Fiction prize in 2012. So I arbitrarily picked out two other books from the short lists for those years (The Throwback Special and Train Dreams, both great choices if I can say so myself), but for the purposes of this post, I’ll just focus on the books that actually won awards. Here’s the list, with my Goodreads rating in parentheses:
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:
- 2010 – Tinkers by Paul Harding (3)
- 2011 – A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (3)
- 2012 – (no award given)
- 2013 – The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson (5)
- 2014 – The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (5)
- 2015 – All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (5)
- 2016 – The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (3)
- 2017 – The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (4)
- 2018 – Less by Andrew Sean Greer (5)
- 2019 – The Overstory by Richard Powers (5)
National Book Award for Fiction:
- 2010 – Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (3)
- 2011 – Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (5)
- 2012 – The Round House by Louise Erdrich (4)
- 2013 – The Good Lord Bird by James McBride (4)
- 2014 – Redeployment by Phil Klay (5)
- 2015 – Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson (5)
- 2016 – The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (4)
- 2017 – Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (5)
- 2018 – The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (4)
- 2019 – Trust Exercise by Susan Choi (2)
Of those 18, two were short-story collections. Regular readers will know that I’m a fan of the short story, and those two collections didn’t disappoint. Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles and Phil Klay’s Redeployment both won the National Book Award and both earned five stars on my Goodreads page.
Speaking of Johnson, he was one of only two authors to be represented twice on my list; his novel The Orphan Master’s Son won a Pulitzer. Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award twice, with Salvage The Bones and Sing, Unburied Sing. Colson Whitehead, of course, made the list twice by winning both awards with The Underground Railroad. (He’s also an early entry for my Books From The Twenties list, with his The Nickel Boys having won the Pulitzer in 2020.)
Favorites
Both Jesmyn Ward novels got five stars from me on Goodreads, as did the two story collections. Other five-star reads were The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, Less by Andrew Sean Greer, The Overstory by Richard Powers and the above-mentioned The Orphan Master’s Son. I can’t pick a single favorite from those, but I can narrow it down to three: Sing, Unburied Sing; All the Light We Cannot See and The Overstory.
At the other end of the spectrum, there were books that I simply didn’t like and didn’t understand how they could be honored. In that list — books that got two- or three-star ratings on my Goodreads page — were Tinkers by Paul Harding, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lord of Misrule by Jaime Gordon and Trust Exercise by Susan Choi.
Overall, the Pulitzer Prize winners got an average 4.22 rating from me, while the American Book Award winners averaged 4.10 in my ratings, a negligible difference mitigated by the Pulitzer’s no-award decision in 2012. I don’t ordinarily look to the overall Goodreads community for guidance, but just out of curiosity, the average community rating for the Pulitzer winners was 3.92, compared to 3.81 for the National Book Award. Goodreads members liked All The Light We Cannot See the best with an average rating of 4.31; they agreed with me on Trust Exercise, giving it the lowest average score on this list at 3.12.
I have, of course, started on a Books From The Twenties list, and I already have a pretty good start on reading some of this decade’s winners. But that’s a subject for future blog posts.
