Guard of Honor

By James Gould Cozzens

This book is the Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction in 1949.

Set in a military base in Florida, 1943, this is the story of three days in the life of that base.
General Beal, base commander, is flying into the base when his plane is involved in a near miss with another plane. After the two planes land, one of the men that was riding in the plane with Beal punches the pilot of the other pilot, sending him to the hospital with a broken nose. The other pilot was a young black man, Lt. Willis, and a group of black officers takes umbrage at his treatment. So when the black officers are not allowed the use regular officer club, they become even more upset and a confrontation at the officer club occurs.
Meanwhile, the local newspaper is sniffing around and it soon becomes apparent that someone has been leaking information to the news that should not be in the public eye. Plus, a big celebration is being planned for General Beal's birthday and two generals from higher up the chain of command are flying into the base for the occasion and for other reasons, some relating to the incidents with Lt. Willis and the black officers. All this adds up to a lot of people stressing about a lot of different things, with lots of meetings and lots of memos. But in the end, it all pales in the face of a genuine tragedy.

What a pain in the neck this book was to read. I started reading it last year (2018) and I just now finished it in June 2019. The main problem was the huge number of characters to keep track of, their military ranks, their jobs & their personal stories. It was just too much to keep track of.
Also, the plot just wasn't that engaging.

Review from Kirkus Reviews. This review is from 1948.

All the Light We Cannot See

By Anthony Doerr

Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2015.

Set in France in World War II, the story centers around a young blind French girl, a young German radio engineer and a priceless diamond gem called the Sea of Flame.
The girl, Marie-Laure, is staying with her father and his brother. Her father has been entrusted with the Sea of Flame by the museum he worked for. He was given the diamond to hide it from the coming Nazi occupation. It is inside a clever tiny puzzle box shaped like a house. At one point, the father is summoned back to Paris but is arrested by the Germans and put in a work camp.
Marie-Laure and her uncle become involved in the resistance as the uncle has a radio hidden in the attic of his house and they use this radio to send vital information to the Allies. But then the uncle is arrested and locked up.
Meanwhile, in Germany, the young boy who has a genius for building and repairing radios, Werner, is an orphan living in a group home with his younger sister. The town they live in is a mining town and Werner's future seems destined to be a miner like his father, a destiny he is anxious to escape. When he is given the chance to attend a military school, he welcomes it, even though his sister is violently opposed.
Life is hard at the school, but Werner prefers it to the thought of returning back to the mines. He eventually is sent to fight in the war, as Germany begins to falter in its attempt to conquer Europe. This is how he ends up in the same town where Marie-Laure is living.
Also in this town is a German officer. He knows about the Sea of Flame and its legend. The legend is that any one who owns the diamond will lose everyone they love but will live forever. He has been tracking the diamond across France and desperate to find it because he is dying of cancer.
The tide turns against the Germans and the Allies start bombing the town where Marie-Laure is living all alone in her uncle's house. He is in prison and there is no other adult to tell her about the leaflets the Allies dropped warning the residents to flee before the bombing starts. She survives the first round of bombs but before she can escape, the German officer comes looking for the diamond, which he has traced to her father.
Marie-Laure hides in the attic where the radio is. The entrance to the attic is hidden but she knows that the German will eventually figure it out. Meanwhile, she is slowly dying from thirst. As a last gasp, she sends out a cry for help over the radio. Her message is received by Werner.
Werner and another soldier were in a cellar with their radio equipment when the bombing started. The building above them collapsed and they were trapped in the cellar. The radio was damaged, but Werner managed to get it working again in time to hear Marie-Laure's message. They also manage to finally dig their way out of the rubble and Werner sets off to help the girl whose voice he heard over the airwaves.

This was an OK read. Long, but most of the chapters are short.

Review by The Guardian.

The Yearling

By Marjorie Rawlings

Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 1939.

Ora and Ezra, know as Penny, with their only child, young Jody, are poor farmers in rural Florida. They have a lot of problems with their no-account neighbors, the Forresters who have been stealing their pigs.
One day, while out searching for the missing pigs, Penny gets bit on the arm by a rattlesnake.  So he shoots a doe and uses her liver as a poultice to draw out the poison. But the doe had a young fawn and Jody adopts the little orphan fawn. His parents understand his compassion but know that this will just lead to problems in the future.
Jody loves the little fawn and names him Flag. They grow up together. But Flag grows up a lot faster and, as predicted by the parents, having a growing deer on the property is just causing too many problems for a family struggling just to get by. Some hard decisions are going to have to be made, whether Jody is ready to make them or not.

I really enjoyed this story a lot, even given its heartbreaking elements. This is a sad story and one in which we wish the impossible could, for once, become possible. But it never does, it never does.
This novel is a tremendous read and well worth reading.

See also, Kirkus Reviews.

The Store

By T.S. Stribling

Pulitzer Prize in fiction, 1933.

This is the story of Miltiades Vaiden of Alabama of the 1880s. Vaiden was a Civil War veteran, former leader of the KKK and, since the South was freed, not prospering like he feels he should. He feels he is a Southern Gentleman of the Old South and he longs for those days to return, a time he thinks of as a kind of Eden. Of course, it wasn't an Eden for the slaves, but Vaiden is not accustomed to thinking of black people as human beings. They are property and as such have no equal standing with their former owners. A view that is held by 99.99% of the whites in the South at the time.
Vaiden was swindled by a store owner, Mr. Handback. When he sees an opportunity to swindle Handback and enrich himself in the process, he seizes upon it. With the result that Vaiden becomes wealthy and Handback is driven into financial ruin. The whole town knows what Vaiden did and holds it against him. But being rich has it rewards and he is eventually forgiven and welcomed back into the social ranks, especially after fixing up a mansion in town and making donations to the building of a fancy new church. He even ends up marrying the beautiful young daughter of the woman who left him at the altar when he was a younger man. Seems like everything is going his way, finally. Until his only child, his only son, is murdered at the hands of an enraged mob, a son he only found out about as he rushed to save him from the lynch mob.

The Store is the second book in the Vaiden triology.  It deals very frankly with the racism of the Old South. And lays out, in painful detail, white attitudes to blacks among them. Must reading for anyone who is ignorant of or dismisses the history of slavery in the United States.
But other than that, I am sorry to say that I found the book dull. It was a plain chore to finish it. I am not going to say it was a bad read, but it just didn't engage me the way I want when I read a novel. For one thing, it is a long book, almost 600 pages long. Frankly, I got bored with it and just wanted it to be over.
Also, one thing that annoyed me from the very beginning of the story was the author's constant ragging on Vaiden's fat wife. The author calls her fat, shapeless, overflowing, heavy, fleshy and on and on. He can never mention her without reminding the reader that she is fat. OK, we get it, she's fat! Give it a rest, man!
Here is something I thought was little funny. But whether the author was poking fun too, I don't know. Anyway, two white people are commenting on the odd names that black people choose. The name they are laughing at is Toussaint. Meanwhile their names are Miltiades and Sydna :-).

See also,  Reading the Pulitzer Winners for Fiction.

Middlesex

By Jeffrey Eugenides

Callie was born a male. But due to his lack of testicles and minuscule penis, he was misidentified as a female. So his parents, believing he was a girl, raised him as a girl. Which was fine. He was a very pretty little girl and did all the girly things most little girls do. But then when he didn't go through the usual transformations that occur to most young teen girls, his parents decided to take him to a specialist in New York City.  The doctor recommends to the parents that Callie have surgery to remove his undescended testicles and put him on hormone therapy and  let him live out his life as the female he has been raised to be.
But Callie reads his medical file and suddenly his life makes sense: his attraction to girls, his budding mustache, his gangly body, his height.  And he runs away to California.
But before we get to this point in the story, we have to delve into Callie's antecedents. We have to learn about his grandparents, brother and sister, who fled Europe to the safety of America. We have to follow them as they get married (to each other!), have two kids and settle in Detroit. Then there is their son, Milton, who marries a cousin, Tessie and who gives birth to two sons, one of whom is Callie who they think is a girl. It takes almost 200 pages for the story to even get to the moment of Callie's birth. Then we have to read about her childhood before we get to the meat of the story, Callie's struggle to understand the truth about himself.

This book is really a family saga and is more concerned about the story of the whole family than it is about the story of Callie's sexual identity.  I wanted the story of Callie, not the story of the whole family. Two hundred pages into a five hundred page novel and Callie is only briefly touched on, which was rather annoying. For me, the story didn't really get that interesting until it focused more on Callie and less on her family.
Also, this novel is described, by some, as a comedy and as a comic epic, as hilarious, funny, playful. I didn't find it to be any of those things.
For another review, see http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/11/29/american-dreams-middlesex-by-jeffrey-eugenides?source=dictionary.

The story of Callie reminded me of David Reimer. He was a boy whose penis was accidentally removed as a baby and who, as a result, was castrated and raised as a girl until he rebelled and reclaimed his male identity. I wonder if Eugenides based his novel on David's tragic story.

The Color Purple

By Alice Walker

Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 1983.

Celie is a black girl in rural Georgia in the 1930s and she has a hard life. She was raped by her step-father and had two babies by him. He then gave the babies away, without her approval or knowledge. She was then given in marriage to a widowed man who needed someone to help raise his kids. Celie did not care for this man but she wasn't given any choice in the matter. The man, who she calls in the story Mr. _____, beats Celie, mainly because she is not Shug Avery, the woman Mr loves. Celie's sister Nettie lives with her and Mr briefly, in order to get away from the attentions of the cruel step-father. But Mr starts bothering Nettie too and she leaves, promising Celie that the only thing that can stop her from writing is death. But Celie never receives any letters and assumes Nettie is dead.
Nettie, meanwhile, has found refuge with the minister and his wife who adopted Celie's two lost babies. Nettie and the minister and family head off to Africa to start a mission. She writes to Celie, but never receives a reply because Mr has been hiding her letters. When Celie finds out what he has been doing, she wants to kill him. But Shug, who had been staying with Mr and Celie and who has become very close to Celie, talks her out of it.
Eventually Celie and Shug leave Georgia and move to Tennessee. Shug is a successful singer and, under her sheltering wing, Celie is able to start her own business. She even forgives Mr, who has seemingly changed his evil ways, acquiring some wisdom and grace with age. At about this time, the long lost Nettie and the two babies, who are now grown, come back to Georgia and the two sisters are reunited after decades apart.

This was a pretty good story, especially the part about Celie and the other characters in the Georgia part of the story. The letters from Nettie to Celie about her life in Africa were not quite as captivating as Celie's story, but still added a different and informative perspective. And everything seems to work out for the best despite all the suffering endured, so the book ends on a high note, which is what I prefer. I always like a happy ending and this book provides that.

The Stone Diaries

By Carol Shields

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1995.

This is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett. She was born in 1905 in Canada and her life started out not so good. Her mother died giving birth to Daisy and a few months later her father walked out of her life, leaving his baby daughter with a neighbor woman. Soon after this, the neighbor woman moves in with her grown son and together they raise Daisy until she is eleven when the woman dies in an accident. The son has lustful thoughts about young Daisy and so he sends her off to live the father she doesn't remember. The father, a stone cutter, has done well for himself and he manages to give Daisy a good home. She goes off to college and marries soon after graduating but her husband dies on their honeymoon, falling out of a window while intoxicated. Daisy moves back home, still a virgin, and lives with her father until she is about thirty. She moves out when her dad remarries and Daisy finds she is uncomfortable with the new wife. So she goes back to Canada to visit the man who helped raise her and they decide to get married. He has a good job and Daisy bears three children for him. Of course, he is a lot older than she and he dies when she is in her fifties. She then gets a job writing a gardening column for the local newspaper, and she really enjoys it and is very crushed when, after doing the column for about nine years, the newspaper gives the column to someone else. Daisy becomes very depressed but eventually recovers and moves to Florida to be with her two best friends from childhood, Beans and Fraidy. By this time Daisy is getting old and the novel concludes with the circumstances of her death.
Daisy is just an ordinary woman who lives an ordinary life, but who goes through her life marked by the absence of love in it. Her mother dead, her father gone, her foster mother dying and her foster father sending her away, her first marriage a tragedy and her second marriage almost a marriage of convenience, Daisy never feels truly loved, and never experiences a grand passion. Even with her own children and grandchildren there is a sense of distance and estrangement. All through her life she searches but never finds much sense of purpose or fulfilment, mainly she just goes through the motions, doing what is expected, doing her duty, being a good mom, a good wife. But in the end satisfaction still eludes her, as she admits on her deathbed that she is not at peace.

This was a pretty interesting read, though I can't really say why. The book has no plot to speak of, just the details of an ordinary life. But the story just grabs you from the very start with the strange and sad beginning of Daisy's life, in the kitchen of her parent's house as her obese mother gives birth to a baby that she didn't even know she was carrying.

Review by Publishers Weekly.

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2007

Something terrible has happened to the Earth, some huge ecological disaster or perhaps a horrible war. Whatever it was it has left the world, cold, barren and burned.
A few people have managed to survive, hanging on mainly by preying on each other. One man and his young son have clung to survival for as long as they can where they currently live but things are getting very desperate. The man decides to head out to a new locale, some place where food and shelter can be found, southward and to the ocean. He doesn't have much time because he is ill and knows he is probably dying. He just wants to get his son to safety. So they embark on a dangerous trek, hiding out against marauders, stumbling across timely caches of food and supplies. The man does the best he can but sometimes things go really hard for them. But they struggle onward to the promise of some kind of life and security.

Well, isn't this a cheerful little book? People roasting newborn babies over campfires. Charred burned corpses littering the highways. Hopelessness and despair and impending death. Yup, a real hoot.
Lots of readers found this book uplifting and inspiring. To me it was just so depressing and gruesome. I couldn't take it and had to set it aside for several months. I don't need to be hit over the head with a brick, which is exactly what this book does to the reader. Not to my taste at all.

For another review, see The New York Times.

New Words (Apparently the author is fond of unusual words. These definitions may not be accurate as some of these words are very hard to track down.)

Gryke: also grike; a fissure. 'He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time.'

Meconium: greenish substance that builds up in the bowels of a growing fetus and is normally discharged shortly after birth. 'The improbable appearance of the small crown of the head. Streaked with blood and lank black hair. The rank meconium.'

Rachitic: of, relating to, or affected by rickets; resembling or suggesting the condition of one suffering from rickets. 'He was lean, wiry, rachitic.'

Siwash camp: a camp out without a tent or supplies. 'When it was a bit lighter he rose and walked out and cut a perimeter about their siwash camp looking for sign but other than their own faint track through the ash he saw nothing.'

Claggy: sticky or tacky. 'The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh.'

Parsible also parsable; parse means to break a sentence down into component parts. "He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities.'

Intestate: having no legal will, one who dies without a will. 'He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.'

Patterans: any of several coded signs left along a road or on a non-gypsy house by one gypsy comrade to another. 'They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans.'

Pampooties: soft shoe, moccasin or slipper, usually made of leather. 'They'd wrapped their feet in sailcloth and bound them up in blue plastic pampooties cut from a tarp and they left strange tracks in their comings and going.'

Salitter: essence of God. 'He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth.'

Crozzled: crushed, squashed, shrunken. 'The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.'

Hydroptic: swollen. 'The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.'

Rabbit at Rest

By John Updike

In this, the fourth and last Rabbit story, Updike says goodbye to Rabbit. We get to experience the last few months of Rabbit's life until his untimely death in his mid 50s.
The novel starts out with Rabbit and his wife Jan at their condo in Florida. Rabbit and Jan are semi-retired and spending their winters in Deleon, Florida while their son Nelson runs the Toyota dealership back in Brewer, PA. Rabbit and Jan seem pretty contented and comfortable but it soon becomes clear that something is screwy back home. Nelson and his family come down to Florida for a brief visit and Nelson is jumpy and skinny and he admits to his mom that he has been using cocaine.
Rabbit takes his granddaughter out sailing and while out on the ocean he has a mild heart attack. He manages to get the boat back to shore where he then collapses.
After he is placed on medication and they get back to Brewer, Rabbit undergoes angioplasty but he can't seem to shake the bad habits that lead to the problem in the first place, not enough exercise and eating improperly.
On his first night home after the angioplasty, his daughter-in-law, angry at her drug-addicted husband, comes into Rabbit's bedroom and seduces him.
Rabbit's son is forced into rehab after a nasty scene when he accuses his family of stealing his cocaine stash. Nelson has also been stealing money from the dealership, almost $200,000 and Toyota pulls their franchise. This really upsets Rabbit and then Jan finds out about the one night stand with the daughter-in-law, and, rather than face her, Rabbit flees down to their condo in Florida. He feels like the whole family is ganging up on him. Jan wants to sell the condo to help cover Nelson's debts and Rabbit doesn't want to. She also wants to sell their little house that Rabbit loves which really upsets him more, plus losing the dealership. Throw in a foolish attempt to recapture his lost youth with a pick-up game of basketball and it all adds up to a major heart attack, one from which Rabbit will not recover.

Sad to read a book about a man who has finally reached a point in his life where things are pretty good only to see it all taken away within the course of a few months. In this last book Rabbit is less of a stinker than in the first two and it seems as if the deck is stacked against him this time. Feels just a little unfair to Rabbit but maybe not. Rabbit is still a pretty selfish guy but at least in one respect he has improved: in this book there are no fantasies of smashing his wife's head in. Rabbit has settled down, ready to moulder away into comfortable old age, but it is not to be. Technically, Rabbit has heart disease but it seems like that last heart attack was really his own heart breaking from seeing his world fall apart and dealing with it all on his own, having estranged himself from his wife and family. In the end, jerk though he was, I was sorry to see Rabbit go.

I really enjoyed Updike's descriptions of Florida, of Rabbit's last drive south, and of Rabbit's experience with heart disease. It just felt like the real deal, almost as good as being there. Updike really has an amazing eye for descriptive detail, he really captures it. Excellent novel.

New Words

Macoma tellin: a mollusk; in this case its shell. '"Oh," he says, enjoying posing as casually brave, shaping the ash of his cigarette on the edge of a lovely Macoma tellin he uses as an ashtray, "it's mostly talk."

Taborets: A taboret or tabouret refers to two different pieces of furniture, a cabinet or a stool in the shape of a drum. 'Stuffed flowered chairs with broad wooden arms, plush chocolate-brown sofa with needlepointed scatter pillows and yellowing lace antimacassars, varnished little knickknack stands and taborets, a footstool on which an old watermill is depicted, symmetrical lamps whose porcelain bases show English hunting dogs in gilded ovals, an oppressively patterned muddy neo-Colonial wallpaper, and on every flat surface, fringed runners and semi-precious glass and porcelain elves and parrots and framed photographs of babies and graduating sons and small plates and kettles of hammered copper and pewter, object to dust around but never to rearrange.'

Rabbit Is Rich

By John Updike

Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 1982.

Third in the series, this novel finds Rabbit in his 40's, enjoying a little prosperity, at a calmer point in his life. His son, Nelson, is grown and off at college. Rabbit and his wife, Janice, are living with his wife's mom and Rabbit is working at the car lot owned by his wife and her mom, which is now a Toyota dealership. Thanks to Janice and her family, Rabbit is living in security and comfort and a sort of contentment. He and his wife also enjoy a mild social life with their friends at the country club, Rabbit continuing to play the golf he was introduced to in the first novel.
The snake in this little paradise turns out to be Nelson, who comes home unexpectedly with a girl, Melanie, moving into the same home with Rabbit, his wife and his mother-in-law. Nelson is an unhappy boy, trying to be a man, and blaming Rabbit for his misery. Nelson is still angry at Rabbit for the death of Jill, a drifter girl from the second novel who died in a house fire. Somehow, Nelson thinks Rabbit abandoned Jill to her fate, blaming Rabbit for not being there when the house was torched.
So Nelson blames and resents his father and his father resents Nelson, especially when Nelson pushes his way onto the dealership, talking his mom and grandma into letting him try to sell cars. This means that Jan's old lover from the second novel, Charlie, has to be sent packing because the business can't support an extra salesman. Rabbit feels bad for Charlie, whom he has come to regard as a friend, but can't stop what is happening since Janice and her mom are the owners of the business.
Then Nelson reveals that he has a girlfriend he met at college who is now pregnant. This is not Melanie, the girl he brought home, but is another girl, called Pru. This girl soon arrives to move into the house too, Melanie having left by then. All in all, the big house is starting to feel a little crowded and Rabbit wants to move into a house of his own, against the objections of the wife's mom, who is afraid of being left alone in the big house.

This novel isn't exactly jammed pack with action. At least in this one Rabbit doesn't slap any women around which is an improvement. But he has frequent fantasies of bashing his wife's head in, so he hasn't changed that much, he's still a jerk: "Janice giggles. Some day what would give him great pleasure would be to take a large rock and crush her skull in with it." This skull crushing fantasy recurs at several points in the book. Of course he doesn't bash her in the head since she is his meal ticket and he owes all his new prosperity to her and her car dealership.
Nelson turns out to be a chip off the old block with similar murderous fantasies. "It would be nice, as long as he was standing, to take up one of the beer bottles and smash it down into the curly hair of Melanie's skull and then to take the broken half still in his hand and rotate it into the smiling plumpnesses of her face, the great brown eyes and the cherry lips, the mocking implacable Buddha calm." He even pushes his pregnant girl friend down a steep stair case because he is angry at her. Rabbit and Nelson are more alike than they realize.
The first novel had some understated sex scenes, the second had more explicit sex scenes and this one has very graphic sex scenes. Is it education or degradation? I don't know but if you don't enjoy reading such stuff then give this one a skip because the book is chock full of it. Other than that, it has been kind of fun watching Rabbit live his rather ordinary life, even though I find Rabbit rather repulsive. Next one in the series is Rabbit at Rest in which Rabbit ends up where we all do. Doesn't sound like it will be a lot of fun to read.

For another review see Fifty Books Project.

New Words

Stanchions: a stanchion is a prop or support, usually a piece of timber in the form of a stake or post, used for a support. 'Scrolling cast-iron light stanchions not lit since World War II.'

Redbellies: a form of bullying or hazing in which a person is held down and the stomach slapped until it is reddened. 'Rabbit has known Ronnie for thirty years and never liked him, one of those locker-room show-offs always soaping himself for everybody to see and giving the JVs redbellies and out on the basketball court barging around all sweat and elbows trying to make up in muscle what he lacked in style.'

Nassau: a popular competition among recreational golfers. Points are awarded to the winner of the front nine, back nine and overall 18. Each point usually represents a separate bet. 'Harry's team lost the Nassau, but he feels it was his partner's fault.'

Ferhuddled: confused, mixed up, fractured. 'The boy means well in his way but he's all ferhuddled for now, and the girl, I don't know.'

Soignée: polished and well-groomed; showing sophisticated elegance. 'She was less soignée than formerly; the tiny imperfection at one corner of her lips had bloomed into something that needed to be covered with a little circular Band-Aid.'

A Confederacy of Dunces

By John Kennedy Toole

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981.

Ignatius J. Reilly is a character, no doubt. No dummy, Ignatius has a master's degree and a razor sharp intellect, yet he spends his days wallowing in bed, jotting in his collections of note pads and watching movies that he hates just so he can criticize them. Ignatius lives with his mom and off his mom and when his mom crashes her car into a building while drunk, Ignatius is forced to go to work to help Mom pay for the damages or her home will be seized to pay what she owes.
Ignatius tried to work for a living before, but, according to what he says, the bus ride nearly did him in. He is just too sensitive for his own good. Still, with his master's degree in hand, he lands a job as a file clerk for Levy Pants. He quickly solves the filing problem by tossing the files in the trash and then he rouses the factory workers into rebellion against the owner of Levy Pants. The rebellion is very brief and Ignatius soon finds himself looking for another job.
His next job is as a hot dog vendor. He just kind of lucks into the hot dog job. He pushes a hot dog cart through the city streets, humiliating his poor mother to death. Apparently, hot dog vendor is just about the lowest kind of job a man can have in New Orleans of the 1960s. Plus Ignatius isn't making much money since he eats most of the hot dogs himself. His mom is further humiliated when his boss requires that Ignatius dress as a pirate while selling the dogs. Surprisingly, Ignatius rather enjoys dressing as a pirate. Since he is too fat to fit in most of the costume, it consists merely of a sash, a hoop earring and a plastic saber. Ignatius has lots of adventures while pushing the dog cart but makes almost no money and eventually flees New Orleans to escape his vengeful mother.

I don't think I will ever forget Ignatius J. Reilly. He is an amazing, funny, crazy, loony and smart character. Although he is not the kind of person you would actually want in your life, he was a tremendous amount of fun to read about. I truly enjoyed this prize-winning novel and look forward to reading it again sometime.

Review by Danny Heitman in The Wall Street Journal.

New Words:
Hexerei: Witchery, sorcery, wizardry, witchcraft. "'Never in my life have I seen a shop filled with so much religious hererei.'"
Recherché: Sought out with care; choice. Hence, of rare quality, elegance, or attractiveness; peculiar and refined in kind, especially with an artificial or pretentious effect. "Ignatius filmed the scene before him for a minute of two more, then he followed a post upward to the ceiling for what he imagined would be an interesting and rather recherché bit of cinematography suggesting aspiration."
Vibrissae: Long whiskers specialized as tactile receptors, commonly located in the facial region. "'I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.'"
Daube: A classic French stew or pot roast consisting of a single piece of meat such as a shoulder or joint , stewed in a rich, wine laden broth. "'I'm trying to cook her some spaghettis and daube, and she keeps on playing in my pot.'"
Banquette: Sidewalk. "'Irene!' Santa screamed when she opened the door and saw the hesitant Mrs. Reilly on the front steps and her nephew, Patrolman Mancuso, standing down on the banquette.
Sodality: Companionship; a fraternity, society, an association. '"You probly belong to a ladies' sodality or something.'"
Onanism: Masturbation. "The suggested onanism with the piece of chalk intrigued Ignatius."

The Executioner's Song

By Norman Mailer

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.

Back in the mid 1970s, a recently released convict named Gary Gilmore killed two men during the commission of two robberies. He was caught and convicted and sentenced to die. Gilmore, who had spent many years in prison, decided that he couldn't bear to be in jail any longer and so he declined to appeal his conviction and he demanded to be executed as per his sentence. This decision launched an uproar over the death sentence as a form of punishment and many people tried to prevent the execution through legal means even though they went against Gilmore's wishes. They failed though and Gilmore was executed by firing squad. This novel is Mailer's presentation of those events.
When I found out what the novel was about I really wasn't that keen on reading it. Plus, the book is huge, more than 1000 pages. So I made a schedule, planning to read so many pages a day till I was finished. But I didn't need the schedule. This book, despite its nasty main character and ugly subject matter, is very readable and absorbing. It is very detailed but still manages to avoid being boring. It examines Gilmore's life after his last prison release, takes us through the trial and the furor generated by his wish to be executed and his two suicide attempts and to the fulfillment of the death sentence. You certainly learn a lot about Gilmore who was a very angry, irresponsible, selfish and childish person. He was so selfish that he talked the gullible woman who thought she loved him into committing suicide with him (they both survived). He was never really able to explain why he shot two men who put up no resistance during the robberies. Both men were solid citizens, married with young children, who were complete strangers to Gilmore. About the only explanation is that Gilmore was angry at his girlfriend and took his anger out on his two victims.
Gilmore got what he deserved, he was a manipulative, selfish creep, but he died like a man. I guess that's something.

As a portrait of a killer, The Executioner's Song is top-notch. As a look at how the media operates, the book is a revelation, a real insider's view. I thought I would hate this book. I won't say I loved it, but I will say it was well worth reading.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

New Words:
Rotogravure: a printing process by which the paper is rolled through intaglio cylinders; a print made by such a method; the portion of a printed work produced by this method. "Bessie studied dresses in the rotogravure before sewing her own, and went ballroom dancing at the Utahma Dance Hall in Provo when they brought orchestras in."
Tautologic: repetition of same sense in different words: 'a true fact' and `a free gift' for example. "The reason you couldn't find the word in the dictionary is because you read it wrong -- or I didn't write it right -- anyhow it's TAUTOLOGIC not TANTOLOGIC."

The Stories of John Cheever

By John Cheever

This collection of short stories won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1979.

John Cheever's stories are cruel and mean and nasty and occasionally slightly amusing. Very rarely do they end happily. Mostly they are about ordinary yet creepy men and the women who like to make their lives a misery. According to the Wikipedia article about Cheever his most famous stories are "Goodbye, My Brother", "The Enormous Radio", and "The Swimmer." The only one I was previously familiar with was "The Swimmer" which was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster and which I saw on TV as a kid.
In "Goodbye, My Brother", a family gets together at their summer home on the beach. One brother is a spoilsport who always has some critical comment to make. His brother gets fed up with his sourpuss brother and clonks him on the head with a chunk of wood.
In "The Enormous Radio", an old radio gets replaced with a new radio. It has such an acute receiver that it picks up the conversations of the other tenants in the apartment building. The wife listens in to these conversations and is shocked and dismayed at all the shameful things going on in the superficially happy homes of her neighbors. Her husband chides her, pointing out her own foibles.
In "The Swimmer", (which doesn't appear til almost the end of the book) a man is attending (or thinks he is attending) a pool party when he decides to swim home using all the neighborhood pools via a route he calls the Lucinda River in honor of his wife Lucinda. He does swim home but when he gets there the house is abandoned.

I found these stories interesting and engaging, even if they are a rather twisted view of ordinary people. I didn't find the book hard to read, even though I don't care for short stories for the most part.

New Words:
Fitch: Polecat; dark brown mustelid of woodlands of Eurasia that gives off an unpleasant odor when threatened. "Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink." From "The Enormous Radio".
Vitiated: Marred, made imperfect, corrupted. "Hills blocked off the delicate, the vitiated New Hampshire landscape, with its omnipresence of ruin, but every few miles a tributary of the Merrimack opened a broad valley, with elms, farms, and stone fences." From "The Summer Farmer".
Plangent: Loud and resounding. "He mowed, cultivated, and waxed angry about the price of scratch feed, and at that instant when the plangent winds of Labor Day began to sound he hung up his blunted scythe to rust in the back hall, where the kerosene was kept, and happily shifted his interest to the warm apartments of New York." From "The Summer Farmer."
Snath: The long wooden shaft of a scythe. "Then the wet wind climbed the hill behind them, and Paul, taking one hand off the snath, straightened his back." From "The Summer Farmer."
Copore sano: Latin for "sound body". "They were people who emphasized copore sano unduly, Baxter thought, and they shouldn't leave Clarissa alone in the cottage." From "The Chaste Clarissa".
Sumptuary laws: Laws intended to restrain or limit the expenditure of citizens in apparel, food, furniture, etc.; laws which regulate the prices of commodities and the wages of labor; laws which forbid or restrict the use of certain articles, as of luxurious apparel. Sumptuary means regulating or controlling expenditure or personal behavior. "He dressed -- like the rest of us -- as if he admitted the existence of sumptuary laws." From "The Five-Forty-Eight".
Banlieue: French for outskirts of a city. "I served four years in the Navy, have four kids now, and live in a banlieue called Shady Hill." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill."
Parablendeum: a kind of plastic wrap; a word that may have been created by the author. "I went to work right after the war for a parablendeum manufacturer, and seemed on the way to making this my life." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Schuhplattler: A traditional folk dance from Bavaria and Austria. "It seemed to me that if it had been my destiny to be a Russian ballet dancer, or to make art jewelry, or to paint Schuhplattler dancers on bureau drawers and landscapes on clamshells and live in some very low-tide place like Provincetown, I wouldn't have known a queerer bunch of men and women than I knew in the parablendeum industry, and I decided to strike out on my own." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Riggish: Wanton. "I was thinking sadly about my beginnings -- about how I was made by a riggish couple in a midtown hotel after a six-course dinner with wines, and my mother told me so many times that if she hadn't drunk so many Old-Fashioneds before that famous dinner I would still be unborn on a star." From "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill".
Gymkhana: A meet at which riders and horses display a range of skills and aptitudes. "I'm having a little gymkhana next month, and I want your children to ride in it." From "The Bus to St. James".
Soubrettes: A soubrette is a stock female character in opera or theater; in theater it is a vain, girlish, flirty comedy character. "On Saturdays after the movies they go into one of those bars called Harry's or Larry's of Jerry's, where the walls are covered with autographed photographs of unknown electric-guitar players and unknown soubrettes, to eat bacon and eggs and talk baseball and play American records on the jukebox." From "The Bella Lingua".
Upzoning: The process, often controversial, of changing the zoning in an area, usually to allow greater density or commercial use. Sometimes the term is used to mean the opposite -- changing the zoning in a broad area to limit growth and density. "The Wrysons' civic activities were confined to upzoning, but they were very active in this field, and if you were invited to their house for cocktails, the chances were that you would be asked to sign an upzoning petition before you got away." From "The Wrysons".
Rubato: To play with a flexible tempo. "He threw the tempo out the window and played it rubato from beginning to end, like an outpouring of tearful petulance, lonesomeness, and self-pity -- of everything it was Beethoven's greatness not to know." From "The Country Husband".
Neurasthenics: Neurasthenia is an old-fashioned unspecific word usually meaning weakness of the nervous system or nervous exhaustion. Not a phrase that is used much these days. "They took so many hot baths that she could not understand why they were not neurasthenics." From "Clementina".
Hoardings: A temporary wooden fence around a building or structure under construction or repair; a billboard. "All scornful descriptions of American landscapes with ruined tenements, automobile dumps, polluted rivers, jerry-built ranch houses, abandoned miniature golf links, cinder deserts, ugly hoardings, unsightly oil derricks, diseased elm trees, eroded farmlands, gaudy and fanciful gas stations, unclean motels, candlelit tearooms, and streams paved with beer cans, for these are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we -- you and I -- shall build." From "A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear".
Laconic: Crisp, brief and to the point. "In closing -- in closing, that is, for this afternoon (I have to go to the dentist and then have my hair cut), I would like to consider the career of my laconic old friend Royden Blake." From "A Miscellany of Character That Will Not Appear."
Contumacious: Wilfully obstinate; stubbornly disobedient. "It was one of those places where lonely men eat seafood and read the afternoon newspapers and where, in spite of the bath of colored light and distant music, the atmosphere is distinctly contumacious." From "The Ocean".
Suffragan: An assistant or subordinate bishop of a diocese. "Should he ask the suffragan bishop to reassess the Ten Commandments, to include in their prayers some special reference to the feelings of magnanimity and love that follow sexual engorgements?" From "Marito in Città".
Tufa: A type of stone. "The tufa and pepperoni and the bitter colors of the lichen that takes root in the walls and roofs are no part of the consciousness of an American, even if he has lived for years, as Bascomb had, surrounded by this bitterness." From "The World of Apples".
Orison: Prayer. "The man's face was idiotic -- doped, drugged, and ugly -- and yet, standing in his unsavory orisons, he seemed to old Bascomb angelic, armed with a flaming sword that might conquer banality and smash the glass of custom." From "The World of Apples".
Lordosis: An exaggerated inward curvature of the spine; also called swayback. "Her back and front were prominent and there was a memorable curve to her spine that could have been a cruel corset or the beginnings of lordosis." From "The Jewels of the Cabots".

Humboldt's Gift

By Saul Bellow

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for 1976.

Poor Charlie Citrine. His life is a shambles. A petty gangster has pounded Citrine's beautiful car to a pulp. Charlie's ex-wife is suing him for a bigger share of his assets and a judge has frozen Charlie's money telling Charlie that Charlie can always make more money. It is true that Charlie has been successful in the past but lately he hasn't done much of anything except sit around his house and meditate on death and the afterlife. Also, Citrine's girlfriend is angling for a marriage proposal and Charlie doesn't care to commit himself again. Charlie and the girlfriend are supposed to head off to Europe but Charlie has to deal with a legacy left to him by his old, estranged friend Humboldt. Humboldt was a failed poet with an alcohol addiction and mental problems so severe that he had to be committed. Humboldt and Charlie became estranged when Charlie wrote a play that was based on Humboldt's life without his permission. The play was very successful and made Charlie a lot of money.
Charlie is a strange fellow, a kind of walking encyclopedia, with literary allusions constantly falling from his lips. He is involved in something called Anthroposphy and he worries about death and about life after death and about art and destiny and reincarnation and philosophy.

Supposedly, the Charlie character is based on Bellow and the Humboldt character on his friend and poet, Delmore Schwartz. Bellow won the Pulitzer for this book, but in the story, this is what the Humboldt character says about the Pulitzer Prize: "The Pulitzer is for the birds -- for the pullets. It's just a dummy newspaper publicity award given by crooks and illiterates." That's probably one of the funniest things in the whole book.
Frankly, this book was a giant pain to read. There is practically not a page where some literary name (or two or three) is not dropped. In fact, I made a list of most of the names; you can see it below the list of new words. It includes names of books and other works and fictional characters and mythological characters. Too much of the book is about Charlie and his philosophy or search for a philosophy. I had never read Saul Bellow before and, after reading this book, I never want to read him again. Too much gobbledygook. I guess this book is just too sophisticated for me.

Review by Richard Rayner in the Los Angeles Times.

New Words
Grenadier: A member of the British Grenadier Guards or a soldier formerly bearing grenades. "With grenadier tails they [cats] bounded to sharpen their claws on trees."
Busby: A tall, full-dress, fur hat worn in certain regiments of the British Army. "His head was shaped like a busby, a high solid arrogant rock covered with thick moss."
Crepuscular: Of or like twilight; hazy, dim. "They brought crepuscular fortune to people down in the streets."
Anthroposophist: A spiritual philosophy based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner which postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual world accessible to direct experience through inner development. "Under my head I put a needlepoint cushion embroidered by a young lady, ... a Miss Dora Scheldt, the daughter of the anthroposophist I consulted now and then."
Orphic: Of or ascribed to Orpheus; mystic, occult, esoteric. "He got a Rationalistic, Naturalistic education at CCNY. This was not easily reconciled with the Orphic. But all his desires were contradictory."
Sortilegio: Sortilege is the art or practice of foretelling the future by drawing lots; sorcery; witchcraft. "'What? Sorcery! Fucking sortilegio!' 'It's not sortilegio. It's mutual aid.'"
Morphology: The biological study of the form and structure of living organisms. Protoplasts: The living material of a cell as distinguished from inert portions. Ergastic substances: Metabolically inert products of photosynthesis, such as starch grains and fat globules. "I obtained a large botany book by a woman named Esau and sank myself into morphology, into protoplasts and ergastic substances, so that my exercises might have real content."
Attainder: The loss of all civil rights legally consequent to a death sentence or to outlawry for a capital offense. "The hereditary attainder rule was very strict."
Relume: To make bright or clear again. "I remember the shine of his [Humboldt] eyes when he dropped his voice to pronounce the word "relume" spoken by a fellow about to commit a murder, or when he spoke Cleopatra's words 'I have immortal longings in me.'"
Antinomian: In theology, the idea that members of a particular religious group are under no obligation to obey the laws of ethics or morality as presented by religious authorities. "But it was only antinomian, not free."
Theosophy: Religious speculation dealing with the mystical apprehension of God, associated with various occult systems; or the doctrines and beliefs of a religious sect, the Theosophical Society, incorporating aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism. "If he added theosophy to literature and the insurance business, what would become of him?"
Exousiai: In anthroposophy, based on the teachings by Rudolf Steiner, the Exousiai represent the sixth realm of the Christian angelic hierarchy of the Roman Catholic tradition. This hierarchic level of divine spirits is immediately above the three levels comprising the Angels, Archangels and Archai/Principati. The role of the Exousiai in spiritual evolution is essential, since the human Self has emanated from them. Having their residence in the spiritual spheres of the Sun, the Exousiai are specially devoted to the development of Earth and humanity. "But when Humboldt cried, 'Life!' he didn't mean the Thrones, Exousiai, and Angels."
Havelock: A cloth covering for a cap, having a flap to protect the back of the neck. "On her head was a garrison cap and a Sam Browne belt crossed her chest --the works: fleece boots, mittens, her neck protected by an orange havelock, her figure obliterated."
Tinia crura Tinea crura is a fungal infection in the skin of the groin. "And Dr. Tim Vonghel gave me a bucket of gentian violet to sit in. He told me I had a bad case of tinia crura."
Hydrostatics: The statics of fluids, especially incompressible fluids. Statics is the equilibrium mechanics of stationary bodies. "He was quite old now, and the unkind forces of human hydrostatics were beginning to make a strained and wrinkled bag of his face, but his color remained fresh and he was still the Harvard radical of the John Reed type, one of those ever-youthful lightweight high-spirited American intellectuals, faithful to his Marx or his Bakunin, to Isadora, Randolph Bourne, Lenin and Trotsky, Max Eastman, Cocteau, André Gide, the Ballets Ruses, Eisenstein -- the beautiful avant-garde pantheon of the good old days."
Mansard: The upper story formed by the lower slope of a mansard roof, which is a roof having two slopes on all four sides. "Renata was still criticizing the mansard room."
Inductive: Of reasoning; proceeding from particular facts to a general conclusion. "'It isn't mysticism,' I said. 'Goethe simply wouldn't stop at the boundaries drawn by the inductive method.'"
Epistemologies: Epistemology is the philosophy that investigates the nature and origin of knowledge; a theory of the nature of knowledge. "Five different epistemologies in an evening. Take your choice. They're all agreeable, and not one is binding or necessary or has true strength or speaks straight to the soul."
Tremor cordis: Irregular heart beat. "I recalled how he had looked in Connecticut, when he quoted me King Leontes in my yard by the sea. 'I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances; but not for joy, not joy.'"
Carabiniere: A military body that polices both military and civilians. "Thaxter's carabiniere costume looked sick by comparison."
Soutane: A cassock worn by Roman Catholic priests. "'Priests' pockets are picked under the soutane.'"
Chandala: An untouchable; especially someone engaged in the profession of carrying of dead bodies and in the process of cremation. "I knew all of that would-be Shavian wit you could hear at dinner tables on Lake Shore Drive: they wanted to make an untouchable and a chandala of Flonzaley, a scavenger, but he would take their gold into the gloom with him, and he would be a Prince there -- that sort of stuff I could do without."

The List of References from Humboldt's Gift:

Adventures of Ideas by Alfred N. Whitehead
Aida opera by Giuseppe Verde
American Mercury magazine
Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare
Antigone by Sophocles
Balzac sculpture by Auguste Rodin
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
Bonnie and Clyde movie
Carmen opera by Georges Bizet
Comédie Humaine by Honoré de Balzac
Deep Throat porno film
De Anima (On the Soul) by Aristotle
Diaries by Franz Kafka
Elégie song by Jules Massenet
Encyclopedia of Unified Science
Finnegan's Wake by James Joyce
From Hegel to Marx by Sidney Hook
Guernica painting by Pablo Picasso
Hamlet by Shakespeare
I Am Curious Yellow movie
Ils Ne M'auront Pas (They shall not have me) by Jean Hélion
Intimate Journals by Charles Baudelaire
King Solomon's Mine by H. Rider Haggard
Knock play by Jules Romains
Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner
La Comédie Humaine by Honoré de Balzac
Les Amours Jaunes by Tristan Corbière
Letters by John Keats
"Liebestod" from Richard Wagner opera
Maja paintings by Francisco Goya
New World Symphony by Antonín Dvorák
Oedipus at Colonus play by Sophocles
Pagliacci opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Pastorale symphony Ludwig van Beethoven
Phaedrus by Plato
Phenomenology by Georg Wilhelm Hegel
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Revista de Occidente magazine
Satyricon movie by Frederico Fellini
State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
Symposium by Plato
The Barber of Seville opera
The Dial magazine
The French Connection movie
The Godfather movie
The Great McGinty movie
The Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics by James Hastings
The Magic Flute opera by Mozart
The Miracle of Morgan's Creek movie
The Modern Theme by José Ortega y Gasset
"The Pardoner" (excerpt) by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Sense of Beauty by George Santayana
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James
The Tempest by Shakespeare
The Triumph of the Therapeutic by Philip Rieff
The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare
Timaeus by Plato
Women's Wear Daily magazine
Abel, Lionel
Acheson, Secretary Dean
Adams, Henry & Mrs.
Adonais
Agamemnon
Ahriman
Aiken, Conrad
Alger, Horatio
Alighieri, Dante
Amin, General (Idi Amin Dada)
Amundsen, Roald
Antony, Mark
Apollinaire, Guillaume
Aquinas, Thomas
Ardrey, Robert
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Armstrong, Louis
Artaud, Antonin
Ash, Paul
Ashurbanipal
Atlantis
Babbitt (character by Sinclair Lewis)
Bach, Johann Sebastian
Bacon, Francis
Baedeker
Bakunin, Mikhail
Ballets Russes
Balzac, Honoré de
Baron, Salo Wittmayer
Baruch, Bernard
Batista, General Fulgencio
Baudelaire, Charles
Beethoven, Ludwig van
Bergotte (character by Proust)
Bernhardt, Sarah
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo
Berryman, John
Beyle, Marie-Henri
Binet, Alfred
Blake, William
Blavatsky, Madame
Bloomgarden, Kermit
Boehme, Jakob
Boito, Arrigo
Bolling, Edith
Bonaparte, Louis
Bonaparte, Napoleon
Bosch, Hieronymus
Botticelli, Sandro
Bourne, Randolph
Brecht, Bertolt
Bretonne, Restif del la
Browning, Edward West "Daddy" & Frances Heenan "Peaches"
Bryan, William Jennings
Buchalter, Louis "Lepke"
Buddha
Bukharin, Nikolai
Burnham, James
Burns, Robert
Burton, Sir Richard Francis
Caeser, Julius
Caliban (character by Shakespeare)
Carus, Titus Lucretius
Caruso, Enrico
Casals, Pablo
Chapman, George
Chaney, Lon
Chaplin, Charlie
Charlus, Baron de (character from Proust)
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chekhov, Anton
Chiaramonte, Nicola
Christian (character by John Bunyan)
Churchill, Winston
Circe
Clair, René
Clarissa (character by Samuel Richardson)
Claudius
Cleopatra
Cocteau, Jean
Cohen, Morris R.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Colman, Ronald
Coolidge, Calvin
Corbière, Tristan
Corelli, Arcangelo
Corvo, Baron (Frederick William Rolfe)
Crane, Hart
Cutting, Sen. Bronson
Cyclops
Daniels, Samuel
Dante Alighieri
Darwin, Charles
Davies, Marion
Defoe, Daniel
DeGaulle, Charles
Closerie Des Lilas (restaurant)
d'Evry, Baron Hulot (character by Balzac)
Dimaggio, Joe
Dimmesdale (character by Hawthorne)
Dirksen, Sen. Erv
Disraeli, Benjamin
Don José (character by Bizet)
Donlevy, Brian
Donne, John
Dostoevsky, Fyodor
Douglas, Justice William O.
Dryden, John
Duncan, Isadora
Durkheim, Emile
Durnwald, Richard
Dvorák, Antonín
Dzerzhinsky, Felix E.
Eastman, Max
Eckhardt, Meister
Eddington, Arthur
Einstein, Albert
Eisenhower, Dwight
Eisenstein, Sergei
El Greco (Domenicos Theotokopoulos)
Eliot, T.S.
Ellenbogen, Wilhelm
Eller, Morris
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
English, Woody (baseball)
Eriksen, Erik
Eros
Escamillo (character from opera Carmen)
Fafnir
Fellini, Frederico
Ferenczi, Sándor
Fields, W.C.
Figaro (opera character)
Fitzgerald, Scott
Flaubert, Gustave
Ford, Henry
Fort Dearborn
Fowler, Gene
Freud, Sigmund
Friedman, Milton
Frost, Robert
Gabor, Zsa Zsa
Galli-Curci, Amelita
Galvani, Dr. Luigi
Genet, Jean
Gide, André
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goldoni, Carlo
Goodman, Paul
Goya, Francisco
Grey, Zane
Haggard, H. Rider
Hal, Frans
Halas, George
Hamlet (character by Shakespeare)
Hart, Liddell
Hastings, James
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
Haydn, Franz Joseph
Hearst, Patty
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm
Heine, Heinrich
Held Jr., John
Hélion, Jean
Hemingway, Ernest
Herodias
Hickok, Wild Bill
Himmel, Richard
Hirschfeld, Al
Hobbes, Thomas
Hoffmann, E.T.A.
Holmes, Justice Oliver Wendell
Homer
Hook, Sidney
Hoover, Herbert
Hoover, J. Edgar
Hopkins, Harry
Houdini, Harry
Humphrey, Hubert
Hur, Ben
Ibsen, Henrik
Jacobsen, Dr. Edmund
James, Henry
James, Dr. William
Jannings, Emil
Jarrell, Randall
Javits, Sen. Jacob Koppel
Jenner, Sen. William Ezra
John of the Cross, St.
Johnson, Dr. Samuel
Joyce, James
Jung, C.G.
Kafka, Franz
Kahn, Herman
Kai-shek, Chiang
Kamenev, Lev
Kant, Immanuel
Karamazov (character by Dostoevsky)
Karo, Rabbi Joseph
Keats, John
Kennedy, Jackie
Kennedy, John
Kennedy, Robert
Keynes, John Maynard
Kierkegaard, Søren
Kinsey, Alfred C.
Koestler, Albert
Köhler, Wolfgang
Kun, Béla
Lardner, Ring
Laughton, Charles
Lawrence, T.E.
Leakey, Louis
Lear, King (Shakespeare character)
Le Corbusier
Lenin, Vladimir
Leontes, King (Shakespeare character)
Levi, Paul Alan
Lewis, Sinclair
Lincoln, Abe
Lindbergh, Charles
Lorca, Frederico Garcia
Lorenz, Konrad
Lovelace (character by Richardson)
Loyola, St. Ignatius
Lucretius
Lugosi, Béla
Luxemburg, Rosa
Lyons, Leonard
MacArthur, Douglas
Macbeth (Shakespeare character)
Machiavelli, Niccolò
Maja (Goya subject)
Mallarmé, Stéphane
Malraux, André
Malthus, Thomas Robert
Mammon
Manville, Tommy
Mao Zedong
Marais, Eugene
Marshall, Gen. George C.
Marvell, Andrew
Marx, Karl
Mosca, Count (from Stendhal)
Massenet, Jules
Masters, William
Mastroianni, Marcello
Matisse, Henri
McCarthy, Sen. Joseph
McCormick, Colonel Robert R.
McLaglen, Victor
Melville, Herman
Mencken, H.L.
Mill, John Stuart
Milton, John
Molière
Momigliano, Arnaldo
Monet, Claude
Monroe, Marilyn
Mostel, Zero
Mozart, Wolfgang
Murray, Mae
Mussolini, Benito
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nobile, Umberto
Novalis
O'Banion, Dion
Olivier, Sir Laurence
Orpheus
Ortega y Gasset, Jose
Ouspenskaya, Maria
Paganini, Niccolò
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da
Panofsky, Wolfgang
Pascal, Blaise
Pershing, General John Joseph
Picasso, Pablo
Pickford, Mary
Piguet, Audemar
Plato
Plautus, Titus Maccius
Pluto
Poe, Edgar A.
Polonius (Shakespeare character)
Pope, Alexander
Post, Emily
Pound, Ezra
Praz, Mario
Prospero (Shakespeare character)
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph
Proust, Marcel
Prufrock, J. Alfred (TS Eliot character)
Psyche
Qaddafi, Muammar al
Rahv, Philip
Rameau, Jean-Philippe
Rasputin, Grigori
Reed, John
Rhadamanthus
Rhadames (character from Aida)
Richardson, Samuel
Richelieu, Cardinal
Rieff, Philip
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Robinson, Sugar Ray
Rockefeller, J.D.
Rodin, Auguste
Romains, Jules
Romberg, Sigmund
Rommel, General Erwin
Roosevelt, Franklin .D.
Rosicrucian
Rossini, Gioachino
Rostovtzeff, Michael
Roth, Cecil
Rothko, Mark
Roualt, Georges
Ruffo, Titta
Ruth, Babe
Santayana, George
Sarnoff, Gen. David
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Schaller, George
Schapiro, Meyer
Schipa, Tito
Schliemann, Heinrich
Schopenhauer, Arthur
Schumann-Heink, Ernestine
Schumpeter, Joseph
Schweitzer, Albert
Scott, Robert F.
Sebastian, St.
Sejanus (Lucius Aelius Seianus)
Shakespeare, William
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Simon, St.
Sitwell, Edith
Smith, Red
Smith, Adam
Smith, Al & Johnny Walker
Smolny Institute
Snerd, Mortimer (Edgar Bergen dummy)
Socrates
Sombart, Werner
Sophocles
Sorel, Julien
Soutine, Chaim
Spens, Sir Patrick
Spinoza, Baruch
Stalin, Joseph
Stanton, Edwin M.
Steichen, Edward
Stein, Gertrude
Steiner, Rudolf
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
Stevens, Wallace
Stevenson, Adlai
Stravinsky, Igor
Sturges, Preston
Suetonius
Sullivan, Louis
Swanson, Gloria
Swift, Jonathan
Swinburne, Algernon Charles
Tamiroff, Akim
Tawney, R.H.
Temple, Sir William
Tennyson, Alfred Lord
Teresa, St.
Thaw, Harry & Evelyn Nesbitt
Thompson, William Hale "Big Bill"
Thoreau, Henry David
Thucydides
Thurmond, Sen. Strom
Tiberius
Tillich, Paul
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Toklas, Alice B.
Tolstoi, Leo
Toynbee, Arnold
Triton
Trotsky, Leon
Tumulty, Joseph
Ustinov, Peter
Valéry, Paul
Vallee, Rudy
Van der Weyden, Rogier
Velásquez, Diego
Verdi, Giuseppe
Vesco, Robert Lee
Vico, Giambattista
Villa, Pancho
Virgil
Vishinsky, Andrei
Von Trenck, Pandour
Wagner, Richard
Walker, Johnny & Al Smith
Walpole, Horace
Weber, Max
Welles, Orson
Wharton, Edith
Wheeler, Sen. Burton K.
Wheeler-Bennet, John
Whitehead, Alfred North
Whitman, Walt
Wilde, Oscar
Wilmot, Chester
Wilson, Woodrow
Wilson, Earl
Wilson, Edmund
Wilson, Hack
Wimsey, Lord Peter (Dorothy Sayers character)
Winchell, Walter
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
Wordsworth, William
Yeats, William Butler
Yerkes, Robert Means
Yokum, Mammy (cartoon character by Al Capp)
Zarathustra
Ziegfeld, Florenz
Zinoviev, Grigory
Zuckerman, Solly Baron
(Whew!)

The Killer Angels

By Michael Shaara

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1975.

In this story, we revisit the battle of Gettysburg in 1863, looking at the battle through the eyes of the generals who led the fight. We are privy to the decisions, misgivings and hopes of the men who led thousands of young soldiers to their deaths. We are there as Lee consults with his generals and then makes his own, fatal decision. We are there as the Union line stands against the Rebel onslaught.

In this book, Shaara explains how Lee messed up and why. He looks at the actions of various generals, Rebel and Union, on the battlefield. He also explores their private thoughts and reflections, which gives the novel a very human touch.

When I was researching this book before reading it, I was dismayed at the subject matter. Battles, wars and strategy hold no charm for me. As for the details of the battles, I am no judge. But, despite the unappealing subject matter, this was a really good book. I was totally surprised at how enthralling it was and I learned a lot more about the battle of Gettysburg. The Killer Angels is a great book.

For a more detailed review of the book, see Plant's Review of Books.

New Words:
Guidon: Originally the flag that marched at the head and to the right of the first rank for the troops to guide on. Usually carried by a cavalry or artillery company and swallow-tailed in appearance. Carried by some infantry companies as flank markers. "It [the army] came out of a blue rainstorm in the east and overflowed the narrow valley road, coiling along a stream, narrowing and choking at a white bridge, fading out into the yellowish dust of June but still visible on the farther road beyond the blue hills, spiked with flags and guidons like a great chopped bristly snake, the snake ending headless in a blue wall of summer rain."
Enfilade: Gunfire directed along the length rather than the breadth of a formation. "The guns to the right, on the Rocky Hill, would enfilade the line."
Vedette: A mounted sentry or outpost. "He [Longstreet] found Goree, sent him off to Hood, telling him to send vedettes ahead to scout the ground."
Napoleon: A smoothbore, muzzle-loading, 12-pounder cannon, used by both sides in the Civil War. "The line was a marvelous thing to see: thousands of men and horses and the gleaming Napoleons, row on row, and miles of wagons and shells."

The Optimist's Daughter

By Eudora Welty

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1973.

Laurel Hand comes home from Chicago to Mississippi when her father needs to have eye surgery. He has a torn retina and after the surgery he will be confined to a hospital bed for several weeks and he has to keep absolutely still or his eye may not heal.
Laurel's mother Becky died years ago and her father remarried to a woman Laurel's age, Fay. Fay is shallow and selfish and she regards Laurel and Laurel's dead mother Becky as her rivals.
After the surgery, while Laurel's father, Judge McKelva, lays motionless in bed, Fay complains that she is missing the Carnival. Always, her first thought is for herself.
Judge McKelva starts to decline. He becomes remote and somewhat unresponsive to his wife and daughter. Laurel sits at his bedside reading to herself as he doesn't seem to want her to read to him. Laurel thinks that "her father seemed to be paying some unbargained-for price for his recovery...his face looked tireder every morning."
One night, Fay gets fed up with the Judge's unresponsiveness and tries to give him a good shaking, as she says later, "I tried to make him quit his old-man foolishness. I was going to make him live if I had to drag him!" He dies shortly thereafter. Laurel feels that Fay caused his death by shaking him like she did.
The Judge's body is taken to his house and all the friends and relatives stop by to pay their respects. Fay's family also shows up, coming all the way from Texas. In the novel, they are supposed to be lower class people than Laurel's people. They just seemed like ordinary folks to me, no worse or better than most.
After the funeral, Fay decides to go home for a visit for a week leaving Laurel alone in the house, the house that Judge McKelva left to his wife and not to his daughter.
Laurel goes through her father's desk and her mother's papers. She thinks about their marriage and about her mother's death. When she was dying, Becky felt, probably unreasonably, that her family was betraying her. The last thing she said to Laurel was, "You could have saved your mother's life. But you stood by and wouldn't intervene. I despair for you." Laurel also recalls her own brief marriage to a man who died in WW II.
Laurel had planned to be gone by the time Fay came back from her trip but Fay comes home early, perhaps because she want to confront Laurel, to establish her dominance and ownership over the house that Laurel grew up in. They have an argument that almost turns violent. But Laurel realizes that Fay will never understand her because Fay is "without any powers of passion or imagination in herself and had no way to see it or reach it in the other person...[Fay] could no more fight a feeling person than she could love him."

I just plain didn't like this book at all. The wake part of the book lasts so long that it was almost like being there, and not in a good way. A lot of the motivations of the characters are left unspoken, disguised in language that just sorts of hints at what is going on. I found this book tedious and overly subtle.

Review from Kirkus Reviews. 

New Words
Feist: a small, nervous, belligerent mongrel dog. "She [Fay] had round, country-blue eyes and a little feist jaw."
Packthread: a strong three-ply twine used to sew or tie packages. "Laurel was halted. A thousand packthreads seemed to cross and crisscross her skin, binding her there."

Angle of Repose

By Wallace Stegner

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1972.

Lyman Ward is a disabled older man, who, in order to occupy his time and also to help him understand himself and his family better, writes the life of his pioneering grandmother Susan. Lyman is divorced, his wife left him shortly after his surgery to removed his diseased leg. His wife left him for his surgeon and Lyman is understandably bitter. His son thinks Lyman should forgive and let the ex back into his life if for no other reason than that Lyman needs someone to look after him.
The grandmother, Susan, is a gentlewoman, raised on the East Coast and planning on a career as an artist/illustrator in the 19th century. She falls for an engineer from the far West, Oliver. Her friends fear she is throwing herself away when she marries Oliver Ward. Too bad for Susan that she enters her marriage with an unrealistic expectation of what their lives together will be. Susan thinks that she and Oliver will have to spend, at the most, ten years in the west, while Oliver makes his fortune. Then, as she sees it, they will move back east and take their place in the East Coast artistic, genteel society that Susan craves. But that doesn't happen.
Oliver goes from job to job, location to location, always chasing after the success that continually eludes him. At first, Susan goes happily along, but as the years pass she loses confidence in her husband. Her feelings become even more bleak as Oliver turns to alcohol to ease his disappointment and frustration. Feeling miserable, Susan becomes involved with her husband's friend and assistant, Frank.
The story weaves between that of Susan and her trials and that of her grandson, Lyman and his problems. Lyman looks at his grandmother's unhappiness and mistakes and tries to figure out what went wrong in his own marriage

The "angle of repose"is a geologic term, referring to the place where moving rock stops sliding downward, like in a rockslide. It is usually a precarious position, that the least change may cause to deteriorate. In Stegner's story it not only refers to a place of rest in the Ward's marriage, but also to the place of rest reached by Lyman in his slide downward in his life, his marriage and his illness. This is an interesting tale of two marriages in two different centuries, but concentrating mainly on Susan Ward. It is a rather long story but well worth the time it takes to read. Stegner based his story on the real life pioneer, Mary Hallock Foote. In fact, the letters in the story are taken from Foote's letters. Reading her letters made me want to read about her. Makes me wonder how closely Stegner's Susan Ward's life matched Foote's.

For two other reviews see ReadingGroupGuides and Grandpoohbah.

New Words:

Epicene: effeminate. "In the 1870s he was gentle, thoughtful, amusing, a spirit that glowed through a frail, almost epicene body.
Madrone: a plant, the arbutus. "In the night she may have heard the wind sighing under the eaves and creaking the stiff oaks and madrones on the hillside behind."
Charivari: shivaree. "'There was some talk about a charivari,' Oliver said. 'I gave them money for a couple barrels of beer. So now I'm going to take Sue home and barricade the doors.'"
Theodolite: a surveying instrument. "She could not bear to think of him down there in the blackness, dropping his thousand-foot plumb lines, gluing his eye to the theodolite eyepiece while an assistant held a candle close, and while the bob, suspended in water to make its motion minimal, moved in its deep orbit hundreds of feet below and the wire which was all he had to measure by shifted its hairbreadth left or right."
Tommyknockers: Welsh or Cornish version of a brownie or leprechaun. They live underground and wear miner's garb and are mischievous. "'Tommyknockers. Little people who go through the mine tapping at the timbering to make sure it's sound.'"
Wobblies: a Wobbly is a member of a union, the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. "I suggested the I.W.W. parallel to Ada, who being a miner's daughter knew about the Wobblies."
Argillaceous: soils which are predominantly clay or abounding in clays or claylike materials. "Decades later, over the mountain at Permanente, not too far from New Almaden, Henry Kaiser would make a very good thing indeed out of the argillaceous and calcareous that Oliver Ward forced into an insoluble marriage in the winter of 1877."
Proud flesh: the swollen tissue around a healing wound or ulcer. "Slack's, at the end of the steel, was as ugly as proud flesh, a gulch of shacks and tents and derailed cars, its one street a continuous mudhole, every square foot of flat ground cluttered with piles of ties, rails, logs, rusty Fresno scrapers, wagonbeds, spare wheels, barrels, lumber, coal."
Lacunae: gaps, blank spaces. "Mice have gnawed Grandmother's Leadville letters and created some historical lacunae."
Attenuated: weakened. "Anyway I'm not sure I could stand being attenuated in Mr. James's fashion. I was half glad he didn't appear, isn't it awful?"
Democrat wagon: a high, lightweight, horse-drawn wagon, usually having two seats. "Oliver met us with a democrat wagon at Kuna, the end of the line."
Meeching: Hiding; skulking; cowardly. "Vexed by the unpleasantness of her own laugh as much as by Mrs. Briscoe's absence, she looked over her shoulder, afraid that meeching pig-like presence might be behind her."
Fourierist phalansteries: Fourierism is a system for social reform advocated by Charles Fourier in the early 19th century, proposing that society be organized into small self-sustaining communal groups or phalanges. A phalanstery was the building designed by Fourier to house the community. See Wikipedia. "'Plato,' I said. 'In his fashion. Sir Thomas More, in his way. Coleridge, Melville, Samuel Butler, D.H. Lawrence, in their ways. Brook Farm and all the other Fourierist phalansteries. New Harmony, whether under the Rappites or the Owenites. The Icarians. Amana. Homestead. The Mennonites. The Amish. The Hutterites. The Shakers. The United Order of Zion. The Oneida Colony. Especially the Oneida Colony.'"

House Made of Dawn

N. Scott Momaday

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1969.

After I finished reading this book, I thought to myself that many parts of it were like reading blank verse and that it seemed rather disjointed and without much of a plot. Then I read online that the book originally started out as poetry, then as short stories and finally it was all tied together in the form of a novel. So my impression of it was confirmed by the facts.

In the novel Abel has come home to the reservation to live with his grandfather in New Mexico after serving overseas in World War II. He is pretty much of an alcoholic. During the short time Abel is home, he kills an albino man who he believes is a witch. He is sent to prison (his time in prison is completely skipped over) and after getting out heads to Los Angeles. At first he gets a job, but loses it. He runs afoul of an abusive cop and gets the stuffing beaten out of him. He is found by a friend and taken to the hospital. When he leaves the hospital, he heads back home to the reservation just in time to take care of his grandfather who is dying. Tending to his grandfather and listening to him talk helps Abel reconnect with his spirituality.

Even though I am neither a fan of poetry or short stories, still I enjoyed reading this book. The descriptions of the landscape were wonderfully evocative. I lived in New Mexico for a few years and reading this novel brought the beautiful and stark vistas back almost as if I were there again. I also enjoyed reading about the ceremonies and the dances, especially the story of the peyote service at the Los Angeles church. I even enjoyed reading the poems and songs. I do wish I had a study guide when reading it as I didn't understand parts of the story, especially the business with the albino. Also, there are a lot of Indian or Spanish words in the story. Still, though a lot of it didn't make sense to me, I really liked it.

For a more thorough summary of House Made of Dawn see the article about it at Wikipedia.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.

New Words (not the foreign words):
Sacristan: the man in charge of the sacristy and the vessels and vestments. The sacristy is the room in which these items are stored.
Peneplain: A flat, featureless landscape formed by a long history of erosion. "He made camp that night far down the peneplain and saw the stars and heard the coyotes away by the river."

The Confessions of Nat Turner

By William Styron

This novel won the Pulitzer Prize for 1968.

In 1831, a slave called Nat led a rebellion in Virginia. Nat and his followers killed 57 whites; men, women and children. Nat was an intelligent man who learned to read at time when it was forbidden to teach slaves to read. Nat was very religious and prayed and fasted in order to become closer to God. He experienced visions which he believed were God leading him to rise up against slavery. He was convinced that the whites needed to be slaughtered and that it was the only way to obtain his people's freedom from white oppression. Sadly, his failed rebellion resulted in the revenge killings of hundreds of innocent blacks and the enactment of even stricter rules against blacks in the South, freed men and slaves.
William Styron was born in Virginia not far from the site of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. I suppose he was aware of Nat from the early days of his life and it is not surprising that he decided to write this fictionalized account of Nat's life and the rebellion he masterminded. It was perhaps presumptuous of Styron though. At the time the novel was published, he was criticized and called a racists by many in the black community. They felt his portrayal of Nat distorted the motives that drove Nat to take the drastic steps that he did. After reading this novel and reading about Nat Turner, I think they are probably right. I don't think Styron really understood what drove Nat to rebellion. A lot of what he wrote about Nat comes off more as fiction than as fact, especially the stuff about Nat's fantasies about white women. Also Styron completely omits the fact that Nat was married. In the book, he paints Styron as a frustrated enamored man lusting after a white girl. This book does present the bare facts of the rebellion but it seems off base in its depiction of Nat. However, if you look at this novel as just a work of fiction, then it is pretty interesting.
Nat's rebellion is an important event in history and illuminates the desperation of people who feel they have been dealt with unfairly and unjustly and seek redress even to point of murder of the innocent and the not-so-innocent.

Review from Kirkus Reviews.


New Words:
Quiddities: "'The essence -- that is, all the quiddities of detail are the same -- or at least I hope they are the same.'" Quiddity means the essence of a thing.
Casuistry: "'Merciful God in heaven, will such casuistry never end! Is not the handwriting on the wall?'" Casuistry means subtle but misleading reasoning.
Crepuscular: "I seemed to be walking alone at the edge of a swamp at nightfall, the light around me glimmering, crepuscular, touched with that greenish hue presaging the onslaught of a summer storm." Crepuscular means that time of day at dawn and twilight.
Majuscules: "'I stress and underline that word. I put that word in majuscules!'" Majuscules means capital letters.
Sedulous: "Though usually the sedulous snoop, I had paid no attention to the conversation, fascinated instead by Benjamin, wondering if this would be one of those evenings when he fell out of his chair." Sedulous means diligent.
Coffle: "The slave coffle had halted at the side of the road, not far below the clearing where the wagon trace began." Coffle means a line of slaves or prisoners chained together.
Calcimine: "I heard the ladder make a faint tap-tapping as they set it against the side of the house and quickly I tested it for balance, gripping it tight by a chest-high rung, then without a word began my climb up the side of the house, past the newly whitewashed clapboard timbers that hurt my eyes in a calcimine lunar glare." Calcimine means whitewash.