I thought I had read all the Pulitzer Prize winners for the last couple decades, but apparently I missed at least one. No more; Madysen is reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, the 1993 Pulitzer winner, and I confiscated it for a couple of days. Quolye, a poor New York journalist and generally nice and trodden-upon guy, moves to his ancestral home of Newfoundland when his entire life is upturned. There, he works for the local paper covering car crashes and posts the ins and outs of boats from the harbor, which leads to profiles on special boats. Slowly, he becomes a meaningful member of the community. Better than the story is Proulx’s prose.
I feel like al of my favorite authors have published new books in the last several months. The latest example, Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur, a collection of thirteen previously unpublished essays. They cover topics like why do people answer questions, the impossibility of time travel, whether football is conservate, and the Unabomber, Chris Gaines, and Kurt Cobain and David Koresh. Regardless of subject matter, Klosterman is great because of his voice.
Margaret Atwood’s fiction has been on my to-read list, but I now know that I shouldn’t have started with her latest release, The Year of the Flood. Taking up the story told in Onyx and Crake, Atwood’s tale is set in the future that has reverted towards a state of nature because of various ecological plagues. There is lots going on–a religious group preparing for the waterless flood, CorpSEcorps, the corporate interest which seem to control all aspects of daily life, etc. It is a lonely and thought provoking story.
I enjoyed reading The Handmaid’s Tale years ago but never read anything else by Atwood, why did you think that starting with The Year of the Flood was a bad idea? Do you think I should rad the Onyx and Crake first?
I think Onyx and Crake first would make more sense. Just felt like I had missed Act I.