Tag: setting

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners mapped by US setting

February 3rd, 2014

I have a confession to make. A major motivator in my Andrea Reads America project is my ambition to read more Great American Literature. I’ve read Faulkner and Ellison and Steinbeck; I’ve read Cather and Walker and Lee; but Philip Roth – who’s he? John Updike? Never tried him. Toni Morrison? I want to read more of her work. As I work my way across the USA, reading three books set in each state, I aim to finally get to some of the big names that I might otherwise never read.¹

Pulitzer Prize fiction winners and finalists set in specific US states

National Book Award fiction winners set in specific US states

Following the lead of researchers Kidd and Costano, who published a recent paper in Science suggesting that reading literary fiction improves empathy, I turned to the Pulitzer and National Book Award lists to find examples of Great Literature. I compiled lists of winners and finalists, and based on blurbs, reviews, and Goodreads tags, I noted the setting of each book in my spreadsheet.² If the narrative was set primarily in a specific state within the United States of America – not in generic-town-USA, not overseas, but in a specific location within the US – I plotted it on the maps above.³ Books that are based mainly on a journey across states are, for the most part, not included.⁴ Full list of titles follows.⁵ ⁶

I am reading America: 3 books from each state in the US with the following authorships represented – women, men, and non-Caucasian writers. To follow along, click on the Andrea Reads America tab on the left. For more resources on reading geographically, please see Resources for taking a literary tour of the US.

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¹ No, I do not plan to read every book listed here. Are you crazy?

² If I am wrong on any of these, please correct me. In cases where I haven’t read the book (i.e. most of them. 88% in fact.), I cannot be sure how much of the narrative takes place in a particular setting. Also, the stars on the maps do not indicate specific cities or setting within a state, only that the book is set in the state. I’d be here forever if I scaled down to city level, and I’ve got reading to do.

³ The spread is fascinating, isn’t it? What’s up, Western States? Also, look how many Pulitzer winners are set in New York: NINE if you include finalists. The committee was hooked on Maine for a while there, too. And the state with the most National Book Awards? Illinois. What does it all mean, people?!

⁴ My personal familiarity with the books came into play here. Though the story travels from Texas to Montana, I included Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove for Texas, mainly because the point of view is clearly Texan, and because McMurtry evokes Texas so beautifully that the state becomes a character in the story. I wonder if John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath works similarly for Oklahoma, as it is told from the Okie perspective as Oklahomans journey west to California. I do not remember the book well enough to feel comfortable plotting it in either Oklahoma or California. If you have strong feelings on this, please let me know in the comments.

⁵ Pulitzer Fiction Winners and Finalists by state setting

AL – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1961)
AL – The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (1965)
AK – The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (2013 finalist)
DC – Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1960)
FL – Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens (1949)
FL – Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (2012 finalist)
GA – Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (1956)
GA – The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
IL – An Unfinished Season by Ward Just (2005 finalist)
IN – The Bright Forever by Lee Martin (2006 finalist)
IA – A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1992)
LA – A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1981)
ME – Tinkers by Paul Harding (2010)
ME – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (2009)
ME – Empire Falls by Richard Russo (2002)
MA – The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O’Connor (1962)
MI – Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2003)
MS – The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (1973)
MS – The Reivers by William Faulkner (1963)
MO – The Way West by A. B. Guthrie (1950)
NE – The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (2007 finalist)
NJ – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (2008)
NJ – American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1998)
NM – House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1969)
NY – The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love by Oscar Hijuelos (1990)
NY – Ironweed by William Kennedy (1984)
NY – The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1979)
NY – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (2001)
NY – Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser (1997)
NY – All Souls by Christine Schutt (2009 finalist)
NY – The Privileges by Jonathan Dee (2011 finalist)
NY – Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos (1996 finalist)
NY – At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott (1993 finalist)
ND – The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich (2009 finalist)
OH – The Town by Conrad Richter (1951)
OH – Beloved by Toni Morrison (1988)
OK – Mean Spirit by Linda Hogan (1991 finalist)
PA – The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1975)
TN – A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor (1987)
TN – A Death in the Family by James Agee (1958)
TX – Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1986)
TX – Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter (1966)
UT – The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer (1980)
VA – The Known World by Edward P. Jones (2004)
VA – The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron (1968)
WY – Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx (2000 finalist)

⁶ National Book Award Winners by state setting

CA – In America by Susan Sontag (2000)
FL – Shadow Country by Peter Matthiessen (2008)
GA – Paris Trout by Pete Dexter (1988)
GA – The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1983)
HI – From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1952)
IL – The Man With the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren (1950)
IL – Herzog by Saul Bellow (1965)
IL – The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder (1968)
IL – So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1982)
LA – The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1962)
LA – Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories by Ellen Gilchrist (1984)
MA – The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever (1958)
MI – Them by Joyce Carol Oates (1970)
MN – Morte D’Urban by J. F. Powers (1963)
MS – Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
NE – Plains Song by Wright Morris (1981)
NE – The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (2006)
NJ – Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth (1960)
NY – The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud (1959)
NY – World’s Fair by E. L. Doctorow (1986)
NY – Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann (2009)
NC – Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann (1987)
NC – Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (1997)
ND – The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012)
PA – Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara (1956)
PA – The Centaur by John Updike (1964)
PA – Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (1982)
RI – Spartina by John Casey (1989)
WV – Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon (2010)

If you’ve read any of these and have opinions on them, please let me know. I’ve read a few and thought Bah, what’s the big deal? while others have blown me away. I’m curious what your thoughts are. Thanks!

I am reading America: 3 books from each state in the US with the following authorships represented – women, men, and non-Caucasian writers. To follow along, please visit me at andreareadsamerica.com.
The ultimate reading experience: when your real life setting jibes with (or opposes) the one in your book

September 10th, 2013

In general, my memory is pretty terrible. I remember books; I remember their stories, their characters, whether I enjoyed the work or not. But I rarely remember details of the circumstances under which I read them: where I was sitting, what was around me, the physical, sensory scene in my real life.

But sometimes the universe conspires to give you the ultimate reading experience, putting a book in your hands at the exact time and place you will be able to experience it to the fullest. Sometimes the words on the page interact with real life in a way that sets a scene you will remember for a lifetime, bringing literature to life so vividly that the story is impressed into your reality, forever:

‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King: I was a young teenager when I went through my Stephen King phase. My family lived in a large house on a small island off the coast of Georgia. At the time there were only a few houses on the island, and our road was dirt, not asphalt. We were a twenty minute drive from the mainland (ie a hospital), if there was an emergency. We were isolated. My room was on the second floor, and I had a white day bed with brass knobs on the corner posts. My bed was pushed up against the window, so that when I propped my head against the pillows to read, my body lay inches from the glass, my face in the center of the single four-foot pane. On the other side of the glass, a few feet from the house, swayed a cabbage palm, its moppy head at eye level with my bed.

One night, I stayed up late eating King’s pages. My blinds were closed (Duh! Of course I closed them. I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot), and I came to a scene where a vampire hovered outside a window, tapping, seeking entry into the home. My heart pounded, my eyes darted to the glass a foot from my face, and then there came a quiet screeching on my window, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Screeeeeech. Screeeech. I threw the book down and jumped out of bed, my chest heaving, until I rememberd, “The palm fronds” (pant pant), “It’s just the palm fronds.” With each skritchy squeak on the window, my heart thumped dangerously. I envisioned the vampire floating there, only inches away, his fingernails sharpened to better scratch the glass, his smile twitching because he could smell the vigor of my fresh, pulsing blood. I have never been more terrified while reading. I think I may have hidden the book, or removed it from my room, but the screeching continued all night. Even now, twenty-something years later, when I go home and hear the sound of palm fronds on glass, I think of ‘Salem’s Lot.

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell: I was once traveling and got delayed in Atlanta for several hours – maybe six or eight? I had brought with me the 32-pound hardcover of Gone With the Wind, and with so much time on my hands, rather than sit in the loud and bustling Atlanta airport, I decided to take the Marta train downtown to Centennial Olympic park. I lugged Mitchell’s tome with me and found an outdoor table at a café where I could watch kids chase bursts of water shooting up from the ground in the Centennial park fountain. As I read with my huge book splayed flat on a black iron café table, the moist Georgia heat pressed down on me. Condensation from my icy Coke trickled down the cup and pooled, then dripped onto the sidewalk below. I didn’t understand Atlanta, this city that seemed to be both South and not-South, with its messy tangle of inelegant roads and its fast pace and its strange mixture of old and new that I rarely experienced in coastal or rural Georgia. For four hours I sat with my dripping cup and I turned pages. I read the city – it’s pre-Sherman heyday, its burning, its invasion by outsiders, the fierce pride and dignity of its natives, reconstruction’s disregard of the South’s ways, of gentility, and Atlanta’s in-your-face rise from the ashes – on the pages of Mitchell’s book as in real life I breathed its air, drank its Coke, and listened to the laughter of its children, finally, through a work of fiction, understanding the history of this proud city that rose and fell, and then rose to what it is today.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris: (There are, um, a few F-bombs in this piece. Consider yourself warned.) Though it wasn’t the first time I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, my most memorable reading took place in Minnesota where, in the Mom circles I ran in, I never heard a single swear word (much to my dismay). I sat in the bleachers at the ice skating rink where my daughter wobbled back and forth in her lessons, the paperback in my lap, and I read “The Rooster,” a story about David’s brother, Paul, who “politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family, his father included, as either ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker.” Paul’s response to his father’s various lectures was, “‘Fuck it,’ or on one of his more articulate days, ‘Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”

The story was absolutely inappropriate for the wholesome ice rink setting, which added to its hilarity, and I tried to stifle giggles while moms chased toddlers around me. Children ran laps on the metal benches to hear the tinny clank clank clank of their feet on aluminum just as I got to the line where Paul says, “Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I said, ‘Fuck off, fuckface,’” and I laughed the kind of laugh that when you try to keep it in, it builds until your face contorts, and your shoulders shake, and tears are streaming down your face and you can’t see because your vision is blurred and you have to close the book before some nice non-swearing mom asks you what you’re laughing at. (This is not the first time this unsuccessful laughter-containment has happened to me. See: Lost Balls). Once my eyes were dry again, and I felt I could go on (because this is possibly the most fun I have ever had reading a book), I finished the story, which ends with “an enormous Fuck-It Bucket – a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars, [because] (‘When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.’)” and I was simultaneously pleased and horrified to have the laughing fit happen all over again when a small child fell and hurt his knee, and I felt bad for him, and I thought, that poor kid needs a Fuck-It Bucket.

What about you? Have you had an ultimate reading experience?
Dystopia – to go or not to go?

September 1st, 2013

“In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock.” – Ernest Hemingway

I was talking books with my roller skating friend, Dee, (I know – isn’t she awesome? She likes books AND roller skating) and I told her about the latest book I quit on. She asked what made me put it down – the characters, the setting, or the plot? Then she said, “Setting is a big deal for me. I don’t want to read a book that’s set in a place I don’t want to be.”

Whoa. That seems so obvious now – when you immerse yourself in a book, you are there, wherever it is set, so why would you voluntarily go someplace you don’t want to be? My friend dislikes dystopia, “Huh-uh, no end of the world for me, thanks,” and I am right there with her.

After Dee said that – “I don’t want to read a book that’s set in a place I don’t want to be” – I thought about how many of my book choices have been based on setting. I wanted to go someplace cold, so I grabbed The Tricking of Freya, set in Iceland. I wanted the jungle, so I read Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder. I wanted the South, so I read The Color Purple. Likewise, many of my favorite books become beloved because they transport me to a place I want to be – the red earth of Georgia in Gone With the Wind, among fragrant blooms in The Language of Flowers, by an Alpine stream so cold you can chill wine in it in summer in The Sun Also Rises.

Have I ever quit on a book based on its setting, though? Not that I can recall. But that’s probably because I never started it. I often won’t pick a book up if I’m not interested in the place where the story unfolds. A post-apocalyptic future. Space. Even though dystopia is hugely popular, and I have read a few dystopian novels that I very much enjoyed (Ready Player One, The Forever War, The Hunger Games, The Giver), it takes a lot of convincing to make me give them a try. I don’t like bleakness and destruction and all that. That being said, dystopian fiction makes me think about things I wouldn’t otherwise think of, about our future instead of our past. What will rise out of our destruction? Are my friends who are preparing for the zombie apocalypse – stockpiling antibiotics, amassing survival gear – maybe onto something? I wrote several pages in my journal about memories and dreams, and gathering wisdom from them, after I read The Giver. After The Age of Miracles, I spent days thinking about the ripple effect, how changes in our solar system – in the case of Miracles, a lengthening of the day to 50, 60 hours – would have tremendous implications for our survival, from something as seemingly mundane as school and work schedules to issues as large as world food supplies.

But still, despite all that learning and thinking, when I read I like to curl up in bed and immerse myself in a setting I want to experience – Newfoundland winters, or summer in Appalachia. If I can’t travel to Paris, or feel what life was like for a pioneer on the prairie, I want to read a gifted writer’s rendering of the scenery, the culture, domestic life, the storms. I want to feel snowflakes on my skin, or smell rain on warm wheat, or hear the clink of cups at an outdoor cafe.

In other words, like Dee, I want to read a book that takes me to a place I want to be.

What about you? Does setting play into the reading material you choose?

If you’re wondering why I abandoned the book I was reading – it wasn’t setting, characters, or plot. Or maybe it was all three. I couldn’t get beyond the language (70 or so pages of 19th century English in the beginning of the book, 100 or so pages of dialect in the middle), so it was hard to see the scenery, get a feel for the characters, or have any idea what was going on plot-wise. I couldn’t get close to any of them because I never found my stride with the words. This is usually my reason for breaking up with a book.

Tag: setting

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners mapped by US setting

⁵ Pulitzer Fiction Winners and Finalists by state setting

⁶ National Book Award Winners by state setting

The ultimate reading experience: when your real life setting jibes with (or opposes) the one in your book

Dystopia – to go or not to go?