transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Now, at McDonald's, wake up to a $4 breakfast meal deal. Wake up to a sausage McMuffin or a sausage biscuit, to hash browns, and wake up to a hot coffee. Get your $4 breakfast meal deal.
Speaker 2:
[00:12] Limit time only. May vary.
Speaker 3:
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Speaker 4:
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Speaker 3:
[00:49] This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Jeff O'Neal.
Speaker 2:
[00:51] And I'm Rebecca Schinsky.
Speaker 3:
[00:53] Today on the show, we are ranking the top Pulitzer Prize winning novels. Fiction, doesn't have to be novels, it could be short stories. Of the century so far, Rebecca, I ranked 23.
Speaker 2:
[01:11] Because I did not give you specific homework.
Speaker 3:
[01:14] No, you didn't. Because the century is a lot.
Speaker 2:
[01:17] Yeah, I power ranked the top 10.
Speaker 3:
[01:19] And I did not rank, though, a couple because I had not read them. I ranked everything I had read going back to 2000, that's what I did.
Speaker 2:
[01:26] Okay, I went based on like vibes of how did this book perform? Where does it continue to sit in critical consciousness? Do people still talk about it? And do I know anything about sales? I have read all but one of the 10 that I ranked.
Speaker 3:
[01:50] I just happen to believe that my sense of a book's quality is co-extensive with its place in the larger zeitgeist. So I will make no distinction between what other people think and what I think. If they don't think what I think, they should. So there we go.
Speaker 2:
[02:05] You have chosen the right career in podcasting.
Speaker 3:
[02:10] Just unearned confidence. So what's a fun game? I could throw out what I have. Maybe I'll go start at my number 23. And I'll just go until you hit one of yours. Is that interesting?
Speaker 2:
[02:22] And then we'll start talking.
Speaker 3:
[02:25] So that leads me to have, yeah, 26 winners, because 2000, I included. Inclusive 2000 for reasons I think, if you listen to Zero Row Red in the future, may be inclusive of that. Anyway...
Speaker 2:
[02:37] I did not include that since the book was not published in 2000 in my considerations. That might change my calculus.
Speaker 3:
[02:43] Well, again, as the horrible mistake has been made to not put us in charge of books and publishing, we don't have rulings about when these awards are published, what year, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2:
[02:57] We're doing this episode right now because the Pulitzers will be announced on May 4th. This episode is brought to you by Quince. I've been shopping from Quince for a while now, and at some point, my husband started noticing. I'd show him what arrived, another linen piece incredibly well-made, and when I told him what I paid for it, he couldn't believe it. Eventually, he just started ordering for himself. The thing that got him hooked was the linen pants. We travel a lot, especially in the summer, and he's been looking for something that doesn't wrinkle into a disaster in a suitcase, looks good enough for dinner out, and is actually really comfortable in the heat. These are that. The kind of pants you wear on the plane, go straight to a nice enough restaurant, and nobody knows you've been traveling all day. They've become his default for summer date nights too. They're laid back but pulled together without any effort. Quince works directly with ethical factories and cuts out the middleman, so everything is 50 to 60% less than comparable brands. The quality is there, the price just doesn't match it in the very best way. Go to quince.com/bookriot for free shipping and 365 day returns. That's quince.com/bookriot. Thanks to Quince for supporting the show.
Speaker 5:
[04:12] Today's episode is brought to you by Sourcebooks Landmark, publisher of The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michelle Richardson. Now, if you like something that's bookish, that's southern, that's heartwarming, but gets into the nitty gritty of life, this is for you. In this deeply moving standalone and companion novel to the New York Times bestselling the Book Woman of Troublesome Creek series, our heroine for the ages, legendary book woman, Cussie Lovett returns home. It's a powerful testament to strength, survival and the magic of the printed word, wrapped into a vivid portrait of Kentucky life, examining incarceration and criminalization, the effects on the poor and powerless, and the consequences of fractured family bonds, along with nostalgic glimpses of a bustling, multifaceted Louisville. They're also heartwarming portraits of reading efforts in every facet of life. It really has everything that you need wrapped up into one book. Check out The Mountains We Call Home by Kim Michelle Richardson. Thanks again to Sourcebook's Landmark for sponsoring this episode.
Speaker 6:
[05:20] Thanks for watching.
Speaker 7:
[05:22] No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Copilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to hit the door. Hank Makes the Pizza, Copilot, Handles the Spreadsheets. Learn more at m365copilot.com/work.
Speaker 3:
[05:52] So anyway, so the three, there was of course no award in 2012, which just the worst possible look for the Pulitzer Prize.
Speaker 2:
[05:59] Still mad about it.
Speaker 3:
[06:00] Yeah. And then I have not read The Netanyahu's by Josh Cohen. That was the 2022 winner.
Speaker 2:
[06:05] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[06:05] I have not read Night Watch by Jane Ann Phillips. This was a 2024 reader. And I have not read All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the 2015 winner. So those are no, I can, as much as it pains me to say, I cannot cast judgment on those. Even my conscious will not allow that to happen.
Speaker 2:
[06:23] All right.
Speaker 3:
[06:24] I will say this. I liked all 23 books. I didn't have anyone I was sad to have on there. Someone had to be 23, but of the ones I had read, I'm like, I like all of these. Now I didn't go back and re-adjudicate all of these. We could at some point. But in the 23-hole, I have less by Andrew Sean Greer. Had you ever read that?
Speaker 2:
[06:42] I have not read that one. Yeah, no. In looking at the list of winners, that's one of those Pulitzer anomalies of what happened that year. I'm sure it's great. People love Andrew Sean Greer. But is this a signal work of American literary achievement? It doesn't seem to have aged that way.
Speaker 3:
[07:02] Yeah. I hate to say this, but it's the most fun of the books on here. I hate to denigrate fun, but it doesn't feel like it has as much juice.
Speaker 2:
[07:13] It strikes me as more-
Speaker 3:
[07:14] But again, I like it. It was smart and cool and fun. But it's hard to put up against-
Speaker 2:
[07:20] It strikes me as more in the commercial upmarket zone than in the literary zone, which is what this prize is intended to go to.
Speaker 3:
[07:28] Right. Then in the 22 hole, I have Empire Falls by Richard Russo, the 2002 winner. Did you-
Speaker 2:
[07:35] Did not make my top 10. I looked at it, charming, lovely, but also like not a signal work of American literary achievement.
Speaker 3:
[07:46] This feels like, again, it's been a long, 20 years since I've read this at least, I think. So I did not go back and reread these. I'm sorry to all of you out there to disappoint. I did not reread 23 books this week so that I would brush up. This feels like a relic from a different age. Like this and Richard Ford's Independence Day, winners from this time period. It's a lovely book about a small town, end of life situation. I think a lot of the work that Elizabeth Strout is doing in a different milieu, Richard Russo was doing an earlier iteration of it. So if you haven't read Elizabeth Strout, I recommend Richard Russo. If you haven't read Elizabeth Strout and you like Richard Russo, I would recommend it. It's very difficult to not like this book, but it's very good.
Speaker 2:
[08:34] Yeah, I really liked Empire Falls. I think this was maybe my first Richard Russo. Thank you Barnes and Noble paperback table.
Speaker 3:
[08:41] Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
[08:42] It set me down reading some of the ones that came before it because he's written several books in this same small town with some of these same characters. I'm glad to be reminded of Richard Russo because I think this is also a good recommendation for folks that are in the man called OVA correspondent zone.
Speaker 3:
[09:00] Maybe even the view of Golden of like the old guys have a little something to offer if we just pay attention.
Speaker 2:
[09:04] It's not quite cozy but it's not not cozy.
Speaker 3:
[09:09] Very much so. I mean, I think probably is Straight Man Richard Russo's most well known book at this point.
Speaker 6:
[09:15] I don't know.
Speaker 2:
[09:15] It's my favorite. I would bet it's Empire Falls because of the award win. And then there was that HBO mini series.
Speaker 6:
[09:20] True.
Speaker 3:
[09:21] Good point. From there, I'm jumping up to Tinkers by Paul Harding, which I remember reading I think even before it won Pulitzer because it had a Tony Morrison blurb on it, which again, back when this was again, actually if Tony Morrison blurbed a book now, I would definitely sit up and notice because she's been dead for a minute. But this one is kind of not dissimilar. The main character is an old guy on his death bed and he's thinking about things that happens. Everyone knows here that I am an old man waiting to die, especially if it's New England, especially if they work with their hands. I am all into that kind of a moment. This one is quite good. I tried not to give it a ding because I did not enjoy Paul Harding's last book, but Tinkers was number 21.
Speaker 2:
[10:03] Which you famously to me described as-
Speaker 3:
[10:05] Do we have to do this again every time?
Speaker 2:
[10:07] Yes, every time. We have to celebrate the day you called a book Gormless. Gormless Day. It's a Jeff O'Neal hobby.
Speaker 3:
[10:13] Gormless Day. The day after my birthday. Well, which shall now be referred to as Gormless Day. Up next, I think really everything above here, I had to look at it pretty hard. Those bottom three were clearly my bottom three. Next is the overstory by Richard Russo I have on my list. I assume it's not in your top 10.
Speaker 2:
[10:32] Not Russo.
Speaker 3:
[10:33] I'm sorry, Powers. Wrong Richard.
Speaker 2:
[10:35] I'm so mad at Richard Powers.
Speaker 3:
[10:38] That you're retroactively giving a demerit to the overstory.
Speaker 2:
[10:41] I mean, I liked the overstory. I did not find it to be revelatory as folks did, and I'm still mad at him about the ending of what was the playground, that one. I'm not mad at the overstory. I thought it was fine. It didn't break new ground for me.
Speaker 3:
[10:59] Okay. So this is nine interconnected short stories, each of them named after a part of a tree. Pretty cool. Powers integrates science more than any other writer of fiction I know of right now, that's not named Andy Weir, I guess, with that caveat to the side. Certainly not a writer of genre fiction. Can I attribute the success of the overstory critically and commercially to how many flipping tree books there are in any independent bookstore I walk into now?
Speaker 2:
[11:33] It was a real moment for trees. I wonder if all of this is Robin Wall Kimmerer's fault, unintentionally, that Braiding Sweetgrass was a huge book. People loved it and we love it. That's a great book, a wonderful connection to the natural world and spiritual practices and principles. People were tapping into that. Then there was this flurry of tree books and the overstory is one of the big tree books. I would much rather, well, Braiding Sweetgrass is a work of non-fiction, so it wouldn't be on this list in the first place. Yeah, I think that this starts with indie booksellers. There's tons of tree stuff going on. Also, it's incredibly book club-able. It's about a social issue, but it doesn't feel super political. The story does read very quickly. I turned the pages on overstory. I just kept waiting for my mind to be blown, and then it wasn't.
Speaker 3:
[12:29] Yeah, now we have the secret life of trees, the hitting meeting of trees, trees know things, watch out for trees. We have The Trees by Percival Everett, which came out. It's just trees all over the place. I'm out on trees. Trees are great, I've enjoyed trees. It's time for something else.
Speaker 2:
[12:44] Yeah, even Robert Moore had a book several years ago called On Trails that was this philosophical consideration of what is a trail and paths and what does it mean to try to walk a trail. And he has On Trees this year or In Trees. Sure, of course. I should love this because I love the way he writes, but I cannot get it up to go read another tree book. I just can't.
Speaker 3:
[13:04] Tree book, divorce memoirs, addiction memoirs and cooking memoirs.
Speaker 2:
[13:09] You got to do something special.
Speaker 3:
[13:11] They're way up there in the overstory. They're in the canopy now. There will be more of those.
Speaker 2:
[13:14] Up in the overstory.
Speaker 3:
[13:15] Is the overstory above the canopy or above? I can't remember at this point. It's been a while since I did my Amazon rainforest layers of the jungle. Okay, from there, I think I'm going Olive Kidridge. And now I'm very much recognizing that I've got some recency bias and how these things are playing out because Olive Kidridge won the 2009 National Book Award. So I'm coming up on two decades I've read this book because of the 2000 and I read it at the same time. Again, Richard Russo, but not is what she's doing there. I think a little more character driven, a little more internality, Olive Kid yourself is a little spikier, which I think you could do an interesting sociological, literary, anthropological studies of like, old women have to be spiky to be interesting and the old men have to be mush. Like they kind of have to be tender hearted and they're softening, where the women are spiky, I don't know, is there something there? Maybe there is.
Speaker 2:
[14:11] I think it is. I think it's like literature attempting to be reparative of like, old men have this reputation for being difficult and curmudgeonly. So let's give them some soft, thoughtful, reflective ones that are like interested in changing even though they're in their 80s. And then old women, like now-
Speaker 3:
[14:30] They get to get off my lawn. They get to shake fist and clout.
Speaker 2:
[14:34] I think a lot has shifted since Olive Kidridge came out. Like it does really feel like a relic of 2009 because today, like a cantankerous older woman in a book is still a fun thing to read, but it's not novel. Like, it's not a new feeling thing. And I mean, you know, Elizabeth Strout helped break some of that ground or help soften it. But we've got cranky old ladies all over the place and I'm here for it. But this continues to be name-checked in comps. Like for readers of Olive Kittredge still comes up. And I do think that matters for something.
Speaker 3:
[15:06] Those books sell like she has a real following. And when a new book come out, it's sort of reliably will stick around the top 20 hardcover fiction for a few weeks, which is not-
Speaker 2:
[15:13] She's got a new one out in the next several weeks, I think, that I expect to do quite well.
Speaker 3:
[15:16] And I think it's part of the Olive Kittredge universe. There's been a couple set in the same town with same characters. I think I've read one subsequent Elizabeth Strout, and I do not remember the title of it. So maybe I should have demerited a little bit more.
Speaker 2:
[15:28] I'm not totally sure that Elizabeth Strout and Kent Heref aren't the same person. Have we ever seen them in the same room?
Speaker 3:
[15:34] That's a great call. Very interesting. Next up for number 18 on my list, I have the brief wondrous life of Oscar. Wow. I am not excising anyone from my list for consideration here. Diaz had some personal stuff come up five, six years, 10 years ago as part of Me Too on the outs. Now, he's slowly being reintegrated, I think. Interestingly, there's a very popular touring production of brief wondrous life of Oscar Wow that tours. He is still associated with a couple of professional groups. For some reason, the twice a month I log into Facebook to see what my family and friends are doing, it always wants to serve me that Junot Diaz has copy pasted a whole New York Times article into a post. I don't know why. Copyright infringement, go look into that. I don't know. I'm sure everything's super well regulated on social media. Now, I'm sure someone will get right on that. This was a bolt of lightning from the sky, brief wondrous life of Oscar Wow when it came out in 2007, when the 2008 Pulitzer Prize Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey. He loved science fiction and fantasy. An early, maybe early peak of genre mash up, literary fiction, multiple identities, a diversification of contemporary fiction in this regard. I remember liking it quite a bit. I have not read it since. That's the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wow.
Speaker 2:
[17:02] Same, yeah, and that he was early on the tip of characters who are multilingual, code switching on the page without going to great pains to explain what was happening for white people.
Speaker 3:
[17:16] Next up on my list, we haven't got to anything of yours, which is super interesting. I'm not surprised. I think this might be the last I would bet a heavy amount of money did not make your top 10. It's March by Geraldine Brooks. Yeah, Geraldine Brooks has written a whole bunch of different kinds of books. A lot of historical fiction. You and I both loved her recent memoir, which I cannot remember the title of. Memorial Days. Thank you very much. I was getting that confused with a novel she wrote called Year of Wonders. But this one is a, I guess it's not a retelling, but it's the story of, inspired by the life of Louisa May Alcott's father, Bronson Alcott, who went to war. But it's actually John March, the father of the March sisters in Little Women. So it's historical fiction. It's very cool. I thought it was terrific. I think it's everything you want from a pretty straight ahead historical, literary historical fiction. She's an excellent writer. I think this is probably, I realized where I first mistook her for an American. She is an Australian writing American Civil War. So I just assumed, I guess I probably just assume everyone's American that I read because I read mostly Americans. But if you write a Civil War historical fiction work, but following John March, I just assume you're American. No sense of what Australians make of Little Women.
Speaker 2:
[18:31] Yeah. I think you can be forgiven for that.
Speaker 3:
[18:33] Oh, I assume so.
Speaker 2:
[18:34] I learned live on our Zero to Well-Read episode about Little Women that that's what March was about. I do love Geraldine Brooks. I haven't read this one, but it's on my now someday maybe mental radar of maybe over Christmas when I'm in the Greta Gerwig Little Women mood, because apparently that's the thing I have access to now is maybe I'll pick up March.
Speaker 3:
[18:57] This is only my second favorite novel named March, unfortunately, which is a tough beat for Geraldine Brooks. My first favorite is March by EL. Doctorow, which is historical fiction about Sherman's March to Atlanta and all the people that follow in his wake there.
Speaker 2:
[19:10] There's also John Lewis's multi-volume graphic novel, March.
Speaker 3:
[19:14] March, yeah. Don't name your thing March if you have a book coming out. This is the first one I think make my your top 10. I'm not for sure, but it could. This is where I slotted in Yiyun Copperhead by Barbara King-Solver.
Speaker 2:
[19:26] Okay, I had that at number eight on my top 10.
Speaker 3:
[19:29] So why don't you speak on it then for this purpose then?
Speaker 2:
[19:32] Okay, well, it is relatively new. So it's hard to give it a really high placing, even though it was so, so big the year that it came out. And hugely popular with readers, like this was number one, I believe, on the New York Times reader favorites of the last 100 years.
Speaker 3:
[19:53] Hard to cast off, yes.
Speaker 2:
[19:54] But also sold super well. So it lives in that zone that I think of as classically Pulitzer, which is like up market, tilting really literary, like literary, but very accessible and popular. And kind of the four quadrant hit. King Solver, this was officially when she became no longer underrated.
Speaker 3:
[20:15] You think when she's number one on the reader's poll of the best books of the century?
Speaker 2:
[20:19] It's still so new that it's really hard to know how this is going to age. And I think that a book that is a retelling of another book, which I'm going to contradict myself later on.
Speaker 3:
[20:28] I was going to say, let's both be careful of ourselves out there.
Speaker 2:
[20:32] But I just think it's harder to know what the legacy of something like this will be. It feels very of its moment, which was wonderful. But is that moment something that we're still interested in 20, 40, 50 years down the line? How will it stand the test of time in a power ranking? I don't really hear people talking about Demon Copperhead any more, you know? Like the literary establishment is not comping it to things.
Speaker 3:
[20:56] We've moved on to the correspondent at the U of Golden, I guess.
Speaker 2:
[20:59] Yeah. It's an important slot to be filled in the book conversation. But I just don't know that Demon Copperhead becomes a huge legacy title, even among King Solver's others, like one of her best selling books. But there are others of her titles that folks also still continue to talk about.
Speaker 3:
[21:18] This is going to sound weird to say, but she writes old-fashioned books. This is a big sprawling prose epic based on Dickens, but it doesn't necessarily feel like a 2022 title, I mean, a 2023 winner. I think I'm looking closely, things that I have above it feel like maybe more modern, pushing the envelope in some way or another, but this is extraordinarily good read. I did try to rationalize having it this low to myself, especially looking at that New York Times Reader's List. And here is my posit to you, is if that poll was taken the year after the help come out, are we sure the help wouldn't have been number one on that list?
Speaker 2:
[21:57] Totally, yeah.
Speaker 3:
[21:57] So I think when it comes to recency bias on that is huge, because of what people have read. It's one reason people say, To Kill a Mockingbird is our favorite book of all time. Because that's just, they've read, most people have read that.
Speaker 2:
[22:08] Yeah, and Demon Copperhead, it was so in the water that year. I remember being at a Christmas party and someone that I know who reads two books a year and it's always just what have the people around him been mentioning enough was like, I'm reading Demon Copperhead. And I was like, okay, well, now it's crossed into the zone of like, even the folks who only read one or two books a year, that's the thing that they're picking up. But like, I just don't know where this sits in the pantheon over time. It's too recent.
Speaker 3:
[22:34] And absolutely worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a wonderful book, but I just can't put it in the higher.
Speaker 2:
[22:39] That's one of the reasons that it made it into my top 10 is that the Pulitzer is like looking for something not really specifically that represents American culture. Like where the National Book Award is American, but is more interested in like literary experimentation, the Pulitzer tends to be a little bit more commercial. But I do think Demon Copperhead captures like a uniquely American moment with the opioid crisis through the lens of Dickens is really interesting. But yeah, how relevant is that in another 10 years?
Speaker 3:
[23:08] I'm not sure. You know what? This book, because the adaptation flopped so hard, I actually think The Goldfish by Donna Tartt might be underrated at this point.
Speaker 2:
[23:18] Yeah, I had it at nine.
Speaker 3:
[23:20] Okay. So The Goldfinch, it's if we're doing Jordan Willard, is it about art? Absolutely. It's very, you know, there's an explosion. It's so, it's about art and ideas and inheritance and what you want to do with your life, but it's also ploddy and super strange. It was a huge, it was the Demon Copperhead of 2013. It kind of hit the same kind of heights that the KingSolver did. I just think what Dart, Dart is just weirder than BK. And I'm going to bias myself towards that strangeness. So that's where I am on the Goldfish. Rebecca, why do you have it so high?
Speaker 2:
[23:54] Yeah, I mean, it was because it was the Demon Copperhead of that year. And also people do still talk about it. I still see the Goldfinch in comp titles. It was number 46 on the New York Times list, the Critics list. It also was on, I started looking around at other awards, like where do these books sit in the critical pantheon? It was on the short list for the National Book Critics Circle Award that year. And it was on the short list for the Women's Prize for Fiction. So it kind of almost universally agreed that the Goldfinch was something to be excited about. Demon Copperhead did not have that well-rounded or robust of a critical reception. So I guess technically I should have made the Goldfinch higher than Demon Copperhead. But I had it one below. That's personal bias. Like, I did not love the Goldfinch. I felt like such a weirdo that year when everybody was raving about it. I thought it was good, but I was looking for even weirder from Tart, I think.
Speaker 3:
[24:51] Yeah. Tart, since there's only a handful of novels, each one that comes out. And this is the last Donna Tart novel we got. We're 12 years in counting.
Speaker 2:
[24:58] It has to bear so much weight.
Speaker 3:
[25:00] I can't. Yeah. But you kind of have to reckon with it, kind of like a new Terrence Malick movie or something. You only get it every decade or so. People are going to take it seriously from there. At number 14, I have the 2013 winner, The Orphan Master Son by Adam Johnson. Was that in your top 10?
Speaker 2:
[25:15] I have not read that one.
Speaker 3:
[25:16] Oh, okay. So this was a 2020-12 breakout.
Speaker 2:
[25:21] It was huge. I remember that.
Speaker 3:
[25:22] Really heralding Adam Johnson, who had a book out last year called The Way Founder, which I did not read, which...
Speaker 2:
[25:29] Wasn't it enormous?
Speaker 3:
[25:29] I didn't know what to do with that data. It's big. It was a chunky boy. And the reviews I read were interestingly mixed, but not enough to put me over the top, not enough to dissuade me, but not enough to put me over the top. But the plot of this is that the main character is raised in a North Korean orphanage and then tries to make his way to South Korea. It's a lot more complicated than that. It's a real sort of journey through hell, and it's a satire but an exploration of American's involvement. Korean politics, transmissions from the International Space Station get involved. It is a real fractal, almost sort of postmodernist book. I thought it was terrific. I actually don't know why I don't have it higher, to be honest with you. I think I haven't read it in a long time, but I also feel like Adam Johnson's Star has not been what I thought it might be. It didn't get made into a movie. I don't know that a lot of people read this book, Rebecca. So I have it at 14.
Speaker 2:
[26:33] I think that's pretty reasonable, given what I know about it. And I was trying to think like, why didn't I read this? And it's that I was hosting all the books at the time also. And Liberty was so into Orphan Master's Sun.
Speaker 3:
[26:45] One of yours.
Speaker 2:
[26:45] Yeah, that it was like somebody's already carrying the flag for that, I gotta go read something else. And there are just so many books that I didn't get to in that time because of that.
Speaker 3:
[26:56] Okay, number 13.
Speaker 2:
[26:57] 13, all right.
Speaker 3:
[26:58] I have The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Claire by Michael Shaben.
Speaker 2:
[27:02] It did not quite make my top 10 either.
Speaker 3:
[27:05] I imagine that. It actually did not make my top 10. It made my top 13. I love this book. People who were into books as readers of, we're trying, you wanna read literary fiction, you're young especially. This blew a lot of our hair off. You were maybe a little young even, because I was just, I was 22 when this book came out.
Speaker 2:
[27:24] I got to it a couple of years later. Again, the paperback favorites table.
Speaker 3:
[27:28] It's a wonderful New York novel. It's a friendship novel. It's a novel about art. It's a novel about comic books. We've done drafts of books we'd like to be made into movies. This one is perennial in the You Could Make a Movie. There's been an opera of this, which seems very unlikely. Shaben, he's had a strange career. He wrote for movies for a while. He did a couple other things. But I think based on this book and what I thought about this book and Shaben's career at this point, it didn't go the way I thought it was going to go. I've read Gentleman of the Road, some things that he's done, but nothing seems to me have hit the heights of the amazing.
Speaker 2:
[28:04] Yeah. If there were an announcement of a new Shaben book, that would be one of the most interesting things of the year for sure.
Speaker 3:
[28:11] I think he's written for Star Trek and video games. He's had a really interesting career.
Speaker 2:
[28:17] Yeah.
Speaker 8:
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Speaker 9:
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Speaker 10:
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Speaker 3:
[29:42] All right, number 12. I have the 2003 winner Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Was that in your top 10?
Speaker 2:
[29:48] It was not.
Speaker 3:
[29:49] Have you read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides?
Speaker 2:
[29:51] I think so.
Speaker 3:
[29:53] Okay.
Speaker 2:
[29:54] I think so. It was early Book Riot days.
Speaker 3:
[29:56] Yeah. I guess that's one where I'm a little surprised to hear you say think so because it feels like that's something you remember reading or not.
Speaker 2:
[30:02] Then maybe not.
Speaker 3:
[30:04] Yeah. It sold more than 4 million copies. This was a paperback table for a billion years and also ahead of its time. It's about a main character who is intersex. This was his follow-up after The Virgin Suicides, which came about as close to an epoch-defining book in 1993 for Gen X as there were. He read this 19th century memoir by a French convict squirrel girl who was intersex. He thought this was really interesting and provocative. Subject matter, Cal Stefanides, his masculine identity, the main character is also known as Kaliope, the feminine and talks about the genetic condition this person has, some backstory, there's immigration. It's a story of immigration in New York and New America. It's pretty unbelievable. Eugenides, another one where it's hard to know how people's careers are going to go for the next 20 or 30 years. Virgin Suicides into Intersex. Then he had the other book that was like a campus novel. I want to say it's called The Marriage Plot, but I'm not getting confused with the Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson's vehicle. Anyway, what's your sense of where Eugenides is on the radar if he's there at all?
Speaker 2:
[31:16] I don't think about Jeffrey Eugenides ever unless we're talking about The Virgin Suicides. Listening to you do that description, I was like, maybe I didn't read Middle Sex. I just read a lot of things about Middle Sex.
Speaker 3:
[31:26] It was called The Marriage Plot. No wonder I'm confused. All right. Sorry. October 2011, The Marriage Plot.
Speaker 2:
[31:32] I think he got swept up in that mid-teens, like 20-teens thing of like there were just fewer, I think, slots for in the mid-list, for like mid-list, middle-aged white guy novels, whether that's fair or not. It's a good thing for publishing, that there is more diversity happening. But I think Jeffrey Eugenides, I don't know if he's been writing. I'm sure that his publisher would pick up a book from him if he wanted to. But he was one of those figures that became sort of one of our generation's stand-ins for Philip Roth, which is not fair to either of them. But in the way that we toss off like, oh, those old guys like Philip Roth, it was Eugenides and Franzen and all the literary Jonathans and Jeffries. Kind of the star fell around a lot of those guys. But I remember Middlesex was a huge deal. I think if you had a new novel out, that would make headlines. And Middlesex does make the lists when people do the looking back on stuff. I think that was also on the New York Times Top 100. Big Book also kind of feels like a relic of its time. If this were to come out now, we would be having conversations about own voices and how well did he do his research, and is this really more the kind of story that we should leave for an intersex writer to tell? So also a cultural document in that way.
Speaker 3:
[32:57] Right. The Marriage Plot came out in 2011 and it did quite well. It was a finalist for the National Book Circle Award, made a bunch of top books of the year list. That was 2011. Then his follow-up to that is a short story collection in 2017, which there's no sure way for people to forget about you than to write a short story. I mean, seriously. Yeah. Wait six years and then write a short story collection. Then it's been seven years. No, we're up to nine years since he has a book come out. So that'll do it, maybe as much as anything just in writing.
Speaker 2:
[33:24] It'll be interesting to see if he reappears.
Speaker 3:
[33:26] In the 11 hole, I have the Night Watchman by the great Louise Erdrich.
Speaker 2:
[33:29] I have that in the 10 spot.
Speaker 3:
[33:31] Why don't you take over on the Night Watchman?
Speaker 2:
[33:34] I'm just going to put Louise Erdrich on a list. If Louise Erdrich is available to me, the Night Watchman is one of her titles with better name recognition than the other ones. I think if people know one Louise Erdrich book, they probably know that one because it's the one that won the Pulitzer. She has so many books that for any one of her titles to become the Louise Erdrich book people talk about is really difficult because there are so many of them and most of them are critically acclaimed and well-received by readers. She lives in a really sweet zone there. But we hear from her pretty often, and she's regularly nominated for awards. And it's just impossible to know right now while Louise Erdrich, thank God, is still living and writing which Louise Erdrich books are really going to be the ones that we look back on as being the most important or the most, the ones that have the greatest impact. So I had it lower on the list because I just don't know. I think we're talking about Louise Erdrich for many, many years and decades to come. I just don't know if it's the Night Watchmen or not.
Speaker 3:
[34:34] Her standard is so consistently high, it's hard to pick out a peak to focus on. It really is. Though you could do worse than this one for sure. It's got a mystery element to it as well. There's stakes. They're working at a jewel factory for God's sakes. There's all kinds of stuff. It's that most of the main character is Ojibwe, and the imminent threat is this termination bill that's heading to the house floor. If my memory serves, would erase the reservation or some protective set or something, it would materially impact to the detriment of most tribes in the United States. It's really quite good and a lot of people really like that. I wonder too, I never know, the publication date was March 3rd, 2020, which is eight days before COVID. I mean, eight days before the NBA shut down and Tom Hanks COVID in my birthday, nothing was keeping track of that. When really that's like we just stopped doing things on March 11th, 2020.
Speaker 2:
[35:36] So I'm not sure. We were already talking about COVID at the end of February and into early March. So yeah, terrible day to have a new book come out. I don't remember if it made best seller lists or any of the stuff. I just remember that it won the Pulitzers and I'm always going to be happy about Louise Erdrich, whatever she wants to do.
Speaker 3:
[35:55] All right. Now we're up to 10. So then you can sort of reveal your point first because we're an hour to this, our regular structure here.
Speaker 2:
[36:01] We have done my 10, which was The Night Watchman.
Speaker 3:
[36:04] Oh, okay. Crap. Then I have to go to 10. Shit.
Speaker 2:
[36:07] What do you have?
Speaker 3:
[36:08] The 2022 novel won the 2023 Pulitzer. It's Trust by Hernan Diaz, which is also a fantastic New York City novel. It's in the world of finance and it has a meta-fictional elements where it's four fictional texts. There's an incomplete biography, there's a diary, and there's a novel, all based on the same characters, and then the reader has to figure out what's going on. The first one is during the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and I think most of them stick around that same period, but it's very much a novel by identity and finance and capitalism and America and history and memory. It's terrific. I like New York books. I like books about New York in the 1920s and 30s, and like meta-fictional text, so this one is like right out of the Petri dish for me. It's not impossible to read, but it's more challenging than, well, even something like The Night Watchmen or Empire Falls. It's a terrific book. He has a new book, Ply, coming out in the fall, which I think is a very important text in the, Hernan Diaz, like, where's he going to land?
Speaker 2:
[37:15] That's what I was just gonna say, yeah, that he didn't make my top 10, because everybody in my top 10 has a pretty established literary legacy, and it's still an open question whether trust is going to be like the big anomaly that popped in his career or was that the breakout, and now we see Hernan Diaz at a higher level consistently. So if we were doing this next spring with whatever data we get about how Ply performs, that might be a different take. Yeah, that book is awesome, Rebecca.
Speaker 3:
[37:43] Yeah, we have to look at it differently.
Speaker 2:
[37:44] It really might. But that's an exciting moment. It's exciting to have novelists where we're on the hook for what's about to happen with his career. And now we're just debating the best of the very best when you're in a top 10 of the Pulitzers. Okay, so that was your 10.
Speaker 3:
[38:01] What's your 9?
Speaker 2:
[38:01] My 9 was Demon. No, my 9 was The Goldfitch. My 9 was The Goldfitch.
Speaker 3:
[38:08] And we did your 8 too already, I think.
Speaker 2:
[38:10] Which was Demon Copperhead.
Speaker 3:
[38:12] All right, so I am then up to 8, which is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which that book felt like a breath of crazed, overheated fresh air to me. I guess I didn't really look. Is this the only debut novel on here? Oh. I have one that's a debut short story collection coming here in The Limit, but I don't think I have a debut novel anywhere else. Because I think Drown was Diaz. I think Drown was a short story collection.
Speaker 2:
[38:40] Yeah, Drown was a short story collection.
Speaker 3:
[38:43] So maybe a debut novel. But the anonymous narrator here is a Vietnamese spy in the South Vietnamese Army. So this is like Apocalypse Now with Catch-22 sort of situation. With a North Korean. It's funny. It's dark. It's entertaining. Just a wild ride of invention, storytelling and sensibility. Yeah, and launched him to be a writer to watch even through to today. There was a sequel that didn't do as well and a pretty poorly reviewed series adaptation that did a thing that didn't sound like it worked that I was very afraid of, which is Robert Downey Jr. writing a bunch of parts, making it the Robert Downey Jr. show. But it doesn't matter because this book is awesome, Rebecca. I love The Sympathizer.
Speaker 2:
[39:29] It is. He didn't, this didn't make my list for the same reasons of Hernan Diaz, of like waiting to see a legacy establish itself.
Speaker 3:
[39:37] It's 10 years. I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:
[39:39] Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It's tough, but I did really love it. Okay.
Speaker 3:
[39:44] All right. Have I not talked about your seven at least?
Speaker 2:
[39:47] You have not. My number seven is A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.
Speaker 3:
[39:51] Okay. That's my five, but go ahead.
Speaker 2:
[39:53] Okay. This was also like a breath of fresh air at the time. It felt mind-blowing at the time that it came out. Like one of the chapters is a PowerPoint presentation, and literary writers were not doing stuff with technology in literary fiction at the time. This is what, like 2011, something like that?
Speaker 3:
[40:14] Yes, 2011.
Speaker 2:
[40:15] 2011. And it's dated now because the technology was technology from 2011. Like a version of this today would have to have TikToks in it or something, but it was-
Speaker 3:
[40:27] Text exchanges or something.
Speaker 2:
[40:29] And it really is like linked short stories, but that you kind of read as a novel. The publisher wisely packaged it as a novel. Yeah. They joined the book club. Yeah. The Internet disagrees about whether this is a novel. It's not a traditional short story collection, but it does-
Speaker 3:
[40:47] Do you care about calling it one versus the other? I really don't.
Speaker 2:
[40:50] Not really. No. Call it what you need to call it. When it's Jennifer Egan, get people to read the book so they can enjoy it.
Speaker 3:
[40:56] Especially.
Speaker 2:
[40:56] Exactly. I don't want you to miss out on a Jennifer Egan moment because you have some preconceived notion about short stories. And just wonderful about music and technology, but also secrets and past connections and sort of all the creative stuff that Jennifer Egan wants to spin out the way these characters end up linked to each other was so surprising. And I think it would have been higher on my list if it didn't feel as dated as it feels now. Because the farther out we get from Goon Squad, the more I think I just don't know that that book stands the test of time. Because if you put it in a reader's hands today, they don't know from just the reading experience how mind-blowing it was at the moment. You have to do the three minutes of explanation that I just did. And that's a ding, I think.
Speaker 3:
[41:45] Yeah, and I think even I overestimate how important that piece was. That's the easiest one to say was different about it. But a lot is about New York and being a student and art and technology and very dexterous, literarily. The sequel, Candy House, you and I talked together, we loved. That came out a few years ago. I have a hard time expressing how cool I felt reading a visit from the Goon Squad on the F train in 2010, when I was in New York.
Speaker 2:
[42:15] Yeah, that sounds like a beautiful moment.
Speaker 3:
[42:17] Yeah, all the lit hipsters were very into Jennifer Egan. And also, yeah, I think it matters too that New York rock, like the strokes and stuff was, I guess, kind of coming to the end of it. This really felt like it was cool to read this book at this time. Yeah, and I'm not sure I can say that of any other book on my list.
Speaker 2:
[42:36] She's such an interesting thinker. I think she's one of the most interesting thinkers in contemporary fiction, and she doesn't get as much credit as I would like her to for that, because her books are also fun to read. Like, if they felt like homework, she might get more stars.
Speaker 3:
[42:51] Yeah, like Manhattan Beach is like a straight up mystery. I mean, it's Egan, it was like a mystery novel. It's great, terrific.
Speaker 2:
[42:57] Yeah, it's kind of, I mean, it's everything that I want from a literary experience, like she's wonderful.
Speaker 3:
[43:02] Yeah, if you said you could pick a book by any author to come out tomorrow, I would have to get dinner for Egan, a serious consideration on that list. Okay.
Speaker 2:
[43:10] What was your seven?
Speaker 3:
[43:11] My Seven is the Known World by Edward P.
Speaker 2:
[43:14] Jones.
Speaker 3:
[43:14] Have you ever read this book?
Speaker 2:
[43:15] Yes, I have, it's my number three.
Speaker 3:
[43:17] Okay, well then let's save it for three. Then move to your six, what's your six?
Speaker 2:
[43:22] Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.
Speaker 3:
[43:24] I had that at three, so let's save it.
Speaker 2:
[43:27] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[43:28] What was your five?
Speaker 2:
[43:29] James Percival Everett.
Speaker 3:
[43:31] This is where I have a visit from the Goon Squad. I had James hire, I will not spoil it from there.
Speaker 2:
[43:35] Okay, so let's go to your six.
Speaker 3:
[43:37] My six is Interpretive Maladies by Jhumpa Lear.
Speaker 2:
[43:40] Okay, which I don't have on my list because it came out in 99.
Speaker 3:
[43:43] Yes, right. Now, let's play. So we've talked about Interpretive Maladies several times before. We're going to do say a more in-depth discussion into podcast feed coming to an RSS feed near you very soon. We do not need to belabor this. We both like this book. Real me this bad girl, were you to include this? Like where do you think it would be? I actually do a full triage, but like where would it be?
Speaker 2:
[44:08] It would be high. It would be in my top four or five probably. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[44:12] Okay. Her enormously selling virtually flawless collection of short stories that continues to be one of the signal words of late 20th, early 20th. However, you're going to roll the odometer over from there.
Speaker 2:
[44:25] You get bonus points for winning the Pulitzer for a debut collection of short stories.
Speaker 3:
[44:30] You absolutely do.
Speaker 2:
[44:31] Which has happened one other time in like contemporary fiction, and it was in 1993, so.
Speaker 3:
[44:38] Very high bar. From there, then I had five I'd visit from the Goom Squad. Is that where you have James? Yes. Okay. We'll wait for a second. What do you have at number four?
Speaker 2:
[44:48] At four, I have Gilead.
Speaker 3:
[44:51] I have Gilead at Deuce.
Speaker 2:
[44:52] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[44:54] At four, I have The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Speaker 2:
[44:56] I put that at one.
Speaker 3:
[44:58] Okay. So let's just do our one through fives right now. You start one through five. Then we can figure out how to talk about these damn books. Now we've lost track of who's got what where.
Speaker 2:
[45:06] Yeah. Let's do, let's go from the, yeah, let's talk about The Road.
Speaker 3:
[45:10] Okay. The Road.
Speaker 2:
[45:11] All right. Fine. I ended up with this one at one because it rang so many bells.
Speaker 3:
[45:16] I'm very surprised to hear this, by the way. I'm not mad, clearly at four, but I'm quite surprised. Were you surprised?
Speaker 2:
[45:21] I was surprised myself. And I waffled around about what I should have at one, what I should have at three. My heart wanted to put Gilead at one, and then my heart wanted to put Colson Whitehead at one. But The Road, it wins the Pulitzer, it's high in the New York Times list, it was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. It's also older and we are still talking about it. It has more track record than I think than any of these and my top ones, Other Than the Known World. And McCarthy has such a legacy, it's one of those like, people know The Road who don't know books. And people recognize Cormac McCarthy's name and it was on the like early end of, we would call it literary genre now. Like we weren't talking about literary dystopia at the time. But McCarthy sort of opened the door or at least walked through the door before many other writers had. It just has a huge cultural impact. I don't even know, like once you're in this top five, the distinction between one and two might be meaningless. And then between two and three, but that was how I, that was my thought process to get there.
Speaker 3:
[46:31] I will back you up for, cause these top four I moved around in several organizations and I looked at McCarthy at one for a hot minute. I really did.
Speaker 2:
[46:39] I did notes on paper and my notes are like, now it's like crazy murder board with red string of like, which one's actually stayed in the spot that I originally slotted them into.
Speaker 3:
[46:49] First of all, and this is under appreciated, especially if you haven't read this book, especially if you didn't read it at the time. This is one of the all time, your books are magnetized to the pages until you're done reading this book. I defy you to slow down and read this book. Like maybe as much as any book I've ever read, I was like, I just, it's like an episode of The Pit where I sort of, I'm compelled and I also kind of needed to be over. Like I can't look away, but I kind of needed to be over at the same time.
Speaker 2:
[47:15] We got to get through this.
Speaker 3:
[47:16] We got to get through this. One of the great endings of all time, McCarthy is a wizard at setting tone and like the macabre sinister setting. Here's another thing I didn't think about. And finally, I think maybe I underrate it for this reason. This predates The Hunger Games.
Speaker 2:
[47:38] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[47:38] This predates that like...
Speaker 2:
[47:40] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[47:41] It predates allegiance.
Speaker 2:
[47:41] We weren't doing Dystopia yet.
Speaker 3:
[47:43] We weren't. We weren't doing that. He was ahead of the game on that. McCarthy is a brand name. And if I had to take a bet of authors on this list that could be talked about in 50 or 100 years, you could do worse than McCarthy as your number one overall draft because he's a certain style, a certain time. A mediocre adaptation, I don't think it matters because not many of these books have a wonderful adaptation. In fact, what's that best adaptation of a book on here? It's not an amazing.
Speaker 2:
[48:11] It's probably, yeah, Nickel Boys. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[48:14] Nickel Boys.
Speaker 2:
[48:14] Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad were beaten to be the best contenders.
Speaker 3:
[48:18] Whitehead holding them both out. And this was a cultural phenomenon at the time. And McCarthy was, and I think is a brand name author in a way that, you know, if you can parody someone, that's a real sign that they did something. This is what I think about writers.
Speaker 2:
[48:34] But I think McCarthy is underrated now because...
Speaker 3:
[48:38] Glad you said that.
Speaker 2:
[48:39] We haven't had like a big, well, you know, he died. The last couple books were not as big, but this was, I mean, such a cultural moment. And then McCarthy also gets swept up in the like, just, we're kind of done with all those old white guys doing stuff. It's not cool to be into Cormac McCarthy anymore. And saying that McCarthy is your favorite writer now might be kind of a signal about a certain kind of sensibility that like, you know, people might want to write off. You know what?
Speaker 3:
[49:10] I think we need to get rid of that. If you think Cormac McCarthy is a red flag, you can think whatever you want, but it's not the same as some of these other books that get lost.
Speaker 2:
[49:18] I mean, this is, we were having, we had a similar conversation about Catcher in the Rye on, I guess we recorded an episode of about Perks of Being a Wallflower. That'll be out like in a week or two. And we were talking about that. And I don't think that that book, loving that book in itself is any kind of red flag. It's that like, if you're 45 and that's still the best thing you've ever read, like then I'm a little concerned for you.
Speaker 3:
[49:38] And it's To Kill a Mockingbird and the Fountainhead or your other two favorite books, like let's be careful out there.
Speaker 2:
[49:43] Yeah, that McCarthy gets written off for reasons of bigger cultural phenomena that don't actually have much to do with him.
Speaker 3:
[49:53] Can I tell you why I have it at four and not higher? This is the only thing that crossed my mind. It's a corollary to my, I give demerits to TV shows with guns. Like, because if you've got a zombie apocalypse, the tension is just easier. Whereas if you're, and I'll say my one through four are James Gilead, Nickel Boys, The Road, and The Goon Squad. Those are my top five. Zombie apocalypse, of course, you're going to be an easier, more tension-filled reader. Now, McCarthy does that like no one else, I think, could do it. But I'm like, The Nickel Boys is a short historical fiction novel about this abusive reformatory school that's very elusive and like a horror. I feel like that's harder. Gilead is certainly harder. James is maybe the highest degree of difficulty thing I can imagine. So I was like, that's the only thing. Again, The Road is amazing. But when it comes down to really winnowing the field amongst the really highest achievers, that's the only thing I could really come up with.
Speaker 2:
[50:48] I had James at five because it's so new. That was really the only, I would, I just don't feel like we have enough longitudinal data about it. But I wouldn't be surprised if the me of 10 years from now wants to come back and put it in number one. I really think that that book is going to have a long life, but we just don't know yet. But it's in rare company having won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. And the only other, I think the only other book on this list that did that was The Underground Railroad.
Speaker 3:
[51:18] Right. Which we haven't talked about yet, did we?
Speaker 2:
[51:21] Yeah, that's my number two.
Speaker 3:
[51:23] That's your number two.
Speaker 2:
[51:24] Yeah. So as we've established on this podcast, we both think Nickel Boys is the better book.
Speaker 3:
[51:28] Right. But the bonafides of Underground Railroad are unimpeachable.
Speaker 2:
[51:33] So I had Nickel Boys at six just because it did not notch up all the bonafides that the rest of these titles did. But in my heart, Nickel Boys is maybe number one on this list. Like, I love that book. I had Underground Railroad at two. Huge breakout for Colson Whitehead, the real announcement of what literary genre was going to look like, I think, and that he had-
Speaker 3:
[51:54] Maybe the pinnacle. Maybe this is like the peak of literary genre.
Speaker 2:
[51:58] Yeah. And he had done this before. Like, we had this conversation when he did Zone One, and it was like, it's zombies, but it's literary. But this was, can you do a novel about American slavery with magic realism? And will it work? Because the pitch of the railroad is a literal railroad instead of a figurative one, could go all kinds of ways. But Whitehead just, he pulls it off so flawlessly and everybody recognizes it. So of course, like he gets the Pulitzer, he wins the National Book Award. It's high on all of the lists of all of the things. The Barry Jenkins adaptation is excellent, but really, really hard to watch for all of the reasons. Probably not as widely watched as it could have been because it is so difficult to...
Speaker 3:
[52:41] A 10-part Amazon prize. They spent all the money on a real one-of-one peak adaptation Gold Rush TV stuff.
Speaker 2:
[52:48] And if Nickel Boys had come out first, I think Nickel Boys could have won all the awards too. But since it comes out after, and they were in close succession to each other, I just kind of feel like awards juries. The prize juries did not just wanna...
Speaker 3:
[53:02] I mean, it already won the Pulitzer Prize, Rebecca. What else do you want from the Nickel Boys?
Speaker 2:
[53:05] I want Colson Whitehead to get all the things he deserves every time he publishes a book.
Speaker 3:
[53:09] I think he's got them now. I think he's fine. The CW is doing fine.
Speaker 2:
[53:14] Yeah, so I had Underground Railroad at two and Nickel Boys at six because of the differences in public reception.
Speaker 3:
[53:21] I had Gilead at two.
Speaker 2:
[53:23] Okay, that was my four.
Speaker 3:
[53:25] What can we say that we haven't said about Gilead? Again, right now you can go listen to us talk about it for almost two hours in the Zerdora at Feed. I guess it's hard to place because it's a book that feels modern but also out of time at the same time. It's very intentionally set in the decades ago in a little town where time sort of hasn't passed for 60 years, it feels like at the same time, but it also is dealing with old fashioned ideas about faith and legacy and the meaning of it all in a way that doesn't feel fusty. The main character is not a, he doesn't have a real racist moment or a misogynist moment to put him in his place in time and space. He feels like a modern searching consciousness in a way that's embracing and warm and difficult and beautiful and sad all at the same time. I don't know what to do with Marilyn. You look at this kind of work, I just don't know what her legacy is going to be 50 years from now. It could be something that people forget. Edna Ferber keeps jumping into my mind. I think the Marilyn Robinson books are better, but sometimes people get left behind, even things that sold quite well, because it's not at the cutting edge of literature. It's not at the cutting edge of ideas. It's not like a Jennifer Egan-like thing, or even a Nickel Boys thing, or a Jumpla Lahiri kind of thing. It's just, can you transcend time? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[54:47] And I don't know. There's a way of looking at it where this is the most literary sensibility of any of the books on this list, because it is just about ideas, just about sitting and thinking and seeing your life, thinking about what it is to be a person in the world. There is not a plot engine to be found in Gilead. And there's a real plot engine around all the rest of these. Things happen, and there are genre elements in a lot of them. And so by your standard of difficulty level, it's the most difficult to execute, because there are no zombies.
Speaker 3:
[55:26] You're just scratching out of the Iowa corn dirt. That's what you're doing with this book.
Speaker 2:
[55:31] Yeah, so I think that leaves The Known World by Edward P. Jones as the only one we haven't talked about.
Speaker 3:
[55:35] Oh, we haven't really talked about James either, but the interesting to talk about together, actually.
Speaker 2:
[55:40] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[55:41] Do you want to say something about James? Where did you have James again?
Speaker 2:
[55:43] I had that at five, and just as I said, because it's so recent. But you had it at one.
Speaker 3:
[55:48] Well, I do think it's unusual in this regard. Well, many more regards in this one. But looking at the rest of the list, I don't see another Scorsese wins the Academy Award for The Departed when maybe you could have won for four books ahead of it. Where that's kind of, I mean, James deserves it on its own. Maybe more than Departed did buy it on. I actually quite like Departed, whatever. I'm not out of my zone of expertise. But having said that, there's like 25 books. Like there's a long and varied history in coming out of American Fiction, which was the adaptation of Erasure, which is his book. It felt like all the rivers coming together and crowning Everett, and then giving a lot of entree, almost for literary prestige, what TikTok did for Colleen Hoover in terms of sales. Now, you can go back and see everything else, and now people can go back and discover, like, oh my God, and backfill, and then God knows what he's going to do next. Like the next personal ever book is going to be another.
Speaker 2:
[56:49] Yeah, it'll be another huge surprise.
Speaker 3:
[56:51] It's going to be another huge thing, and the book is good. It relates to literary history in American. The pitch is quite easy. I think this is, whereas Gilead is difficult from a simplicity, this is like difficulty from like a Cirque du Soleil kind of difficulty. Trying to do the twain thing, respectively, interesting, but then trying to have a high concept that both is stupid and serious and impossible, but actually quite moving and provocative all at the same time. Like, I stand in wonder at that. It's readable and simple. It is. It's like a sleight of hand where they just make the coin disappear right in front of you. It's like, that's all they do, but you have no idea how they did it. Just disappearing the coin.
Speaker 2:
[57:28] I think if we were doing a power ranking of Pulitzer-winning authors, Everett would be right at the top of my list for all of those reasons.
Speaker 3:
[57:36] You take the career. You get the whole career out of it and the whole body.
Speaker 2:
[57:39] I mean, really hard to beat in our landscape right now. What he has done and what, like, because of his track record, I believe he will continue to do.
Speaker 3:
[57:49] Yes. Yes. And probably the most readily to slide into the canon of teaching right away. I mean, there's everything you're going to want. There's so much to talk about, so much to study, so much to think about. And while it's forward looking, it's actually modern in its own sensibility.
Speaker 2:
[58:04] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[58:05] It's very tough to beat.
Speaker 2:
[58:06] The thing I said about Demon Copperhead, it's derivative based on Dickens, but Demon Copperhead is a more direct mapping onto the ideas of David Copperfield, where Everett really reinvents what he's doing.
Speaker 3:
[58:20] What do you think King Solver see? When she reads something like James, I assume she read, she's like, whoa. Is she like, whoa? Or like, do that?
Speaker 2:
[58:29] Everybody is like, whoa. I think that that's one of the pieces of magic about Everett, is that basically everyone is like, only Percival Everett could pull that off. How did he do it? Could anybody else have done it? You can even be as great and popular as Barbara Kingsolver, and just know there are levels to this, and Percival Everett is just on another level.
Speaker 3:
[58:54] The known world falls into the, I'm not sure the Internet could handle this now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[58:59] Say more about that.
Speaker 3:
[59:00] That's an indictment of the Internet, because Ingrid P. Jones is a wonderful writer and probably underrated.
Speaker 2:
[59:08] Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3:
[59:10] Because it's been a while. I don't actually know the last book, Ingrid P. Jones came out. But it's historical fiction as well, set in Virginia during pre-Civil War days, and it's about black and white slave owners. So there's black people that own slaves. And as you kind of imagine, that is complicated, Rebecca, and it's uncomfortable to read based on the real situation. This is a real thing that happens and happened, sorry, not anymore. It's an ominous, taut, frightening, there's a closeness feel, makes you extremely uncomfortable. The New York Times, I guess this was the critics, or those of us who voted had it number four on the best books of the century. It's kind of if you know, you know, very much.
Speaker 2:
[60:00] It was also a finalist for the National Book Award that year and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Huge. I had the same feeling reading it that you were describing with The Road, where you're like, I cannot put this down, but also, oh my God, how am I going to survive it?
Speaker 3:
[60:19] Edward P. Jones has three books. He's in the Donna Tart land of like three, like hit him and quit him. Like I'm going to drop a novel every 10 years and I'm going to leave you to deal with it. He hasn't published a book since 2006. So like his follow up to this book was All Aunt Hagar's Children. So it was three years later, pretty quickly there. That is a collection of short stories. Again, nothing to defuse your rocket ship to the moon, like dropping a collection of short stories. Maybe because you have them and people want you to get the book out. I remember reading this book and liking it, but I couldn't tell you one short story out of All Aunt Hagar's Children.
Speaker 2:
[60:55] Oh yeah, I couldn't either. I know I read that like around that time, but I don't remember it. But the known world really left an impression on me. I read it when it was pretty new. I was in college or just, yeah, I was in college. And it was one of those like, oh yeah, there are so many more stories about the realities of chattel slavery and American history.
Speaker 3:
[61:14] And discomforting stories.
Speaker 2:
[61:16] Yeah, then make it into the canon or then your English professors have time to take on. And I think this book is being taught now, but it was so new at the time that it wasn't, at least it wasn't taught in my college classrooms. But I was glad to have read it. And it was, that was a, I think, among my formative literary experiences. So that personal experience with it put it up pretty high on my list.
Speaker 3:
[61:40] I know. It's come up a few times. Lib and I are keep, we have Liberty and I have a secret clock that's counting down towards Donna Tart and Edward P. Jones novels. That's our George RR. Martin is Edward P. Jones.
Speaker 2:
[61:52] What a good day that'll be for us.
Speaker 3:
[61:56] I mean, I don't know anything about Edward P. Jones. I really don't. I think I'm just looking at bio and he took a visiting or a professorship in 2010 at George Washington University. He's a DC guy.
Speaker 2:
[62:08] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[62:09] But I haven't heard. It's been 20 years.
Speaker 2:
[62:11] I mean, at this point, he might just be having a nice time teaching. Like you say what you need to say in a book like The Known World.
Speaker 3:
[62:17] I mean, maybe because his first book, The Lost City was also a collection of short stories. The Known World, you win the Pulitzer, the MacArthur Genius Award. You get 10 year. Like what do you want from me? I don't know. It's fascinating to see. Underrated. So if you're into this kind of book or just knowing what the very highest heights of literary fiction are from the last 20 years, it's way up there.
Speaker 2:
[62:40] I was happy to have a chance. Yeah, I think we got everybody. I was just going to say, I was happy to have a chance to talk about The Known World because I know so many of our listeners are younger than we are. It had already fallen off the radar by the time they were coming up in books and getting their heads around what was big and popular. So if you don't know Edward P. Jones, definitely pick up The Known World.
Speaker 3:
[62:58] I remember having the thought when I was watching 12 Years a Slave, which again, a very good movie, thinking would Hollywood ever make The Known World? What kind of a world would we have to be in where that's a movie that could get made right now? Because you can hear in my voice and shoulders, you can't see moving up and being very defensive. I don't know what you would do with this at this point. It's extremely, extremely difficult stuff. That's our list. Do you want to read our top 10s?
Speaker 2:
[63:25] Yeah. Do you want to go 1-10 or 10-1?
Speaker 3:
[63:28] Go 10-1. People like that better.
Speaker 2:
[63:31] The Night Watchman, The Goldfinch, Demon Copperhead, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Nickel Boys, James, Gilead, The Known World, The Underground Railroad, and The Road.
Speaker 3:
[63:43] Mine from 10-1 Trust by Anant Diaz, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, The Sympathizer by Viet Nhan Nguyen, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which Rebecca is cowardly not included because she lost. 1999. Number 5, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, The Nickel Boys at number 3 by Colson Whitehead, number 2, Gilead by Marilyn Robinson, and then James by Percival Everett here. Your biggest surprise was where you were forced to put The Road?
Speaker 2:
[64:16] Yeah. I tried to talk myself out of it several times. But I made my list last night. I was like, this is it. I think I'm done futzing with it, and then I just resisted the temptation to move things around more today. So that's where we are.
Speaker 3:
[64:32] My biggest surprise that A Visit from the Goon Squad kept floating up. So here's what I did. I just put all 23 of the ones that I was eligible to think I could say something reasonably confidently about in a spreadsheet by year, and I just float them up to the top, start moving the top. And then A Visit from the Goon Squad was relatively late because I started first and I just didn't move James. I just stayed there the whole time. But The Visit from the Goon Squad just kept floating, floating, floating, floating, floating. And I had it right there with interpretive maladies. And if Edward P. Jones had another book or two out, I think that would have gone a little bit higher.
Speaker 2:
[65:09] I think a fun exercise.
Speaker 3:
[65:11] I mean, the Pulitzer does a pretty good job. Yeah. Pretty good. I wasn't except for not awarding something in 2012, which is a disaster beyond comprehension.
Speaker 2:
[65:23] It's dumb.
Speaker 3:
[65:25] Am I ever going to read the Night Watch or the Netanyahu? If I haven't done it now, it's going to be like when I'm retired or hospitalized or.
Speaker 2:
[65:31] Yeah. Maybe if when something gets a big adaptation, you'll pick it up, but yeah.
Speaker 3:
[65:38] I don't think I've ever been as surprised as when the Night Watch by Jane and Phillips won because the Netanyahu is I literally hadn't heard of.
Speaker 2:
[65:44] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[65:44] But the Night Watch I had, I'm sure it's great.
Speaker 6:
[65:47] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[65:47] Every now and then there's a big out of left field. I think the Pulitzer's left field picks are better than the National Book Awards left field picks.
Speaker 6:
[65:56] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[65:57] I agree with that. Is there a whole episode in the NBA is doing the same thing for them?
Speaker 2:
[66:02] We did it last year.
Speaker 3:
[66:05] What I meant to say is, if you want to hear us do the same thing for the National Book Awards.
Speaker 2:
[66:09] I don't know if we did the century so far or if we just power ranked like the last 10, but we did a National Book Awards power ranking.
Speaker 3:
[66:14] What would be the most obscure but still above the line worth of a patron, of an episode? Like the NBCC, the pen, the pen debut award would be interesting. Like what happened to those careers of the last 10 or so?
Speaker 2:
[66:29] Where are they now would be interesting.
Speaker 3:
[66:30] Where are they now?
Speaker 2:
[66:33] National Book Critics Circle, I think also has a debut award.
Speaker 3:
[66:37] Maybe a twofer, we do look at both of them. I don't want to put anyone on blast, but that would be interesting from our own point of view.
Speaker 2:
[66:44] There's a version of that episode that's just like this person won an award and we haven't heard from any of them ever again.
Speaker 3:
[66:49] What the hell, your agents are so mad. All right, shownotesbookriot.com/listen or just in the podcast, show notes for the podcast players there. You can check out the Patreon. You can check us out over at zero to well read and by the time this is posted, you'll hear us talking about James.
Speaker 2:
[67:07] It'll be there and out in paperback this week.
Speaker 3:
[67:11] Yeah. For those who've been around for a little while, Lisa, I came out, you know that famously technological glitches ate our first discussion of James and we had to wait a full year and a half to have enough juice in the tank to talk about again, but I'm glad we had the chance to talk about it there as well. Rebecca, anything else we need to make people aware of?
Speaker 2:
[67:29] No, I think that's it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[67:32] The Book Riot Podcast is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Shoot us an email, podcast at book riot.com. Until next time, we'll talk to you later.
Speaker 6:
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