Challenge #3: March 2012

With our Russian novels behind us at last, here’s our challenge for the third month of the year:

Read a book that has won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

This is a fun and unusual challenge that Katherine dug up from the depths of the internet.  There are only six books that meet this criterion:

• The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Katherine Anne Porter
• A Fable, William Faulkner
• The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
• The Color Purple, Alice Walker
• Rabbit Is Rich, John Updike
• The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

There were a number of things about this list that caught me off-guard: its short length, the very eclectic collection of books represented, and the fact that I had never heard of three of them (I’ve read a handful of Faulkner novels but am unfamiliar with A Fable; Porter and Malamud have simply never across my literary radar at all).  Perhaps I just overestimate my literary merits – always possible, mind – but you would think that any book with this distinction would rocket to instant and everlasting fame, wouldn’t you?

I’ll be back shortly with my book for March, and I’m sure Katherine will be too!