Rachel's Pulitzer Prize Winners

Hi Everyone! I see this group is mostly dead, but I wanted to make a thread to keep track of the Pulitzer Prize winners I've read, so I thought I'd do it here. Hopefully no one minds! I'll list the ones I've read before 2012:

Fiction
The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck
A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

General Non-fiction
Guns, Germs, and Steel, by Jared Diamond
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

History
Polio: An American Story, by David M. Oshinsky

I'm not sure I've read a Pulitzer Prize winner every. I probably should remedy that! I have a hard time getting through nonfiction, though, so I'll have to start myself off easy and go with a novel. I've been meaning to read Jeffrey Eugenides for a while anyway.

General Non-Fiction: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee (1/25/2012).

My Review 4/5 stars
The Emperor of All Maladies is a sweeping “biography” of cancer covering archeological/ancient history to present-day. It is very well-informed, well written, and thorough. Definitely worth a read for anyone who is interested in the history of cancer or medicine. Well-deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won in 2011. I think it was written with the popular reader in mind (he DOES tell us what DNA is at the beginning of the book), but the book quickly delves into terminology and topics that I suspect would be very heavy to someone who doesn’t already know a little about biology/medicine. This is especially true in the second half of the book. Mukherjee also is SO thorough that the book becomes extremely long, which is difficult for those of us with a short attention span. Also, I got great amusement out of his formulaically inserted personal patient pieces. It was good that he had them (they broke up the difficult scientific passages) but I could tell that they were written by a scientist and not a journalist (i.e. they were comprised of literal rather than emotive descriptions). Being a scientist myself, this made me chuckle (alas! an emotion). However, I think the personal patient pieces were interesting and elicited enough emotion to engage the readers. They worked for me, anyway.

Hi Amy! I think until a couple of years ago I hadn't read any Pulitzer Prize winners either. But I thought it would be fun to try to get through some of them. And keeping a list is so encouraging. :)

Hi! I actually started reading Emperor of All Maladies and thought what I read was well written. I began working at a cancer center last year (I'm a medical librarian) and figured I should read it. Somehow I got distracted but I do intend to get back to it.

I certainly think it's worthwhile if you're working in a cancer center! It's long and hard to get through, though, so I understand needing a break. :)