Prize Time!

So the Pulitzer Prize winners will be announced this Monday, April 12th. I love the Pulitzer Prizes - um, hello, understatement - and look forward to the yearly announcement. This year, however, it's kind of weird. I have NO idea what will possibly win any of them.

I particularly have no idea what will possibly win the Pulitzer for fiction, and that's the weirdest of all, I think. This is the first year in quite some time that I did not spend any portion of the previous year, the time during which potential Pulitzer winners were released, working at least part-time in a bookstore. I was off and on slinging books for so much of this past decade, that some portion of a stint always made it into most every calendar year -- but not after 2008.

And I certainly haven't been reading new fiction! Oh, I've been reading a lot, but it's all these projects I've concocted for myself in the last decade or so, like (funny, this:) reading past Pulitzer winners, and reading a bio of every president in order to see where we went wrong (started during the Dubya administration, obvio), and "re"-reading Moby Dick, which I am doing now.

So - what the heck were the amazing books of 2009? I was reading old stuff. Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City was on my radar a little bit. Lorrie Moore had a new book out, but I heard it was weird and disjointed. Sherman Alexie? What about that Tennessee family generations drama that got all that buzz a couple months ago, was that still 2009?

Note to self: read new stuff and classics during 2010!

This doesn't even touch on any of the other categories. It's also interesting to think about what the journalism winners will be. Pulitzers! My favorite! Well, one of my favorites.

(I realize this is a totally book-themed post, but it seemed in my head to be more current eventy than literary supplementy, so I put it here on the "main" blog.)