Book Awards Reading Challenge

The Moviegoer. Walker Percy. (NY: Vintage, 1960 [1998 reprint]). 241 pages.

I have posted my first review for the Book Awards Reading Challenge. To read the review CLICK HERE.

The Moviegoer won the 1962 National Book Award and I found it to be a great read.

I previously posted my intended reading list on my blog, but after searching through the Awards lists I have updated it and am posting it hear. I reserve the right to change it as I go, but presently it looks like this:


1. The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (National Book Award 1972)

2. Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney (Costa/Whitbread Award (1999)

3. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (National Book Award 1962)

4. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle (Newbery Award 1963)

5. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph J. Ellis (Pulitzer Prize-History 2001)

6. Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor (Pulitzer Prize 1956)

7. T. S. Eliot (Nobel Prize 1948) Christianity and Culture

8. Winston Churchill (Nobel, 1953) A History of the English Speaking Peoples

9. Bertand Russell (Nobel, 1950) Why I Am Not A Christian

10. Rudyard Kipling (Nobel, 1907) Kim

11. Jose Saramago (Nobel, 1998) Blindness

12. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (National Book Award 1953)

And, here are some alternates that I might opt for instead:

13. John Adams by David McCullough (Pulitzer Prize-Biography 2002)

14. Gallipoli , by Alan Moorehead, (Duff Cooper Prize, 1956)

15. True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (Booker Prize 2001)

16. Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Truss (British Book Award (2004)

17. Empire Falls, by Richard Russo (Pulitzer Prize 2002)

18. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole (Pulitzer Prize 1981)

19. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (National Book Award 1954)

20. Ironweed, by William Kennedy ( 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award)

21. Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morison (Pulitzer-Biography, 1943)

22. John Browns Body by Stephen Vincent Benét (Pulitzer-Poetry, 1929)

23. The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (Pulitzer-General Non-Fiction, 1988)

24. Joseph Frank - Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (National Book Critics - Biography, 1984)

25. A Fable, by William Faulkner (Pulitzer-Fiction, 1955)

26. William L. Shirer - The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (National Book Award (Nonfiction), 1961)

27. Lewis Mumford - The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations and its Prospects (National Book Award (Nonfiction), 1962)

28. Nathaniel Philbrick - In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (National Book Award (Nonfiction), 2000)