Random Number Lit

I decided to read or listen to Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys because the two books that I am supposed to be reading right now are Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and Bana’s Kadambari , neither of which have audiobooks that I can find. I pulled up Whitehead’s text because it is the final entry in the previous project that I started many, many years ago with my friend Drew Moody to read all of the books that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I needed something to listen to and found that The Nickel Boys was less than 7 hours and I thought I could do that in a day as I am outside painting. I didn’t finish it in one day but had a little bit left over for the start of the next day.   I loved this book. I loved The Underground Railroad which I read in grad school. Both of these books have similar interacts with reality which I love. I love their tense moments that deliver on the stark realities faced by the characters but that he does not linger too long on the traumas experienced by th

  I pulled Willa Cather’s name from the Small Works List probably because a short story most have been featured in one of the anthologies I scavenged for names. This is one reason why I love to have the Small Works List as a part of this project, but it gives me at least two cracks at an author of the stature of Willa Cather. I asked a friend of mine who is an American Lit professor which book to read from Cather because her writing is just inside that which he knows a great deal about. From this time period, he is probably more familiar with Faulkner and was the person who recommended that I read Go Down, Moses when I got to that text earlier in the year. I was glad for that and so I asked him what to read again. He said that he had read My Antonia recently but had always wanted to read Death Comes for the Archbishop . I decided to read My Antonia because I had read One of Ours for the Pulitzer project years ago, and I have Death Comes for the Archbishop on the Big

This project evolved over time and it is my hope to try to capture the length an breadth of this project even some of this work started before I formalized this whole thing.  Some portion of why this project started was the pandemic, as is with everything now. Right before the Pandemic, and I mention this in my post about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , that I was reading Jeanette Winterston's latest novel, Frankisstein, which is a retelling of the famous story featuring a trans character. It was riveting stuff. As I read it though, I found out that I did not know nearly enough about the original story to be conversant in the retelling's version. This is when the pandemic hit last spring and so I decided to listen to an audiobook version of the original. Audible had just given access to free audiobooks during this time because of the stay-at-home order and I decided then to embark on something that was leading towards this journey.  From Frankenstein, I decided to try my hand