How many books by Nobel Prize winners have you read?
If you’re anything like I was a year ago, the answer is dismally low.
So, in an effort to break out of a reading rut and feed my brain some healthy calories (mitigating the Netflix junk binges), I issued myself a challenge:
Reading one work from a laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature every month in 2016.
This is in addition to The Bradbury Trio challenge. I know, crazy right?
Here is my list of books for this challenge:
Svetlana Alexievich – Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
Alexievich was awarded the Prize in 2015 “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”.
Ernest Hemingway – The Old Man and The Sea
Hemingway was awarded the Prize in 1954 for “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”.
Rabindranath Tagore – Gitanjali
Tagore was awarded the Prize in 1913″because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner won the Prize in 1949 for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”.
Pablo Neruda – Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Neruda won the Prize in 1971 for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”.
Wislawa Szymborska – Map: Collected and Last Poems
Szymborska won the Prize in 1996 for “poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality”.
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
Steinbeck won the Prize in 1962 for “his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception”.
Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
García Márquez won the Prize in 1982 for “his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts”.
Albert Camus – The Stranger
Camus won the Prize in 1957 for “his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times”.
Patrick Modiano – Missing Person
Modiano won the Prize in 2014 for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.
Mo Yan – Red Sorghum: A Novel of China
Yan won the Prize in 2012 because he “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”.
Winston S. Churchill – The Gathering Storm (The Second World War)
Churchill won the Prize in 1953 for “his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values”.
What will you read?
Follow along and let me know what you’re reading. You can follow my list or you can customise your own by looking through the winners over at the Nobel Prize website.
P.S. Have you already read any Nobel Prize winning books? Let me know your recommendations.