William T. Vollman won the National Book Award for fiction with his behemoth Europe Central. Joan Didion won the non-fiction prize for The Year of Magical Thinking - a book that I will have to be made to read at gunpoint. Bookslut has an interview with Vollman wherein he discusses smoking crack and whoring. Bookslut also has a link to a quiz where you can test your LQ (literary quotient), which is based on the number of prize-winning books you have read in the past 10 years. Take the quiz, and join me in feeling like a dumbass. My score was a 9. Humiliating.
November 18th, 2005 at 9:23 am
I scored a 12. I thought I was on a real roll there at first. As I went down the list, though….
Embarrassing!
I’m reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle right now…. it’s taking longer than I expected to slog through.
November 18th, 2005 at 10:12 am
A 12! Holy smokes. That’s awesome.
I can’t wait to hear about “Wind-Up Bird”. I loved “Kafka on The Shore”, and I have been meaning to go back and read everything by Murakami. I couldn’t decide what should be next - it was a toss-up between “Wind-Up Bird” and “Norwegian Wood”.
November 18th, 2005 at 12:03 pm
I read Norwegian Wood and highly recommend it. There are similar themes in it and Wind-Up Bird. I haven’t read Kafka on the Shore and I think it may be a while. Too much Murakami at one stretch can have you needing the men in white coats to come get you. But I still love his books.