Some people climb 14ers, but 9NEWS Broncos Insider Mike Klis is satisfied with reading the most prestigious awarded novels. I am looking forward to No. 60. The Pulitzer Prize committees will announce their winners on Monday at 1 p.m. (Update: The announced winner was The Overstory by Richard Powers.) About two decades ago, I picked up a hobby/goal to read every Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction book dating back to my birth year of 1959. I have read them all and then some. Here is my top 9: 1. Rabbit is Rich, John Updike, 1982 2. A Visit From the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan, 2011 3. Ironweed, William Kennedy, 1984 4. The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson, 2013 5. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides, 2003 6. The Caine Mutiny, Herman Wouk, 1952 7. Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Strout, 2009 8. The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron, 1968 9. Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry, 1986 *Breathing Lessons, Anne Tyler, 1989 *The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, 2016 *Gilead, Marilynne Robinson, 2005 *The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon, 2001 *To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, 1961 *The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead, 2017 *The Mambo Kings Play Love Songs, Oscar Hijuelos, 1990 *March, Geraldine Brooks, 2006 A hobby like this, you can’t keep your top 9 to nine. Although there was no winner in 2012, I did read two of the three finalists – Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, which many believe should have been awarded, and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. There was no winner in 1964, either, but I have read several Pulitzer Prize winners prior to my birth year, including A Death in the Family by James Agee, The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, and one of my favorites, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk. Like so many hobbies, mine began by accident, then grew into an obsession. While covering the Colorado Rockies as a beat reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph during the team’s infancy in the early 1990s, I had trouble going to sleep following a night game in one city and having to catch an early morning flight the next day to another city. Larry Bearnarth, the Rockies’ pitching coach from 1993-95, said over a cocktail at the hotel bar that he read because it put him right to sleep. I went to a bookstore shortly after in downtown Cincinnati and asked the manager for a recommendation. He directed me to Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which happened to win the Pulitzer in 1975. I loved it. Later, Jerry Crasnick, a terrific ball writer for the Denver Post, recommended A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, a Pulitzer winner in 1981. Walt Weiss, then the Rockies’ shortstop and an avid reader, led me to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. McCarthy later won a Pulitzer for The Road. Once I was deep into the hobby, Bill Plascke of the Los Angeles Times and Around the Horn fame, told me The Amazing Aventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon was the best book ever. At first, my Pulitzer fiction readings were random. I wasn’t married to them as I ventured to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle and Breakfast of Champions. Bearnarth got me into Ken Follett’s The Man from St. Petersburg and that led to The Key to Rebecca and Eye of the Needle. It took determination to get through Thomas Wolfe’s 700-or-so paged You Can’t Go Home Again. I enjoyed it, three or four pages at a time. It was after reading Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift that I decided to make reading every Pulitzer-winning novel dating to 1959 my goal. I was three in and bedtime reading was quelling my catch-an-early-flight anxiety, so I decided to go for it. Don’t misunderstand. I do not have a literary mind, as my own writing shows. I could never join a book-of-the-month club as it took me 18 years to catch up with what was then 51 Pulitzer novels, or a pace of 2.8 books a year. Try as I might, I couldn’t get through Faulkner’s A Fable, or Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, which sure seemed like a non-fiction story to me, was at least 200 pages too long. I must admit some of the prize-winning books I read would require a re-read to jog my memory. But at some point, I become convinced that to become the best writer possible, it was essential to read great writing. And Sports Illustrated wasn’t the end all to great writing. Besides, reading does help me go to sleep. I look forward to reading Richard Powers' The Overstory as soon as I can find it at a discounted rate.<doc-sep>Aretha Franklin, Detroit's "Queen of Soul," has been honored with a special Pulitzer Prize for her decades of achievement. The Pulitzer Prizes announced the honor Monday at the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes for Arts, Drama and Music, naming Franklin a winner "for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades." Franklin died of pancreatic cancer on Aug. 18, 2018 at her Detroit home. She was 76. Her passing was mourned worldwide, and thousands turned out for her funeral in Detroit. Franklin sold millions of albums and was the icon of a generation. When she died, she left behind a $60 million fortune, according to celebritynetworth.com. Such a special award and citation from the Pulitzers is relatively rare. In 2007 a citation was given to jazz composer John Coltrane; the following year one was given to musician Bob Dylan; and in 2010, country music legend Hank Williams was honored. In addition to the special citation given Monday to Franklin, the Pulitzers also gave a special award to the Capital Gazzette in Annapolis, Maryland, for courage in responding to a June 28, 2018, shooting spree that killed five employees. More: Remembering Aretha Franklin More: Aretha Franklin documentary 'Amazing Grace' playing locally<doc-sep>“For me, this is a marvelous late-career recognition,” Powers said by phone just after he heard the news. “It’s my 12th book, and I’ve been writing for over a third of a century, so there have been ups and downs, and it’s a marvelous reward for staying the course. But perhaps for environmental fiction, there’s a little bit more to it. This is one of the chief literary recognitions that this country gives out, and it’s been given to a book that wants above all else to take nonhumans seriously and to take our relationship with those outside of the human world seriously. And that’s encouraging.”<doc-sep>Aretha Franklin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize’s Special Citation, the prestigious journalism and the arts organization announced Monday. Franklin was recognized “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades,” the Pulitzer Prize board added of the honor. Franklin is one of less than a dozen musicians – and the first female artist – to receive the Pulitzers’ Special Citation for the arts; previous winners include Rodgers & Hammerstein, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan and, most recently in 2010, Hank Williams. This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music went to Ellen Reid’s opera p r i s m, with James Romig’s piano work Still and Andrew Norman’s orchestral piece Sustain named as finalists. In 2018, Kendrick Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his 2017 LP Damn.<doc-sep>
Richard Powers’ epic nature novel The Overstory has won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The sweeping and evocative novel, which unfolds in interlocking fables tracing the relationship between humanity and the natural world, has been one of 2018’s most lauded. It was also shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the (still pending) PEN/Faulkner Award, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal: three of the most prestigious awards recognizing English-language fiction. The prolific Powers won the 2006 National Book Award for his ninth and most acclaimed novel, The Echo Maker, which was a Pulitzer finalist. Named finalists for this year’s Pulitzer Prize were two more literary awards season mainstays: Rebecca Makkai’s ’80s queer novel The Great Believers, and Tommy Orange’s Oakland-set debut There There. The former won the equivalent Los Angeles Times book prize just this weekend, and most prestigiously, was awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal. Both The Great Believers and There There ranked among EW’s Top 10 Books of 2018. Elsewhere among this year’s Pulitzer winners in books, Jeffrey C. Stewart’s biography of Alain Locke, The New Negro, won the prize for Biography, following up on its National Book Award win, and David W. Blight’s Frederick Douglass volume was named the prize-winner for History. On the drama side, Jackie Sibblies Drury pulled off an upset with a victory for her Off Broadway play Fairview, which the Pulitzer Committee celebrated as “a hard-hitting drama that examines race in a highly conceptual, layered structure, ultimately bringing audiences into the actors’ community to face deep-seated prejudices.” (A notable finalist in Drama was Heidi Schreck for her breakout play What the Constitution Means to Me, currently on Broadway.) Finally, Aretha Franklin received a posthumous special citation, “for her indelible contribution to American music and culture for more than five decades.” Check out the full list of winners below. JOURNALISM Public service: Staff of the South Florida Sun Sentinel Breaking news reporting: Staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Investigative reporting: Matt Hamilton, Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times Explanatory reporting: David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of the New York Times Local reporting: Staff of the Advocate National reporting: Staff of the Wall Street Journal International reporting: Maggie Michael, Maad al-Zikry and Nariman El-Mofty of the Associated Press, and the staff of Reuters Feature writing: Hannah Dreier of ProPublica Commentary: Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Criticism: Carlos Lozada of the Washington Post Editorial writing: Brent Staples of the New York Times Editorial cartooning: Darrin Bell, a freelancer cartoonist Breaking news photography: Photography staff of Reuters Feature photography: Lorenzo Tugnoli of The Washington Post Special citation: Staff of the Capital Gazette BOOKS, DRAMA AND MUSIC Fiction: The Overstory by Richard Powers Nonfiction: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold Drama: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury History: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight Autobiography or Biography: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart Poetry: Be With by Forrest Gander Drama: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury Music: p r i s m by Ellen Reid Special citation: Aretha Franklin