December Reading List: Award-Winning Novels

For the month of December, I will be reading books that have won awards. I'm hoping that this theme will introduce me to some new favorites, as well as allow me to catch up on reading some of the books that people are currently talking about. I read more than anyone I know, but since I always have a huge backlog of books to catch up on, I rarely pick up anything that has just been released. I'm making it a point to include some works that are currently popular (as in, they won their awards within the last few years or so).

Here's the plan for the month:

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen - This novel about a communist double agent from Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, along with a slew of other honors in 2016. The blurbs on the back of the novel are quite impressive, especially the one from Maxine Hong Kingston, noted Chinese-American author and feminist, who calls the novel, "a magnificent feat of storytelling."

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr - This 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner is about a man and a woman living through WWII. In addition to it's Pulitzer, it was selected as a National Book Award finalist and was named one of the New York Times 10 best books of the year.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - This won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013. The plot concerns a boy who is gradually drawn into the criminal underworld of modern-day New York after losing his mother and being abandoned by his father. 

The challenge this month will be the length of these novels. All three have won multiple accolades, and all three are absolute bricks. Hopefully, with the my winter holiday coming up at school, I will be able to squish in more reading time than usual. I hope these novels live up to the hype!