When I agree with both Oprah and the Pulitzer Prize Committee on a novel, you know it’s got to be good. Well, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road today won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Gee, I wonder where my picking it as one of my books of the year ranks with that and Oprah picking it for her book club? I was also happy see that Pete Earley’s Crazy, which was also on my year-end list, was one of the Pulitzer finalists in the general nonfiction category.
Most satisfying to me, though, was that special citations were awarded to SF author Ray Bradbury and jazz saxophonist John Coltrane for their contributions American culture. Both are extremely well-deserved.
If you can’t read and write you can’t think. Your thoughts are dispersed if you don’t know how to read and write. You’ve got to be able to look at your thoughts on paper and discover what a fool you were.
Ray Bradbury, Salon.com interview, August 2001
