Reading in Public No. 26: Reading the National Book Award with Hunter McLendon

Reading in context, the question of craft, and uncovering your own taste

Hey, readers! Today I’m kicking off a stretch of guest posts with an essay from one of the best readers I know. Hunter McLendon is the (unbelievably voracious) reader behind Shelf By Shelf on Instagram and Substack and a frequent contributor to the From the Front Porch podcast. When I think about admiring someone for how they read in addition to wondering what they read, I think about Hunter. Hunter truly investigates the books he reads, often returning to the books that provoke him three, four, or five times. I appreciate the way he values the emotion and entertainment value of a great read, but also seeks to articulate something observant about the craft itself.

Two years ago, Hunter set out to read every book ever longlisted for the National Book Award and to write about that experience on his Substack. I’ve enjoyed following along with his reading and though the project has evolved since then, I wanted to know more about how reading these NBA books has influenced his reading overall. In today’s essay, Hunter tackles that question in a way that completely surprised me. I finished reading his thoughts armed with some new 2024 reading intentions.

I hope you enjoy Hunter’s essay as much as I did. And be sure to follow along with his reading through his Instagram and newsletter.

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I’ve always enjoyed reading prize-winning books. It probably has something to do with my yearning to be an intellectual, a cultured individual, a person who drinks expensive bourbon and smokes cigarettes indoors, but in a classy, professorial kind of way.

When I first got back into reading after high school, I sought out as many award books as possible, hoping it would make up for my not following in the footsteps of all of my friends, who’d ventured off to colleges far, far away. In high school drama class, I’d discovered that my favorite plays had all won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama, which led me to the discovery of the prize for Fiction. At first, I began reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winning novels, and then it became a game of seeing if I could predict who would win in the upcoming year. I was convinced I had read enough, knew enough about the award that I could accurately predict which book would win—only to have never heard of the winner in the first place. Eventually, I discovered that a different award—the National Book Award—was the one recognizing the books I most loved each year.

My focus shifted from reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winning novels to reading all of the National Book Award winners, with the eventual hope of reading all of the books longlisted. I’ve never thought about the impracticality of my goals—in high school I told everyone I planned on winning 17 Oscars by the time I was 18, which I had discovered wasn’t impossible (if I created an entire film on my own and also became a dual citizen), but somewhat improbable. It’s entirely within the realm of possibility for a person to read 450+ books, spanning 70+ years of publication, with many of the early books no longer being in print. At the end of 2021, I made the ludicrous decision that I would try to do this within a year. Oh yeah, and I also decided to document my journey with a newsletter.

Hunter with a stack of NBA longlisted titles.

When I first starting reading award winning books in 2012, it was with the intention of figuring out how to write one myself. I thought if I studied enough of them, I could discover some underlying formula that I could apply to my own work and gain success. I also wanted to be smarter, more cultured. I thought that by reading all of the “best” books, I would be able to hold my own in most conversations, be more respected for my reading taste. By the time I finally started this reading project in 2021, I think I just wanted to prove to myself that I could finally commit to something and see it through. 

I started at the very beginning, with the first NBA winning book, The Man with The Golden Arm by Nelson Algren. It was a beautifully written novel, one that was compelling enough to keep me going, though it wasn’t the type of book I was usually drawn to. As I read it and I wrote out my thoughts in my newsletter, I discussed the book with my friend Bernie Lombardi. When I called something in the book ableist, he asked if it was considered ableist at the time of its publication. I didn’t know, and he convinced me to look into it. It turned out that, for the time of its release, the book was considered ahead of its time, progressive in its conversation around one of the characters. Bernie taught me that if I was going to do this project, and if I really wanted to engage with these books in a more academic way, I needed to consider the greater context with which these books made their way into the world.

Reading a wide variety of books written and set in the past can operate as a fully realized form of time travel. Yes, when you read To Kill A Mockingbird, you get some sense of the world as it was, but when you read ten to twenty books set and published during a specific year, you begin to see the common themes and ideas that people were dealing with at the time. The mid-fifties, for example, saw the beginnings of suburbia as we know it today, and a lot of the books I read set during that time were surprisingly aware of how it was already impacting our view of the nuclear family. People were beginning to settle into this romanticized lifestyle, only to live lives of quiet desperation. I began to understand the need for historical context, for doing outside research when discussing books from the past. 

If you’re just reading a book for pleasure, there may not be a need to take such measures—but I had thought I could make judgments about these books based solely on their artistic merit. I was asking if they were well written, if they had strong character development, and if it was compelling enough to finish. I thought this was the only metric for judging this award, and I was wrong. This also changed the way I view books that are coming out now. It gave me deeper insight into which books might have more staying power than others, and which ones—even if highly regarded—might quickly be forgotten.

At some point, being stuck in the past became stifling—the majority of the books recognized by the award throughout this period were written by straight white men. My issue wasn’t with these authors or with the books themselves, but that by consuming only one point of view for such a significant period of time, I could feel the world getting smaller around me. It gave me an even deeper awareness for the need of diversity in literature. And it’s not that there weren’t diverse books out there at that time—though there were few—but that the literary establishment prioritized a certain voice over others. I began sneaking in a few books here and there, by queer writers, by writers of color, by disabled writers, because it felt so necessary to remember just how vast the experience of being human is. I also recognized how the American voice looms over these writers, and for the first time in my reading life, I realized how important it is to read works were written and set outside of the U.S. 

By spending so much of my time evaluating not only the books I was reading, but my reading as an act, I developed a deeper awareness. I began to question myself whenever I reviewed anything. Was this book good or did it just follow in the footsteps of all of the other books I had loved? Was this book bad or did I just not have enough knowledge of how this book operated, due to my narrow lens? I think we have to interrogate ourselves sometimes, really sit with our thoughts and ideas, to know whether we think this way because we’ve come to that conclusion (after heavy consideration) or because it’s just what we’ve been taught. 

Towards the end of last year, I finished reading the NBA books of the 1960s. Yes, this project is taking way more time than I had anticipated. But part of that is because another thing I learned while reading these books is that taste is even more subjective than I ever realized. There are several books on these longlists that I think are bad books, or mediocre books, or just forgettable books. There are books that never made the longlist that are now much more revered and remembered. Books can be awarded and not be very good. Books can be overlooked and be the best thing you’ve ever read. Sometimes good books are forgettable, and bad books can be hard to shake.

As I evaluate what my reading life looks like now, it’s messier than ever. I am constantly picking books up and setting them back down, re-reading books for the fourth or fifth time, discussing books in ways I had previously deemed entirely irrelevant. I don’t even really know if my reading life feels like something other people can relate to anymore. Most of my friends end up exhausted by my tireless discussions. But I think there’s something really special about finding yourself so deeply inside your own experience. I think when you dig deeply enough, you begin to really consider your own point of view, and you begin to ask questions that maybe you were too afraid to ask before. Reading is such an intimate experience, but we’ve come to a point in our culture where we’ve created a communal experience with reading. In that way, I think it becomes harder to decide what’s your opinion and your experience, and what is the opinion and experience of the masses. This may be why people cling so tightly to the books they’ve read that no one else has. It’s a call back to this intimate experience that’s slowly becoming harder and harder to have. 

I guess if there’s anything that reading hundreds of books that no one else is reading has taught me, it’s that when no one else is around to tell you what to think, you have to go back to thinking for yourself. Reading teaches us a lot, not just about the subject matter covered in the book, but about who we are as people, and how we respond when confronted with ideas and experiences outside of our own. Maybe I’m being a little too ‘woo-woo’ here, but it’s one of my favorite parts of reading. It’s why I think reading is such a beautiful thing. 

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Hunter McLendon is the reader and writer behind the Shelf By Shelf Substack and Instagram. You can also hear Hunter discuss books on the From the Front Porch podcast. Of late, you can listen to him discuss the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Empire Falls and share his favorite books of the year.