Booker 2009 update - part one.

I'm fully in the throes of Booker-mania. As you can see (if one cared to see, I should probably say) from the "last five books I've read" page element on the right hand side, I've now read five out of the thirteen books on the Booker longlist.

I'm moving at a pretty good clip, in no small part due to my (if I do say so myself) incredibly clever technique that I thought up this year of listening to one book on CD while driving and reading another one at night at home. I do a decent bit of driving for work so I've already "read" two books that way. And it does give an interesting perspective on the books, especially since the two that I ended up "reading" that way (due purely to their availability from the library rather than anything else) had at their core an interest in an individual's perspective and how memories/stories/events are filtered by one's own experience/physical and mental states/etc.

Anyway, last night Mark asked for an update about which ones (if any) that I like so far, and if I had to pick a winner (my own choice of winner rather than which I think would win considering the way Booker prizes have gone recently) which it would be. So I thought I would share. I won't go into the (long, boring) detail that I did last night with Mark, and just say that to my surprise, The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, is currently the front runner in the What-Jessica-Thinks-About-Booker-Books stakes. It's a story of a man suffering from Alzheimer's (I know, really upbeat) and there are some things that I don't like about it, but so far it's the one that I think has a good combination of interesting content from an interesting angle pretty well told.

I don't know enough (or anything, really) about Alzheimer's to tell if she's accurately representing what it is most likely to be like to experience the disease, either as the sufferer or the loved one having to live with the sufferer, but it seems real to me, and it's the first time I've thought about what it must be like. It may not be the first time someone's tried to do it, and her structure may not be unique, but although I didn't enjoy it and there were some bits that I disagreed with, I thought it was pretty good.

I'm already on to the next one - about a journalist in Africa - and I've been saving all the ones that I'm really interested in (Coetzee, The Children's Book, the one from the point of view of a chimp, the popular one about Henry VIII) in case I start to slow down...