Man Booker Prize 2010.

It's that time of year again - the Man Booker Prize longlist was announced today.

Here it is:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House - Jonathan Cape)

This year the judging panel is made up entirely of individuals who are authors themselves - in some capacity or another, either as poet, journalist, or critic. No mathematicians, no actors; I'm hoping that it means that this year the panel will have a slightly different approach. We'll see. The list looks pretty good so far - no Ian McEwan - ha! But a Booker winner that I'm not disappointed with isn't really a Booker winner to me, it seems, so perhaps this year will be like all the others.

We saw Inception tonight (loved it - everyone should see it - can't go on enough about it), so since we were at the mall already, I ran into the bookstore there and picked up two of the books at random - David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (it is a very lovely looking book) and Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (it was sitting right next to the cash register, though not, oddly, because of the Booker list; I had to tell them that the longlist was out - they didn't know). I also definitely want to do the same as I did last year, and get one or two of the books in audio format to listen to in the car. I'm planning also to get some from the library again this year, but I currently have such a huge outstanding fine to pay (long story, not very interesting, and no, I'm not going to tell you how much I owe) that they won't let me reserve any books online until I pay it off. So that will have to wait until I get a chance to go into the library. Or, rather, once I have the courage to face up to the very disappointed and disproving look that the librarian will no doubt give me when she sees how much I owe.

But, anyway, two books in hand are better than eleven in the bush, uh, I mean library, so here I go!