Well, that's another year gone, then.

So, yesterday, the winner of the Man Booker prize 2010 was announced.

Meh.

This year, at least I don't disagree strongly. I'm mostly just satisfied that C didn't win, despite the worrying signs in the run-up to the announcement.

But on a personal front, I did end up reading all of the books on the shortlist before the announcement (finishing C two or three hours before it - having struggled with boredom to finally get to the end). Of the others on the long list, I read four out of the seven.

So, in other words, overall I read 10 out of the 13 longlisted books, in two months. Not too bad - one off of my record, of 11 out of 13 in 2007.

Looking at another person's record of their own Booker reading accomplishments, I think I probably will start compiling a single list - either here or elsewhere, just so I can remember down the line. I'd have a hard time coming up with just two words to describe my thoughts about each, though. I think the degree in literature snuffed out any ability I might have had to do that kind of thing.

And reading the Salon article about the Booker prize, in relation to the two main American literary prizes, I'm glad I "follow" the Booker. But at the same time, I think probably no one over here would agree with her feelings that the Booker rewards merit more than any other prize. It gets a lot of flack over here.

I do wonder about trying to read all of the National Book Award fiction finalists one year. Or maybe I should do something different from the Booker and read all the nonfiction finalists. Except those tend to be loooooong - so not sure I could do that many pages in a month.

Hmm.

Maybe next year.

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!

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...

It's that time again!

The Booker longlist was announced yesterday. And yes, the book list is already in spreadsheet form, with notations about which are available via the library, and which will have to be bought. I already have one book reserved, waiting for pick up at our new local library in Weston-Super-Mare (The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey), which I'll get before we pick up the keys to the new flat tomorrow (priorities!).

The last couple of years have been a bit rocky and after last year I really was hesitant about trying to read the longlist again (I didn't even blog about 2008), but this year's crop looks quite interesting (despite all the usual Booker cliches that are met, but I just overlook all that stuff that bloggers love to harp on about), so I think I'm going to give it the old college try yet again.

Ho-hum.

Dad's comment on the previous post reminds me that I never finished what I started, blogging-wise, with my post on the Man Booker prize long list and my attempts to tackle it in its entirety. So in the absence of other blogworthy topics (yes, there are some things that aren't blogworthy, believe it or not), I'll end the suspense on this particular topic.

So, first of all, by the announcement of the winner of the prize on 16 October, I had read all of the long-list, bar two. Both of the two that I didn't read were not on the short list. One of them (Winnie and Wolf) I had absolutely no desire to be near, let alone crack the cover on, after reading the Observer's review of it. The other (The Gift of Rain) I had bought and plan to read some day, I just didn't make it in time for the announcement. A friend currently has it, so I'll just read it whenever it comes back my way.

I don't think 11 out of 13 is bad going, considering that I did it all in the allotted time (about two months). I know I'm not the only one that tries to achieve this particular (minor) feat, but it still lets me have the satisfaction of feeling like I have a more informed opinion than those people who post comments on blogs about the Booker about books they admit to never having read. But anyway, as Sesame Street or Confucious or someone else equally wise might say, the value is in the journey, not the destination, so I should feel pretty good about it all.

But I don't. Because after doing something like this, you can't help but feel let down when you disagree totally with the decision of the judges. This year the prize went to Anne Enright, for The Gathering, a story about a traditional Irish family and all the messy stuff that they're involved with. It's not a bad book. Enright has a real mastery of language and writing and there are some very moving passages. But it just isn't a great book. It's not a book to get excited about. It's not really one you would recommend other people reading. You just read it, it's ok, it's kind of interesting, and you move on. So not really a book to rock anyone's world by being awarded a prestigous literary prize. I think I would rather a book that I absolutely hated had won, because then I could at least have the pleasure of self-righteous rage at the judges being SO wrong. But instead they went with a mediocre choice. Enright supposedly is a really nice person, so it's hard to get upset. And she's going to spend the £50,000 on a new kitchen, so who can argue with that?

The thing that really gets me is that it isn't surprising that they ended up with a middle of the road choice, when you read about how the book was chosen. It was chosen, ladies and gentlemen, by a FORMULA. This is what you get when you have the panel of literary prize chaired by an ECONOMIST. Howard Davies, chair of the 2007 panel, is the director of the London School of Economics. Why he was chosen to lead up the thing, I have no idea. Maybe he's some great artist inside, but it looks to me like he's an economist. By all means, let people from all fields of endeavor participate, but don't give them the reins.

Yes, prizes are always subjective. Yes, prizes don't really mean anything. But come on. Can we at least have the prizes chosen by people who actively participate in the field that the prizes are meant to honor? Even the Academy Awards recognize that!

Needless to say, I'm a bit peeved by it all. It also doesn't help when I read an article that is written by someone who actually knows the history of the prize and understands the context of all this, who argues that the prize has gone completely downhill. Plus, it sounds like our economist gave a stinker of a speech on the night. I haven't yet looked to see if I can find a transcript of his speech, since I think it will just make me mad. And I'm trying to put this all behind me.

It's such a shame, because I enjoy the challenge of reading them all, and it is interesting to compare books that you ordinarily would not compare, just because they've all been thrown together by a random panel of strangers. But, man, this year was just a bit pants all round, and last year was also pretty poor (although the year before, I completely agree that Banville deserved the win). So, the question is, am I going to put myself through this again next year?

Absolutely.

What, you still here?

Booker shortlist progress report, no. 23

I'm just over halfway in Darkmans...about 400 pages to go. I'm feeling alright--I'm hanging in there. I can do this. I can DO this...

THE shortlist.

So the Booker shortlist was announced today. This, of course, is a day of great joy if you are 1) an author who was shortlisted; 2) the parent of an author who was shortlisted; 3) the publisher of an author who was shortlisted; or, 4) someone who has committed to reading all the books on the shortlist and possibly the longlist as well if time allows, who isn't probably going to make the full longlist so at least now knows which ones are the "important" ones.

Last year and the year before I read all of the shortlisted books and it was good fun, so I decided to do it again this year. But then this year the panel decided to have a longlist of only 13 books (rather than the usual 18 or more), so I, like many other people with too much time on their hands and too much interest in this kind of thing, decided to try to go whole hog. I haven't done too badly (5 and a half as it stands today), but not up to professional standards, I imagine. So now I can at least get started on the shortlist (and I've already read one of them and I'm in the middle of the second--The Reluctant Fundamentalist and The Gathering, respectively--woo hoo!). I should be able to make it by the 16th of October or whenever it is. Plus half of the shortlist are, well, short, so that should help me make up time...which is good because I haven't yet cracked the cover on Darkmans, the behemouth of a book clocking in at about 900 pages.