Daily Ada: 25 January 14

Ada was having a little bit of trouble settling for a nap. We heard some thumps so knew she was pulling some books off her bookshelf, while in bed (she can just about reach). Then we looked and saw that she had fallen asleep, cradling one of her books.

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.

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.