Mantel Wins Booker Prize

Today, they announced the winner of this year's Man Booker Prize for fiction: Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall. I'm still on the hold list at the library for the book, which is understandable since it doesn't actually come out in the United States until next week.

Just today, I finally picked up A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, another of the short listed nominees, from the library after being on the hold list since July. I'm really going to have to pick another literary prize if I want to try and read all the nominees before the winner is announced. Either that, or I'll have to get the books that haven't been published here yet shipped over from the U.K., which seems like it would probably be too expensive.

Mantel's novel, which is about Thomas Cromwell, a minister of state to Henry VIII, sounds interesting. I haven't yet read any of her work, so Wolf Hall will be a good place to start.

Speaking of books, I'm just finishing up Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, which I've really enjoyed. I absolutely loved his more recent book, The Library at Night, which I read last year, and since reading it I've been catching up on some of his earlier works. I've decided that Manguel is definitely one of my literary soul mates.

I'm also reading a short story collection called The Body And Its Dangers by Allen Barnett. He was one of the writers in the Men on Men anthology that I read earlier this year. When I finished that collection, I made a list of the authors I'd liked the most and tracked down some of their books.

Barnett wrote beautifully and this collection is largely about the AIDS epidemic, to which he lost his own life in 1991. It's heartbreaking to think of the works he may have given us if he'd been able to live beyond the age of 36.

Another writer I discovered in that anthology was Christopher Davis and I absolutely loved his short story collection called The Boys in the Bars. If you like literary short stories, especially gay themed ones that offer a perspective on the AIDS epidemic from those who were living right in the middle of it, I'd recommend either of these collections.