Man Booker Longlist

July has been an exhausting month for me and I'm glad that it's coming to an end. I'm cautiously optimistic that I'll have more time to blog from this point on.

Even though this past month felt like it was endless at times, it still doesn't feel like a whole year could possibly have gone by since the longlist for the Man Booker Prize was announced. That must be the case, though, since this year's 13 picks have been announced:

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America

Emma Donoghue Room

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question

Andrea Levy The Long Song

Tom McCarthy C

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Lisa Moore February

Paul Murray Skippy Dies

Rose Tremain Trespass

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky

The Man Booker prize was really the first annual literary prize that I ever became aware of and every year the longlist still makes me want to read each title before the shortlist and eventual winner are announced. I'd love to form my own opinion in advance on which book was the most deserving.

Of course, experience has taught me that some of the books that are on the longlist for this UK based prize won't have been published in the United States yet, so I no longer attempt this feat. The annual prize does add several titles to my own To Read list, though.

One of my favorite blogs, Band of Thebes, has pointed out that there are three openly LGBT authors among those on the longlist this year: Emma Donoghue, Damon Galgut, and Christos Tsiolkas.

It speaks to the international flavor of the award (which is for authors from the U.K., Ireland, or the Commonwealth of Nations made up of many of Britain's former colonies) that the three LGBT authors also represent different countries: Donoghue is from Canada by way of Ireland, Galgut is from South Africa, and Tsiolkas is Australian.

Both Tsiolkas and Galgut's books have been published in the United States, so I may well be reading those soon. The Slap, in particular, sounds like something I'd like to read (the description is taken from Joanne Wilkinson's Booklist review):

At a barbecue in a Melbourne suburb, a man loses his temper and slaps the child of the host’s friends. This incident unleashes a slew of divisive opinions, pitting friends and families against each other as the child’s parents take the man to court. Told from eight different viewpoints, the novel also deftly fills in disparate backstories encompassing young and old, single and married, gay and straight, as well as depicting how multiculturalism is increasingly impacting the traditional Aussie ethos. For good measure, the author also throws in male vanity, infidelity, and homophobia.

As always, though, almost every book on the list calls out to me in its own way. The shortlist will be announced on September 7th and the prize will be awarded on October 12th.

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.

Booker Shortlist Announced

A little over a month ago, I noted the longlist selections for the Man Booker Prize. It was my plan at the time to read as many of the nominees as I could, but to date I'm still on the waiting list for every available title except one, which I checked out but returned without reading. That wasn't a judgement on the novel in question, Samantha Harvey's The Wilderness, it just so happened that I was reading other things and my time ran out.

Today, the committee announced the shortlist for the prize, narrowing the selection down to six nominees:

A S Byatt The Children's Book

J M Coetzee Summertime

Adam Foulds The Quickening Maze

Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall

Simon Mawer The Glass Room

Sarah Waters The Little Stranger

The winner of this year's prize will be announced on October 6th. Maybe I'll have read some of the titles by then, since I've have hold requests placed on three of them with the library for well over a month now.

Maybe from now on I should make it a goal to read the previous year's nominees instead of the current crop, which never quite seems to work out.

Booker Longlist Announced

The longlist nominees for the Man Booker Prize were announced yesterday. The Booker prize, if you don't follow such things, is an annual British literary award, given to writers who are either British, Irish, or who live in the Commonwealth of nations that is made up of many of the UK's former colonies. It's one of the top honors in literature.

I've followed literary awards for a few years now, but last year I decided to try something I'd always wanted to do but never attempted: I'd read the whole list of nominees before the winner was announced. I chose the Booker longlist, which was announced right around that time, and started out with The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher, which I really loved. Hensher, an openly gay author, kept me captivated with his writing, which isn't always easy to do when the book in question is over 700 pages long. I devoured it very quickly, though, loving (most of) the characters and the portrait of Britain in the 1970's and 80's.

I moved on to Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith, which was a decent thriller set in the Soviet Union of the early 1950's, but seemed an odd choice for a literary award.

I was able to find a copy of The Northern Clemency through the University library, but I quickly discovered that several of the titles on the longlist hadn't been published in the United States yet and I was so disappointed that I ended up abandoning the effort with only those two titles read. I was very glad to see Hensher's book make the shortlist, but in the end the prize went to The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga.

This year, I know better than to attempt to read all the titles (several of which, again, haven't been published here in the U.S. yet) before they pick a winner, but I am going to try and read the titles which are available. I put holds on several of them at the library this afternoon. If I find anything as enjoyable as The Northern Clemency was, it will be well worth it!

Here's this year's longlist:

A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man
Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
James Lever, Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room
Ed O'Loughlin, Not Untrue and Not Unkind
James Scudamore, Heliopolis
Colm Toibin, Brooklyn
William Trevor, Love and Summer
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger