Though it's difficult to be sure (having only read two and a half of them) I think it's the best short list since 2005 - which was an exceptional year. (I didn't agree with the winner, though!) I agree that Vernon God Little and The Gathering are two of the poorer winners of the prize. The first in particular is a dreadful book in my opinion. Mind, I remember watching a TV program on the evening of the prize award (when VGL won), and they had four people on to discuss the six books - it was obvious that all those four also thought it was the best. It was the last one discussed of the six, and there was an obvious "buzz" around all of them as they started to discuss it - it clearly appealed to all of them too. So perhaps it's just you and me...

This summer I tackled our storage room. We have been in this house for over 25 years now and things have a way of being stashed in the storage room to be sorted through later. I steeled myself by saying "If my husband and I were to die, what would my kids do with this?" We took many trips to the garbage dump and got to know the friendly people at the Salvation Army and SPCA thrift stores. I came across cardboard boxes of hundreds of yellowing paperbacks which went to the recycle bins. Titles of books which I had loved years and years ago but needed to be euthanased. Boxes of kids' books went to local elementary schools though I did save some of the special hardcovers and one tattered and very much loved copy of "Goodnight Moon". (One day I hope to be a Grandma :) ) I had an enormous number of outdated travel books and some hardcover expensive uni books that I just couldnt throw out earlier. Off to the recycle bin. So now I am left with one bookshelf of favs (many were RP discussion books - "The Crimson Petal and the White" for example, I remember discussing with Siobhan.) I have a few plastic bins still but I need to go through those too. Also some bags of books from these charity book sales that allow you to fill up a bag for about $3. I vow to restrain myself at these sales in the future. I give a lot of books away, I dont know how they keep accumulating. It's like that old Star Trek episode, "The Trouble with Tribbles." And now I have an ebook. I downloaded about a hundred classics and old favs on that but the problem I have is that I dont really like the ebook except when travelling. It's been a lifesaver then, in terms of baggage weight allowances. So I have an invisble TBR pile on that gizmo.

I'm mid-way through Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes. It is an excellent read, so far. It is about a very difficult subject, but is hard to put down. From the NY Times: As a successful young professional in the northwest of England, Catherine Bailey has a full life: a job she likes and a cabal of friends with whom she parties hard. When she hooks up with handsome and mysterious Lee she seems to have it all — at least her envious girlfriends think so. “Isn’t he just what we’ve all always wanted?” one of them asks her. “The world doesn’t exist for him outside you.” But instead of every woman’s dream, blond, blue-eyed Lee turns out to be this woman’s nightmare. Manipulative and controlling, he grows more and more violent until he nearly kills her. But the real horror, she explains later, was that “nobody, not even my best friend, believed me.” Lee gets three years in prison and Catherine, now suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, moves to London to start a new life. Haynes uses alternating narratives to burrow into a harrowing story: There’s the 2003 Catherine, meeting Lee, falling in love, then descending into hell; and the 2007 Cathy, struggling to rebuild her life.

Got to second Lilo. Don't know the writer and since his quotes are more or less autobiographical, can try to understand where he is coming from but each writer is an individual with his or her way of writing. Don't know where the "1" is coming from and a new paragraph started with "2." Oh well.