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...

Jan - I have some sympathy with you about McEwan, I have to admit. But aren't all writers a bit formulaic? However, I can't let your assertion about "the ever increasing paucity of the Booker selections" go unchallenged. This year has not been a bad selection by any means; last year was a bit disappointing (all statements IMHO, of course!) - but the year before was quite marvellous. John Banville won with The Sea, The Sea and Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Sebastian Barry were all shortlisted - and McEwan actually missed the shortlist that year with Saturday - a book that plenty of people reckoned was good enough to win. There were five quite marvellous novels out of the six on the shortlist. The year before that, Cloud Atlas was on the shortlist - that book in itself is one I would set against your statement about the paucity of modern literature. People forget that in the "good old days" there was also a hell of a lot of trash too. Perhaps your idea of waiting a few years and see which ones survive is a good one. Me, I think the Booker shortlist is normally a fairly good pointer to at least some of the future classics.

As I say, I'm disappointed that David Mitchell didn't make it. However, when I look at it dispassionately, I'm probably not surprised. It's six interconnecting stories, over the course of one woman's lifetime. However, there is a "fantasy" element about the stories; and in particular, the fifth story is exclusively about this fantasy element. It's not too much of a stretch to say that the fifth story is a battle between good and evil. It's perhaps a little too off-the-wall for a Booker short-list. I enjoyed it a lot, but it's certainly not as good, in my opinion, as Cloud Atlas. There's a nice bit of self-referentialism (is that a word?) in The Bone Clocks. An author tells his agent that he is planning a book which is going to be "a bit fantasy"; his agent says to him that a book can't be a bit fantasy, any more than a woman can be a bit pregnant.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. You know what? I only finished this three weeks ago. It's seven hundred pages; it's dense. I can't face reading it again. I enjoyed it, but not that much. So - it's about a load of people in an interlocking and very complex story about gold mining in New Zealand. The book is set in 1866, but we get a lot of backstory as well. It's very interesting, once you get into it. But there is are a couple of strange things that really get to me. The first is the fact that the chapter titles are astrological references, and each part of the book has an astrological chart with the names of twelve of the important people in the twelve places around it. And yet - there is practically NO other reference to astrology in the book - one person reads fortunes, but she pretty well admits to being a charlatan. So what is the point of the astrological bits? No doubt, if you know something about the subject, you might find the references enlightening. But to me, it strikes of being clever for its own sake, and adds nothing to the book. The other is that the book has the Victorian trick of summarizing the chapter in the heading. For example:- Chapter 1 - Mercury in Sagittarius - In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed; Walter Moody conceals his most recent memory; and Thomas Balfour begins to tell a story. That's all right, so far as it goes - but near the very end of the book, the summarizing starts to become longer and longer and the chapters get shorter and shorter - some chapters are a page and a half of summary - and only a couple of paragraphs. Why, for heaven's sake? So, though I thought the book was really good, these irritations got to me - and the more I think about them, the less I like them. So - I'm not going to read it again. It won't win. I hope.