That is so cool! What a nice thing to collect.

Well done Martin. I'm not much 'into' Booker books but have to say Knowledge of Angels really stood out for me and I didn't even know it had been short listed! Talk about a powerful last sentence . . . .

Congratulations, Martin, on your collection. Two hundred seventy three books... wow, you are so dedicated to it.

Do you still have them in that bookshelf that you built yourself? You posted photos of it some years ago, and it looked very nice.

I didn't know that Quartet in Autumn had been shortlisted, so I checked a list of all winners and shortlisted books, and found I have read more than I would have thought.

Do you keep a list of your favorite ones?

Great collection, Martin. I love bookaholics.

I remember the special bookshelves -- have you had to expand, or does it hold all the collection? I looked over the complete short list listing and found that I've read 12 of them, which is actually more than I expected.

Wow, that's quite an investment you have, Martin!

Like reader_in_transit, I'm interested in which are your favorites. Are there any that you absolutely loathe?

I looked up the price of a first edition of Green Equinox. Oh, yes, quite expensive! $US 425 and more on ABE.

Thanks all for your nice comments.

To answer a few questions - yes, the bookcase is full and overflowing into another one. 2012 was the year which couldn't fit any more.

Favourites - of the winners, I've always loved The Remains of the Day; also The Blind Assassin and Moon Tiger. And Hotel du Lac. My "should have won but didn't" books are Cloud Atlas, Never Let Me Go and The Handmaid's Tale. (The Handmaid's Tale was on the same shortlist as An Artist of the Floating World by Ishiguro and An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo. They all lost out to The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis - what were the judges thinking - or smoking - that year?)

Unfavourites - G by John Berger is unreadable in my opinion, and so is The Famished Road by Ben Okri.

I've read, or tried to read, all the winners; I've also read, or tried to read all the books short-listed since 2003 - before that, I've read about forty or fifty, at a guess. I just bought an ebook of Knowledge of Angels on your recommendation, Vee. (I do read the actual books occasionally, but I never take them out of the house - I prefer to have "reading copies"!)

Generally, I have found that being Booker shortlisted means that the book has about a 75% chance to be worth reading, and about 40% certain to be excellent. That's good enough for me!

Martin, thanks for listing your favorites and "should have wons" and your unreadables. I always find the differing opinions of readers interesting when considering the same set of books. I know it's a matter of taste and all that, but I am still sometimes surprised at positive and negative reactions different from my own. For instance, I hate, loathe, abhor The Handmaid's Tale. :-)

I have only read about ten percent of the 273 books (well, 28 exactly) and I started maybe ten others. When I try to read more than a couple of them in a short time, I burn out quickly. I think too many of them are too much alike (yet if the full range of the forty-something years of Booker history is considered, the books are not really that much alike). I don't know if every year has/had a theme but it seems that way to me; for example, this year's list seemed to be heavy on depressing family themes. I only read one: A Spool of Blue Thread. So what do I know?! But I got that impression from the synopses through the link you provided, Martin, and your write-ups. I really appreciate your efforts to give us heads-up, because I know I would never have the patience to read so much fiction -- it would take me years with all the breaks I would have to take.

Martin and Frieda, I have heard the various judges over the years talk about their role in the Booker competition and many of them imply, rather than openly state, that they are encouraged to go for writers (rather than the books themselves) who fit a certain demographic. So one year the aim might be for something interesting/meaningful/miserable from a Caribbean writer, a young up-and-coming author, or a gay, or an Indian. Now it has been opened to the US, not just the Commonwealth, I don't know if this trend is likely to continue. I doubt that it is openly discussed and would really like a to find a year when the judges went for an old fashioned 'jolly good read'.

If you want an old-fashioned "jolly good read", I can offer you 2011.

The judges said that they were targetting "readability". I don't know if they succeeded, but I thought the shortlist was dire, with only one book being worthy of the prize in my opinion - fortunately it won (Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending).

The judges were roundly criticised for this from all sides.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/16/booker-prize-cricitism-andrew-motion

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/18/booker-prize-readability-test-literature

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/17/booker-prize-populism-backfire

Thanks Martin, some of those Guardian comments, especially that by well-known grouch Jeanette Winterson where she nails her 'literary establishment' colours to the mast and infers that Stella Rimington (head of MI5) is not equal to the task of Head Judge and states a committee could "choose an enthusiastic member of a painting-by-number club to chair the Turner Prize" . . . is a tad bitchy!

I feel a touch of Private Eye's Pseuds Corner coming over me . . .

Re Jeanette Winterson: Why does this woman have an anvil on her shoulder? I've read from Winterson herself that she had a traumatic childhood. So has every other writer, it seems. I tried to read her Sexing the Cherry and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit; but since I couldn't make much sense out of Sexing except it's derivative of Virginia Woolf and Oranges is a semi-autobiographical coming-out story,I am obviously the sort of reader she disdains.

Winterson won the Whitbread Award for Oranges. It seems in her estimation that the Whitbread/Costa is a notch above the Booker -- the Booker catering mostly to plebeians who want to think they are discriminating in their tastes. Checking the lists of the Whitbread (1971-2005; the Costa since 2006) awarded novels and comparing them to the Booker lists, the Booker is somewhat more conventional and traditional, although not more popular (the Whitbread/Costa Awards are more recognizable to me by title).

I sort of know what "an old-fashioned jolly good read" is but if someone could give a couple of examples, maybe I can pin some others down. :-)

To me, that is a book without profanity or explicit sex and interesting characters whom I would like to welcome into my home...

Maeve Binchy is a good example. She is said to have refused to write any more books if the publishers persisted in wanting sex scenes. I believe she won the argument.

I haven't checked out the Booker list but I think the only one I have read that has been mentioned is "Quartet in Autumn" and I enjoyed that as I do all Barbara Pym's books. Another "jolly good read" writer.

For me a jolly good read would describe a book with a beginning middle and end with believable characters, though they don't all have to be 'nice' people, it could be set in the 'now' or 'back-in-time'. I would want to pick it up and read some/several chapters at a time ( I personally never read anything at one sitting; my eyes wont take it) At my age I can do without the sweaty gymnastic sex scenes or vivid accounts of torture and violence.

I've just realised how middle of the road/brow the above makes me, but I'd be just as happy with a Daphne du Maurier, Susan Hill or Ariana Franklin as something self consciously intellectual like Ali Smith's How to be Both which I forced myself to read twice for the 'discussion' here . . . and I'm still sulking as nobody got back to me . .. yes, I know I was late to the party. ;-(

Btw someone on the BBC's 'Woman's Hour' was going on and on about How to be Both and how it will still be remembered in 100 years and what it says about women, loss, transgender, art, pornography . . . well I remembered about the art but did I doze off?

Below is a list of Whitbread awards for different categories of books (poetry, children, biography etc) now renamed Costa awards. They go back nearly 40 years. How many have you read or even recognise?

Whitbread (later Costa) awards

Thanks for the list, Vee. I've read three of them. My reading is not very erudite, I'm afraid--I just like to be told a good story and prefer it to be a mystery.

I might have replied to your post to the How to be Both thread if I had understood enough about the book to sound intelligent. I was rather bemused when I finished it and am sure I won't remember it much in years to come. I can see women, loss, and art; but (dare I confess it) I didn't even get the transgender thing until I read it here. I sort of feel about it like my very intelligent mother who made me read something by Poe (I think, Telltale Heart) when she was finishing her degree. After I finished reading it, she said, quite indignantly, "Now, did you get incest out of that?"

Vee, I recall reading several of the novels on that Whitbread List that I think you read as well, because we had some discussions about them here at RP.

Small Island -- Andrea Levy; Music & Silence -- Rose Tremain; and maybe The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time -- Mark Haddon

I have also read several of the biographies, including Bad Blood by Lorna Sage, that I remember you commenting about.

I notice that Vernon God Little by D B C Pierre (Peter Finlay) won both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award in 2003. I thought it was tripe, the sort of satire/black comedy that appeals to those who think John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is a masterpiece. I think Vernon might be the record holder for most curse words in a major prize winner and such descriptions as this:

"Deputy Gurie tears a strip of meat from a bone; it flaps through her lips like a sh*t taken backwards." and lots more of the same caliber. [thanks to one of the reviewers at Goodreads for the quote -- he thinks it's "a gem"!]

I haven't retained much of How to be both, but I'm sorry that I was unaware of your response to reading it until several months after you posted. You could have helped me greatly with the art part. I think I mostly read it wrong, so thanks to Martin and Sheri for setting me straight on some of my interpretations.

Carolyn, the Poe story could have been "The Fall of the House of Usher" since incest is suggested there, too. But I think the incest in it is probably more obvious than in "The Tell-Tale Heart." I read the latter without grasping it at all, because at the time I was naïve and didn't even know that kind of incest existed. I don't remember it being mentioned, either, in any of my "Poe classes." Your mother was a better educator than the ones I had.

Edit to add: I was on the right track about "jolly good reads." Thank you Annpan and Vee for verifying that. I share with you, Vee, a contentedness with reading DduM, Hill, and Franklin. :-)

Wow, incest in The a Tell-Tale Heart? I last read it when I was 10 or 11 and would never have picked up on that!

Vee, thanks for the list, I've only read three of them, but I do have two others buried deep somewhere in the TBR pile (and that will, most likely, remain there).

Frieda, it wasn't my mother but her teacher who gave the class the low-down on the Poe story. Mama just wanted to see if I were smarter than she was--fat chance!

Carolyn, oh, I thought your mother was indignant because she read "The Tell-Tale Heart" and didn't catch Poe's allusions to incest, which doesn't surprise me no matter how intelligent a reader is. If the reader doesn't have the knowledge of such things, it's just not going to occur to her. That your mother got you to read it to see if you would catch the oblique references is really a good and clever way to educate, I think!

As you can tell, I'm not the swiftest of interpreters. Sorry about that!

And yet another prize, this time 'the best of the best' from the Women's Prize for Fiction Under Half a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about the Biafran Civil war . . a book I am afraid I had never heard of but, despite the terrible horrors of those events was 'rated' very highly by the judges.

I had read almost none of the other contenders.

Under Half a Yellow Sun

Sorry, Frieda, I didn't explain that well. Your first interpretation was correct, but I misunderstood that! She didn't pick up on the incest and wanted to see if I would.

Carolyn: Good! We're squared away then. Thanks for letting me know.

Vee, I'm so out of touch that I didn't know the Orange Prize had become the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction. But even before the changeover, that's what it was intended to do: awarding recognition to women writers.

I read the piece about Ms. Adichie and her "best of the best" book, Half of a Yellow Sun, and although it sounds a bit heavy, it also seems that it might interest me.

The only other two winners that I've read from the second decade are Marilynne Robinson's Home and of course Ali Smith's How to be both. (Really, what is there about that book to be listed for the Booker, the Costa, and the Women's Prize?)

I notice that Zadie Smith's On Beauty was the winner in 2006. I haven't read it, but I remember her earlier White Teeth which I thought was hysterical. I looked it up and found out that my word choice had already been used -- by critic James Wood, no less. In fact, he coined the term hysterical realism as a genre name for such books as White Teeth as "big, ambitious novel[s]. . . characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story." (credit to Wikipedia for the quotation) Maybe I will read On Beauty.

There's incest in "The Tell-Tale Heart"? That's news to me!

Hah! Another innocent.