Booker Prize Shortlist 2021
martin_z
2 years ago
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martin_z
2 years agowoodnymph2_gw
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The Booker Prize Long List is out !
Comments (11)I read only one book on that list so far "Child 44" and I agree there are some very gruesome parts to the story. Despite the horror what held me fascinated by this thriller were the graphic descriptions of Stalinist Soviet Union. It was a smart and orginal piece of writing so I have to say I liked the book however upsetting some of it was to read....See MoreThe Booker Prize Shortlist is now out !
Comments (24)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....See MoreThe Booker Prize 2014 - Longlist
Comments (10)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....See MoreBooker Prize Longlist 2016
Comments (20)OK. So I got about a third of the way through The Year of the Runaways, and abandoned it. It's all a bit depressing - a bunch of illegal immegrants in Sheffield working in the building trade and a back story for each of them about how they got there. I don't know - it just all seems a bit too bleak. Also very irritatingly, a lot of Indian words were used with no glossary. Most of the time, I can guess from context, but occasionally, I had not idea at all what was going on. I'll revisit it if it's shortlisted. I've read The Green Road by Anne Enright. I liked it more than her Booker winner The Gathering, but it's still a bit meh. It's a story of a family in Ireland, most of whom move away, what happened to them, and what happened when they all came back at Christmas. I dunno - haven't I read this so many times before? Now reading The Fishermen. It's basically the story of four brothers in a family in Nigeria. I'll keep going for a while, but again - a bunch of kids doing what kids do. Sigh. I dunno - I didn't like Satin Island, but at least it was a bit original. On first reading, it's certainly not going to be a vintage year. A Spool of Blue Thread is now on my Kindle. But I've read here and there that this is going to be Anne Tyler's last novel, and a cynical little part of me wonders whether it was long-listed just because.......See Moresheri_z6
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