Booker Long List announced

impr0v

Described by a Financial Times literary critic, during a review of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, as 'only the Commonwealth Games of Fiction', the booker longlist was released yesterday:

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Purple Hibiscus
Nadeem Aslam Maps for Lost Lovers
Nicola Barker Clear: A Transparent Novel
John Bemrose The Island Walkers
Ronan Bennett Havoc, in its Third Year
Susanna Clarke Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Neil Cross Always the Sun
Achmat Dangor Bitter Fruit
Louise Dean Becoming Strangers
Lewis Desoto A Blade of Grass
Sarah Hall The Electric Michelangelo
James Hamilton Paterson Cooking with Fernet Branca
Justin Haythe The Honeymoon
Shirley Hazzard The Great Fire
Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty
Gail Jones Sixty Lights
David Mitchell Cloud Atlas
Sam North The Unnumbered
Nicholas Shakespeare Snowleg
Matt Thorne Cherry
Colm Tóibín The Master
Gerard Woodward I'll go to Bed at Noon

The only one I've read from the list is Cloud Atlas, which I found a huge disappointment compared to Ghostwritten and Number9dream, which made 2001's shortlist. While there were still flashes of brilliance, the novel seemed to be padding to flesh out an overly stylistic and unimpressive structure ('russian dolls pierced through the navel') and I found it on the whole boring and self-indulgent. Despite mixed reviews and the general concensus being that it is highly over-rated, William Hill have it as clear favorite with 3-1 odds, which dosen't inspire me to get the rest of listed works!

John

I've never even heard of one of them let alone read one of them

Tusky

never heard of any of them....

OfflerCrocGod

WTF?? Looks like a bunch of arty crap - seems like the list was made by ppl who think Ulysses is a great work :rolleyes:

Miguel_Sanchez

OfflerCrocGod wrote:

WTF?? Looks like a bunch of arty crap - seems like the list was made by ppl who think Ulysses is a great work :rolleyes:

Are you judging them just by their titles? If you haven't heard of them how can you tell if they're arty crap or not? Half of them may be bog-standard blockbusters in the DaVinci Code vein.

Ugh.

OfflerCrocGod

Jeff_Lebowski wrote:

Half of them may be bog-standard blockbusters in the DaVinci Code vein.

Then I would have heard of them First book in the list, quote from that review

Janus, a gifted pianist whose temperament now makes it virtually impossible for him to hold down even the most menial of jobs

"gifted pianist", sounds just like a Tom Clancy novel :rolleyes: Second book and a quote from that:

The book is a fictionalized study, based on many biographical materials and family accounts, of the novelist's interior life from the moment in London in 1895 when James's hope to succeed in the theater rather than on the printed page was eclipsed by the towering success of his younger contemporary Oscar Wilde.

Ummm no doubt a holywood blockbuster staring some hunk will be made of that riveting story. The third book.....is being published in Sept (why it's in the long list I can't tell maybe it's cause he's so cutting edge )

Not so much a failure of memory, but rather a failure of utopianism

YES low brow reading there no doubt! I'll leave the rest as an exercise to the interested reader, if there are any left.

John

I don't hold the Booker in much regard, didn't that Vernon God Little book win last year? Vernon God Awful more like.

impr0v

John2 wrote:

I don't hold the Booker in much regard, didn't that Vernon God Little book win last year? Vernon God Awful more like.

OBJECTION!

sustained.

I thought it was an interesting and humourous book. Granted, satirising Texan 'culture' isn't all that hard, but at least it was done in a suitably zany manner.

If Mitchell does indeed win as the bookies are predicting, that will be two years in succession that the booker winner has been a non-Irish writer resident in Ireland, 'DBC Pierre' (I forget his real name) lives in Leitrim somewhere as far as I remember and Mitchell now lives in Clonakilty.

John

I thought there was absolutely nothing special or interesting about VGL and I tried so hard to like it, it seemed like the sort of book I should love but there was nothing in it.