A Momentary Taste of Being

The Booker Prize--The Winner Comedy and the Booker Prize The Booker Prize Ceremony

Hilary Mantel on winning the booker prize. I especially like the guinea pig.

One Booker Short List Two Booker Short Lists I must express my surprise at the surprise of all those surprised by the lack of David Mitchell on the list.  To my mind, this expresses nothing less than the fact that the book simply wasn't award calibre work.  Good work, but not anything that I would have nominated even on the long list.  But I've been the minority among those who have reviewed the Mitchell book, and in that minority seem to join the author of Two Booker Short Lists, linked above.

Extracts from the longlisters for the Booker Prize--if you care. Booker Prize nominees--perhaps more easily accessed from this link.

Seems we just announced the 2009 Man Booker and now we're into longlist season.

Kim Stanley Robinson on the Man Booker Prize. Unfortunately we have to settle for this precis because the New Scientist wants us to subscribe to read the whole.  So better yet, go out to your Library (if it subscribes to the New Scientist) and find the original article.  I'm sure it is far more interesting than the sound-bites.

Well, I have to say after a very long slog, I am through Wolf Hall and am glad to have finished it. I have very mixed feelings about the book--ambitious, long, convoluted, by turns annoying and confusing, but with deep and interesting insights and speculations, thoughts about the characters and their times. Let's start with one of the least successful aspects of the book.  I have read in other reviews and other places that her limited third person narration that amounts to a curious twist on a first person narration in which "he" much of the time refers to Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cromwell is almost always referred to as he--this literary trick is supposed to bring me into sympathy with Cromwell.  I am supposed to derive from it some sort of closeness.  Truth is, it made the book more difficult to read without offering a lot in the way of perspective or closeness.  Indeed, if anything, I found myself kicking against the goad and more often than not furious at Cr...

Perhaps one does well to let the author speak for himself: from The White Tiger Aravind Adiga It is an ancient and venerated custom of people in my country to start a story by praying to a Higher Power. I guess, Your Excellency, that I too should start off by kissing some god's arse. Which god's arse, though? There are so many choices. See Muslims have one god. The Christians have three gods. And we Hindus have 36,000,000 gods. Making a grand total of 36,000,004 divine arses for me to shoose from. Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of dark around us.  I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work--much like our politicians, and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones ...

To Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall.   Haven't read it, but it sounds like something I would enjoy.