Saturday, August 11, 2007

Booker Mela time

Yes, its that time of the year again - the 2007 Man Booker longlist is out. There are a lot of relatively unknown people on the list and since I am running very behind on my resolution of reading one unread author every month[1], this seems like a great way to rectify that. So I am going to try to read as many books on the list as possible. How about you?

Here's the complete longlist. Please let me know if you plan to review any of these before Oct, the 16th.

Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Self Help by Edward Docx
The Gift Of Rain by Tan Twan Eng
The Gathering by Anne Enright - Falstaff
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid - Veena
The Welsh Girl by Peter Ho Davies - Falstaff
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones - Falstaff, Veena
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - Falstaff, Bill
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn - Falstaff, Veena
Consolation by Michael Redhill - Falstaff
Animal's People by Indra Sinha - Falstaff
Winnie & Wolf by A.N. Wilson

[1] I have read lots of new authors this year but mostly bite-size portions thanks to Granta's Best Young American novelists, so it cannot be counted. I LOVE Gary Shteyngart btw.

4 comments:

Falstaff said...

Sigh. I'm all for longlists that feature unknown authors, but couldn't they have picked books that have actually been released? half of these things don't show up in the library system or on Amazon. Gah!

I suppose it's idle for me to say what I will review. (Just fyi, so far I've got my hands on Enright, Redhill, Davies and Lalwani) But here are two I'm not going to review - The Reluctant Fundamentalist (which I think is contrived and trite) and On Chesil Beach (I read the first chapter in the New Yorker and wasn't impressed).

Veena said...

They haven't released these books?! Wonder if that's just in the States, will go look my library catalog.

And yeah, I have a feeling that might work out fine as those are the ones most other pople are likely to pick up first.

Szerelem said...

have too many books to read as it is and am still mostly focussed on turkey-middle east-north arfican fiction/non fiction.
I was about to comment about The Reluctant Fundamentalist because I read Moth Smoke a while back an thouht it was not bad...so was wondering if anyone had any opinions on it or was plannin to review it. Oh well, Falstaff let the cat out of the bag

Cheshire Cat said...

My inclinations run to "Mister Pip", "Darkmans" and probably "Consolation" (though I wasn't particularly impressed by "Michael Sloane"). Subject to availability, of course.