Man Booker Longlist
Posted by Fliss | Posted in Uncategorized | Posted on 27-07-2010
2
Basically just housekeeping, but here it is anyway, for your reading pleasure. The longlist:
Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan – Picador)
Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin – Fig Tree)
Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group – Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy C (Random House – Jonathan Cape)
David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Hodder & Stoughton – Sceptre)
Lisa Moore February (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin – Hamish Hamilton)
Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House – Chatto & Windus)
Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic – Tuskar Rock)
Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House – Jonathan Cape)
There were a couple on there that I have not heard anything about, but which look very interesting, quite a few that regularly popped up in forums and on other blogs as suggestions. The Levy, Carey, Mitchell, and Tremain books were ones that I thought might make it on to the list, but I had no idea about the rest, and I was actually quite surprised by the omission of <i>Solar</i> from the longlist. Nevertheless, I’m thrilled that Helen Dunmore’s latest is on the longlist, as she is a fabulous writer. It looks like there are quite a few chunksters on the list again, though, which raises the question, is anyone going to attempt a readathon of the longlist this year?
No readerthon for me this year. The Orange longlist was quite enough.
Still, any prize list makes me a teeny bit excitable and I think this year’s Booker longlist is more interesting than I expected. Like you I’m pleased to see Helen Dunmore, and so many women generally – 5 out of the 13 ain’t too bad given past performance. I read a review of Emma Donoghue’s Room a few days ago and thought it sounded interesting (although I read one of her historical novels and thought it was positively turgid…eeep). And I’ve been looking forward to The Slap for a while. The Galgut and the Mitchell are both quite high on the TBR, and Lisa Moore’s February is on my wishlist too.
Hmmm, the only book I’ve read is The Long Song and I was pretty underwhelmed by it. I like Andrea Levy’s writing and she creates extremely memorable characters, but I felt like The Long Song was a little directionless and I didn’t like the framing device. But then again I did read it at the very end of my Orange challenge so may not have been in the best frame of mind. Are you planning on a Booker readerthon?
Victoria, I can understand why you won’t be reading the whole longlist after doing the Orange longlist. I missed reading the Orange longlist this year, though, as it fell in the last couple of months of my degree, and I thought that was probably a bit too much pressure. As for doing a Booker readerthon, I’m not sure wether I’ll attempt it or not, as some of the books appeal to me more than others. I think I’m just going to start with the books that I want to read anyway, like the Dunmore, and see where I go from there.