2019 Booker Prize Shortlist
This morning this years Booker Prize shortlist was announced. Six books have advanced from the thirteen on the longlist (for the longlist, see here).
With Rushdie and Atwood making the shortlist, I suddenly feel like I’m back twenty years in the past, and that’s not a bad thing. Back then I loved the Booker Prize and looked forward to going out and reading as much of the shortlist as I could. I don’t necessarily hear great things about Rushdie’s latest, and we haven’t heard much of anything about Atwood’s since it is still under embargo, so I will just assume those are not even the strongest books on the shortlist.
There’s already a lot of discussion about the shortlist over at the Goodreads group, so feel free to go join in here. The links below are for the U.S. editions at Amazon; several are not published yet, but each (how refreshing) have a publication date.
The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood
Purchase from Amazon.com
Ducks, Newburyport
by Lucy Ellmann
Purchase from Amazon.com
Girl, Woman, Other
by Bernadine Evaristo
Purchase from Amazon.com
An Orchestra of Minorities
by Chigozie Obioma
Purchase from Amazon.com
Quichotte
by Salman Rushdie
Purchase from Amazon.com
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World
by Elif Shafak
Purchase from Amazon.com
I’m not really a book prize follower. I like to use shortlists (and sometimes long lists) as “recommended reading” lists. I often will check out more information about listed books, but only ever read very few. Here are my hot takes on these six:
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood — I still have never read any of her books. Pretty shocking coming from a Canadian. My sister was surprised I never read The Handmaid’s Tale as it was required reading when she was in high school. (I missed it because it was first published right after I graduated.) I have watched the TV series and been meaning to read the book. I will probably read The Handmaid’s Tale soon and decide whether to read The Testaments based on that.
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Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann — I read a roughly 20 page excerpt from this book because I was curious about the gimmick. I got only a few lines in and had to modify the text before continuing. I replaced all instances of “the fact that” with “…”. It changed it from an intolerable read to something readable, but I’m not sure how much I’d like it. It seems to me it might just be a book getting attention for the gimmick, which isn’t really that impressive a gimmick anyway. (If you want to read something with no clear starts or ends to sentences, try Faulkner’s “The Bear”. It’s phenomenal.) I probably won’t read it.
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Quichotte – by Salman Rushdie — From the comments on this site about the excerpt that was published recently in The New Yorker, this one is a hard “pass” for me unless some startling new information crosses my path to cause me to reconsider.
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An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak — Never heard of any of these authors or books before. I haven’t gotten around to finding out anything about them, but I will before the winner is named.
“I got only a few lines in and had to modify the text before continuing. I replaced all instances of “the fact that” with “…”. It changed it from an intolerable read to something readable, but I’m not sure how much I’d like it. It seems to me it might just be a book getting attention for the gimmick, which isn’t really that impressive a gimmick anyway. ”
With you on that one – although a full stop was my preferred replacement. Seems a complete gimmick to me and there are more than 19,000 of them on the book. That said a lot of people seem to love the book.