The Complete Booker

Hot on the heels of The Pulitzer Project comes The Complete Booker. Of the books on this prize winning list I have read only three, although I have been meaning to read several others for ages!


2006 - The Inheritance of Loss (Desai)
2005 - The Sea (Banville)
2004 - The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst) - Didn't really like this one.
2003 - Vernon God Little (Pierre)
2002 - Life of Pi (Martel)
2001 - True History of the Kelly Gang (Carey)
2000 - The Blind Assassin (Atwood)
1999 - Disgrace (Coetzee)
1998 - Amsterdam: A Novel (McEwan)
1997 - The God of Small Things (Roy)
1996 - Last Orders (Swift)
1995 - The Ghost Road (Barker)
1994 - How Late It Was, How Late (Kelman)
1993 - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Doyle)
1992 - The English Patient (Ondaatje)
1992 - Sacred Hunger (Unsworth)
1991 - The Famished Road (Okri)
1990 - Possession: A Romance (Byatt)
1989 - The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro)
1988 - Oscar and Lucinda (Carey)
1987 - Moon Tiger (Lively)
1986 - The Old Devils (Amis)
1985 - The Bone People (Hulme)
1984 - Hotel Du Lac (Brookner)
1983 - Life & Times of Michael K (Coetzee)
1982 - Schindler's List (Keneally)
1981 - Midnight's Children (Rushdie)
1980 - Rites of Passage (Golding)
1979 - Offshore (Fitzgerald)
1978 - The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch)
1977 - Staying on (Scott)
1976 - Saville (Storey)
1975 - Heat and Dust (Jhabvala)
1974 - The Conservationist (Gordimer)
1973 - The Siege of Krishnapur (Farrell)
1972 - G. (Berger)
1971 - In a Free State (Naipaul)
1970 - The Elected Member (Rubens)
1969 - Something to Answer For (Newby)





Another reason for posting this today is that I am going to join in on Dewey's Man Booker Challenge where the challenge is to read six of the books listed above between January 1 and December 31 2008.

Of the books listed above, the books that I am going to read for this challenge are:

Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
Ghost Road by Pat Barker
Amsterdam: A Novel by Ian McEwan
The Famished Road by Ben Okri


The only concern I have about that list is that Ghost Road is the third book in the series, so just in case I decide not to go with that one my substitute may be Possession by AS Byatt.


And that, I think, will be it for challenges for a little while. I did seriously contemplate joining the Royalty Rules challenge to the extent that I had my book list almost ready and the post almost done, but in the end I was going to have to be adding books to my TBR list to complete it, and one of the things that I said about joining in on challenges is that they had to be bringing the number of books on my TBR list down...not up!

Booker Prize 2007 Winner

So the winner of the 2007 Man Booker prize was The Gathering by Anne Enright.

This book doesn't seem to be available here at all. Wonder how quickly it will get published here now that it has been declared the winner!

I will have to keep a look out next time I am in the bookstore!

Man Booker International Prize 2007

The list of contenders for the Man Booker Internation Prize 2007 has been announced, and the list is quite impressive (although there are a couple that I must confess I have never heard of, let alone read).

The list is:

Chinua Achebe
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Peter Carey
Don DeLillo
Carlos Fuentes
Doris Lessing
Ian McEwan
Harry Mulisch
Alice Munro
Michael Ondaatje
Amos Oz
Philip Roth
Salman Rushdie
Michel Tournier

For more details, including a biography of each of the authors, you can find the details here

The Sea by John Banville

The winner of the Man Booker Prize 2005, The Sea was nominated as the February read for a group I am in, and given that I am supposed to be co leading the discussion, there was an assumption that I would actually read it!! However, a few of the other people read it before I got to it, and to say that the response was not overwhelming is a fair comment. I therefore kept on putting it off until I could do so no longer, thinking that I wasn't going to like it either, but it actually wasn't too bad.

If you want a crisp outline of the plot, I probably can't do that. In effect this is the story of a man who, in dealing with an extremely pivotal point in his life, is looking back to another pivotal point years earlier.

If you want likeable characters... I don't think I can give you that either. The main character Max is an art historian, and there are lots of references to artists and classic literature to show this to us. The other main characters are Anna his wife, who's role in the book is as a catalyst, and the Grace family, Mr and Mrs Grace and their two children Myles and Chloe.

Do you want lots of actions, lots of events? Hmmm....nope, not much action either. Lots of introspection and memories. Over half way through I was still struggling to figure out what the book was about.

Having said that, whilst The Sea is a meandering trip through two events in a man's life, the writing is beautiful, with many descriptions and evocative word pictures. By the end of the book I was engaged, and was even reading it while waiting for the lights to change on my drive to work. I had however figured out the two big secrets early on, leaving just one that I didn't realise before time.

One of the main reasons that this book was nominated was because last year we read Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and I thought it would be fun to compare a book that was nominated with the eventual winner. It will be interesting to see what others thought! I also read the 2004 Man Booker winner, Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst, and wonder if maybe I am not cut out for fine literature as this book didn't blow me away either.

Overall, not bad, but I would like a Pulitzer or Booker or other major prize winner to really draw me in, and hold me there, and blow me away. Maybe the next one will.


Rating 4/5