The Booker shortlist

The Booker has always been controversial, and I can see why there are risks involved in turning the writing of novels into a competition, in the damage it does to books not selected etc etc…but it’s still hard to resist the pull of getting involved in focussing on a few books that serious readers have decided are worth our attention.

This year’s list, in particular. There was the initiual curiosity that two of them were written by Irish Pauls, but beyond that silliness was the fact that both The Bee Sting and Prophet Song were compoulsive reads. I had them from the library at the same time, and was gripped by both, but in very different says. I ended up buying a hardback copy of each as Christmas presents, one for my son, one for my daughter. And who got what was another interesting internal debate…

So I enjoyed reading an extract from a blog published in The Guardian, where the writer was comparing their responses to these books, and wondering which of the two of them was more likely to win the prize, and why…and then the realisation that this blog was written in Gaza, and by the time I was reading it the writer could well have been killed.