Booker Season

That is to say that mid-summer is traditionally when the Man Booker Prize long list comes out.  The 2016 long list is here.  I have two main thoughts regarding the Booker Prize: 1) I think it was probably a mistake to open the prize up to authors from the U.S., as there are plenty of prizes already available to U.S. authors and 2) there is a certain sameness to many of the books, though there is a slightly wider array of genres included in the long-list in recent years (though most don't make the cut to the short list).  David Means's Hystopia is probably the most out-there novel from this year's long-list -- an acid trip of a book where JFK wasn't assassinated and Vietnam War vets come home to have their memories wiped away.  I can't tell if I would like this or not, but I'll certainly consider it at some point down the road.  (Perhaps I am somewhat influenced by the fact Means grew up in Kalamazoo but moved away, which is also basically my life story in a nut shell.)

I would also probably institute some limit on the number of times an author can be put on the long list.  If Coetzee makes it to the short list (as is likely) that would make his 4th appearance on the short list.  Salman Rushdie has also made the short list 4 times.  That's not even a record: Iris Murdoch made the short list 5 times, as has Margaret Atwood!  (Wikipedia has a very useful list of all the Booker winners, as well as the rest of the short list, from 1969-2015 here.)

Anyway, I decided to quickly go through the short listed books to see how many I had read (or at least owned), and then I added just a few to my TBR pile.  This is the outcome of that search:

Year		Author	Title
1971	R	Doris Lessing	Briefing for a Descent into Hell
1971	O	Mordecai Richler	St Urbain's Horseman
1971	O	Elizabeth Taylor	Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
1974	O	Kingsley Amis	Ending Up
1977	O	Barbara Pym	Quartet in Autumn
1978	O	Iris Murdoch	The Sea, the Sea
1978	O	Kingsley Amis	Jake's Thing
1978	TBR	Penelope Fitzgerald	The Bookshop
1979	R	V. S. Naipaul	A Bend in the River
1980	O	Anthony Burgess	Earthly Powers
1980	R	Alice Munro	The Beggar Maid (aka Who Do You Think You Are?)
1980	R	J. L. Carr	A Month in the Country
1981	R	Salman Rushdie	Midnight's Children
1981	R	Molly Keane	Good Behaviour
1981	R	Doris Lessing	The Sirian Experiments
1981	R	D. M. Thomas	The White Hotel
1983	R	J. M. Coetzee	Life & Times of Michael K
1983	R	Malcolm Bradbury	Rates of Exchange
1983	R	Salman Rushdie	Shame
1983	R	Graham Swift	Waterland
1984	R	Julian Barnes	Flaubert's Parrot
1984	O	David Lodge	Small World
1985	O	Keri Hulme	The Bone People
1985	R	Doris Lessing	The Good Terrorist
1985	R	Jan Morris	Last Letters from Hav
1986	O	Kingsley Amis	The Old Devils
1986	R	Margaret Atwood	The Handmaid's Tale
1986	R	Robertson Davies	What's Bred in the Bone
1987	TBR	Penelope Lively	Moon Tiger
1988	O	David Lodge	Nice Work
1988	R	Salman Rushdie	The Satanic Verses
1989	R	Kazuo Ishiguro	The Remains of the Day
1989	R	Margaret Atwood	Cat's Eye
1991	R	Ben Okri	The Famished Road
1991	R	Rohinton Mistry	Such a Long Journey
1992	R	Michael Ondaatje	The English Patient
1993	R	Carol Shields	The Stone Diaries
1996	TBR	Margaret Atwood	Alias Grace
1996	R	Rohinton Mistry	A Fine Balance
1997	R	Arundhati Roy	The God of Small Things
1999	R	Michael Frayn	Headlong
2000	O	Margaret Atwood	The Blind Assassin
2000	R	Matthew Kneale	English Passengers
2001	R	Ali Smith	Hotel World
2002	R	Yann Martel	Life of Pi
2002	R	Rohinton Mistry	Family Matters
2002	R	Carol Shields	Unless
2003	O	Monica Ali	Brick Lane
2003	O	Margaret Atwood	Oryx and Crake
2004	TBR	Alan Hollinghurst	The Line of Beauty
2004	R	David Mitchell	Cloud Atlas
2005	R	John Banville	The Sea
2006	R	Kiran Desai	The Inheritance of Loss
2006	R	Sarah Waters	The Night Watch
2007	R	Mohsin Hamid	The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2008	R	Aravind Adiga	The White Tiger
2008	TBR	Amitav Ghosh	Sea of Poppies
2010	R	Howard Jacobson	The Finkler Question
2010	TBR	Peter Carey	Parrot and Olivier in America
2012	TBR	Deborah Levy	Swimming Home
2012	R	Jeet Thayil	Narcopolis
2013	R	NoViolet Bulawayo	We Need New Names
2013	R	Jhumpa Lahiri	The Lowland
2013	TBR	Joshua Ferris	To Rise Again at a Decent Hour
2014	TBR	Neel Mukherjee	The Lives of Others
2015	R	Tom McCarthy	Satin Island
2015	R	Chigozie Obioma	The Fishermen
2016	TBR	Deborah Levy	Hot Milk

This makes for a total of 36 read with another 20 unread, but on the shelves, and then 12 more on my TBR list.*  So I have not quite made it to at least one read from each year, but I am relatively close.  It does appear that I am not synced up with the Booker list until roughly 1978, after which point I am usually interested in one or two books per year.

This exercise reminded me once again that I keep confusing Penelope Fitzgerald and Penelope Lively.  I will make a more concerted effort to read a few novels by each author.  In addition to a few to be read in the list above, I am also going to add Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Lively's How It All Began.  Perhaps that will help me anchor the two separately in my mind.

* As of May 2019, I am now up to 41 read from this list.

Update (May 2020): I only added two more that I have read, incidentally both books partially set in Africa.  Though with the recent e-book explosion, I have 2 or 3 more Booker winners on my Kindle emulator, so I may be at 45 read fairly soon.